Jail Visitors Also Serving Hard Time

‘It just hurts to see your son, your flesh and blood, in here.’

--Ella Sue Maag, jail visitor

Wearing an orange jailhouse jump suit, the young father pressed his nose against the thick glass and tried to blow a kiss to his year-old daughter on the other side.

Several cubicles away in Orange County’s main jail, 22-year-old Lupe Guereque and her son Michael, 3, waited to see Michael’s father, who was serving time “for robbery--I think,” she said softly. “He doesn’t really tell me. He says he doesn’t do any of that stuff.”

Every week for the last nine months, Guereque has filled out a pink jail visitation slip, then waited for sheriff’s deputies to bring her boyfriend to a narrow visiting area. There, a glass partition between them, she can talk to him by phone.

Though she is always glad to see him, the visits are also depressing. “They make me feel like I’m locked up too,” Guereque said.

“They are indeed the victims,” Capt. Bob Kemmes said of visitors to Orange County’s jails.

Kemmes commands the Theo Lacy Branch Jail, a minimum-security jail next to the county animal shelter in Orange.

Arms folded, Kemmes watched quietly one recent Saturday as several dozen people, mostly women with young children, filed past a barbed-wire fence and into a jail courtyard edged with flowers.

The atmosphere at Lacy is more relaxed than at the main jail. Visitors can touch the prisoners and, at the start and end of each hourlong visit, give them a kiss.

In the main jail, visitors and inmates are separated during visits by a thick wall of glass. The telephone is their means of communication.

Visits ‘Upsetting’

Even though the visiting policies at Lacy are more liberal, relatives and friends of the inmates often find visits upsetting, Kemmes said.

“You may have the mother and father coming to visit a child who’s never been in trouble before. Or you have wives whose sole source of income is in custody,” he said. “It’s very difficult, very unsettling to deal with.”

Still, jail commanders encourage these reunions. “Visits from family and children create a positive effect” on an inmate, said Capt. Al Massucci, commander of the main jail in Santa Ana.

Or, as Lacy inmate Mike Fueston put it, “I didn’t have nothing to look forward to (without visitors). It was just going to work, going to sleep, going to work and, before you know it, the day was gone.” But recently, since a young Garden Grove woman named Penny Oswalt started visiting him, “it’s something to look forward to,” the 25-year-old Fueston said.

In the last few years, jail officials have tried to make visiting easier at the main jail.

The main jail used to offer only a few hours for visiting, Massucci said. In the old days, several hundred people would often camp outside the jail for hours, hoping to see the prisoners, he said.

Also, the old system used timers on the main jail’s telephones. Visitors could talk to an inmate for 20 minutes, then the timer would go off. “They’d get two more minutes and then the phone would go dead,” Massucci said.

Now the branch jails offer frequent visiting hours and the main jail has “open hours”; friends and relatives can drop by the main jail any day between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and see a prisoner, so long as he is not at lunch or in court.

In another improvement, the telephone timers are no longer in use. Visitors may talk to inmates for an hour until a deputy on a loudspeaker announces that the visit is over.

‘Treated as Low Class’

But even with these changes, some visitors still criticize the jail. They complain that they may wait 1 1/2 hours or more to see a prisoner. Some also complain that they are treated rudely by deputies.

“We’re treated as low class,” said Sheryl Chapman, who was visiting a high school friend at the main jail recently.

“You see it in their body language. It’s just a general attitude that you are slime because you are here visiting someone in jail,” Chapman said. “And if you call and ask for information, you hold at least 10 minutes. They normally can’t find the file and when they do, they don’t know if the inmate is here.”

But most of the strain comes from having to visit the jail at all, many visitors said.

“It’s real emotional,” said Ella Sue Maag of Garden Grove, who was visiting her 32-year-old son, Michael, at Theo Lacy recently. Jail time is hard enough on the inmates, she said, but “it’s a different kind of a burden for families. It just hurts to see your son, your flesh and blood, in here.”

‘I Feel Terrible, Terrible’

A Santa Ana man named Peter sat in the main jail’s drab visiting area recently, waiting to see his son. “I feel terrible, terrible,” he said. “It’s sad when I come in, and it’s sad when I leave. He’s accused of too many things.”

Some relatives spend their visiting hour at the jail asking inmates to explain themselves. “I wonder if he’s going to straighten up,” said Doreen Garcia, 21, of Orange, whose husband was serving time at the main jail.

Garcia said she recently applied for welfare so she could feed her 7-year-old daughter and 2-month-old baby. “This does affect a lot of things,” she said. “You really get sad that they’re in there.”

A retired Anaheim man named Constantine also came to the jail seeking answers. His 21-year-old son had just been arrested and taken to Theo Lacy on drunk-driving charges. In a brief phone conversation, the youth had seemed “very remorseful,” Constantine said. “His whole life has been upset. I hope this will be his lesson and he will not repeat it.”

Janet Atkins had the same wish. The 29-year-old Anaheim woman said she and her 4-year-old son, Justin, went on welfare after her husband was convicted of grand theft.

‘Responsible for Everything’

“I’m responsible for all the bills now, for everything,” said Atkins, who has begun doing housecleaning to support herself and her child.

Seated on a narrow bench outside the Lacy jail, she leaned back and sighed. Jail was good for her husband. A drug addict when he went in, “he’s clean now. It’s just like I got my old husband back,” Atkins said.

Mother and son had waited about an hour when deputies opened the gate to Lacy’s courtyard and let them in. Ten minutes later, a thin man in an orange jail house jump suit ran toward them.

“Hi, Daddy,” Justin shouted.

“Oh my gosh, Daddy shaved his beard off,” Janet Atkins gasped.

Ralph Atkins kissed his wife and hugged his son. Then they sat down on opposite sides of the table. Like other couples around them, Janet and Ralph Atkins quickly reached across the table and joined hands. They remained like this, hands clasped tightly together, for the rest of the hourlong visit.

Ralph Atkins said he really appreciated his wife’s visits. “This is a rough experience, but you enjoy your family, and it’s a little bit easier,” he said. He gazed at his wife and she gazed back, smiling.