by Faye Westlake Newman

Created on: May 15, 2008   Last Updated: July 03, 2008

Children Be Allowed To Tour or Visit Prisons?

That's a complicated question, with more layers than it appears to have on first glance. My immediate response: Absolutely not! Having spent a mercifully brief period of my life as a jail matron, I know what the inside of a prison looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like. I would not, under the direst circumstances, take my child there. Let me paint a couple of scenarios for you.

I know a place where you can stretch out on a patch of emerald green grass, feel warmed by the sun, listen to the babble of a brook, and hear the nearby murmur of waves foaming ashore. Seagulls scree overhead, children shout and play and chase one another through the waves. A crimson sunset plays visual music over the rocks that keep Sunset Bay at Charleston, Oregon shallow enough to assure the children's safety in the surf. A picnic table wafts the scent of hot dogs, potato salad, and strawberries with whipped cream toward us to mix with the tang of salt air and beached seaweed. Wild strawberries and imported beach grass creep over the edge of the fore dune and spill onto warm sand. It is my mother's day off. She has expressed her love for her children by spending it with them on the beach, leaving the floors that need mopping, the laundry that waits, the dishes in the sink, until we've all gone home to bed. Then she'll be up half the night catching up, but we have a memory to cherish for all time.
Last week, on Mother's Day, my brother and I drove Mom to our favorite childhood beach and reminisced. We smelled the smells, saw the sights, felt the warmth and experienced the love the memory brought us.


Conversely, imagine the sights, sounds, and scents of a prison. Rattling gray steel cages, crashing barred doors, drab gray walls. An exposed latrine wafts the scent of human waste mixed with the acrid smell of harsh cleaning chemicals and sweat. Because I worked in the women's wing, I still hear the screech of shrill voices, the bickering, the despairing tears, demands for the smallest amenities, such as menstrual pads. And because women locked up together tend to harmonize their monthly cycles, there are always several women ordering their supplies at once, and they are not discreet as they do.
Regardless of the events that brought them to this place in their lives, there is no mistaking the atmosphere of gloom, anger and loneliness that permeates everything in the building, even leaving its own special odor on the clothes you

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