I Can't Visit My Sons in Prison Because I Have Unpaid Traffic Tickets

By Joyce Davis, as told to Eli Hager, The Marshall Project

17 September 17

o visit someone in a Michigan state prison, you have to fill out an application and send it to the Department of Corrections with a self-addressed envelope. A couple of months after I mailed mine in, they sent me a sheet of paper saying that I was not approved to see either of my two sons, Harvey and Antwan, who are incarcerated.

You can’t see your child, they told me, because you have outstanding debt.

I have never committed a crime. The only thing on my record is tickets: parking tickets, license plate registration tickets, one for not having proof of insurance, and a couple of others—all of which are more than four years old. I don’t have any moving violations, like speeding.

But I do owe $1,485.

I’m 64 and have lived in Detroit my whole life. I was a receptionist at the city social services department, and an attendance lady at the high school, and helped wash patients at a hospice care facility. I also worked at a poultry shop once. I’ve worked for a long time.

But now I have cancer — tumors on my ovaries. I’m very ill. It’s very painful, and I’m on medication. I haven’t been able to get out of the house much.

And so I’m unable to work and on a fixed income. I get $735 a month of disability that I’ve been getting for many years, and $525 of that goes to rent. Fifty dollars or so goes to my telephone bill, then my food, my toiletries, my transportation. And I have to pay for some of my medication, even though I’m on Medicaid.

I just don’t have the money for those unpaid tickets.

Not being able to see my children, with all this hanging over me, is devastating. For one, you never know what will happen to me with my condition, and it would be devastating to not be with them, to not hold them close, ever again.

My boys are in different prisons, each about two hours away from home. I talk to them on the phone, but not that much because it’s very expensive: three or four dollars for each call. And talking on the phone is nothing like being able to see them and see what’s going on in there — what’s hurting them — because the prison sure won’t let you know.

One of my boys was in segregation (“the hole,” they call it), in a little room, every day for six months. I was so distraught; we couldn’t even talk then. It was affecting his mind — he was talking about committing suicide and all kinds of crazy stuff. If I had been able to go down there, I could have encouraged him.

It was so bad that I started watching YouTube videos about what happens to a human being in a little small cell with just a little toilet. What happens to human beings, you know, so that I could know what was happening to my son.