‘I Don’t Want to Die Alone’ in Prison

Judy Cagle has a few simple wishes: She’d like to be alone with her husband. She’d like to go for a walk with her son. And, perhaps most of all, she’d like to die with dignity, in the company of people who love her.

On the scale of human desire, that may not add up to much, but it is more than the state of California has been willing to grant her.

Cagle is 37 and dying of AIDS. Her doctors say she has perhaps four months to live. For the past three years, she has been an inmate at the California Institute for Women in Frontera, where she is serving a 14-year sentence for armed robberies in which no one was injured. Since last July, she has been confined in a locked ward at Ontario Community Hospital. That is where women are sent when their health becomes too fragile to allow them to remain in the prison’s AIDS unit.

Judy Cagle calls it “a waiting room for death.”

The state Penal Code allows dying prisoners to petition for “compassionate release.” The request must be approved by the Department of Corrections director and the judge who imposed sentence. A year ago, Cagle--who may not live to see her earliest possible parole date in October, 1994--asked to go home.

Despite her virtual incapacity, Corrections Director James Gomez denied Cagle’s request. Allowing her to go home to die, he said, would endanger the community. Three months ago, AIDS Project Los Angeles, which had become active on Cagle’s behalf, asked Santa Monica attorney Viki I. Podberesky to press Gomez to reconsider. She agreed to do so without fee.

Cagle’s appeal, which is on the director’s desk, is supported by Frontera’s warden and associate warden, Cagle’s correctional counselor, the prison’s physician consultant on AIDS, the doctor who helped Cagle break her addiction to drugs and psychiatrist Saul Niedorf, an authority on prison release programs.

All point to Cagle’s rehabilitation and her desperate illness. Podberesky notes that her client has been offered a bed at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, near her husband’s home in the East, and at a Los Angeles hospice, should she elect to remain here.

In short, she would be neither burden nor threat to anyone.

Judy Cagle’s story makes for somber and affecting reading. She was born in Antioch, Calif., the youngest of five children. At 7, according to documents filed as part of her appeal, she was raped by her mother’s alcoholic husband. Her mother was subject to violent rages and, says Judy, “beat me until I bled.”

By the time she was 13, Cagle was a heroin addict. A year later, she became a prostitute to support her habit. At 21, she became pregnant, stopped using heroin and gave birth to a healthy son she named London. “I intended to stay off drugs after London was born,” she says. “But my mother took the baby against my will. It really broke my heart.”

It also sent her back to heroin and the streets. She was arrested for prostitution and tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists and arms. More arrests and prison followed.

Worse was to come. “I first found out I was HIV-positive in July of 1986,” Cagle told me this week. “The doctor at the Contra Costa County hospital called me and told me over the phone that I had AIDS. I didn’t really know much about it at the time. All I knew was that suddenly my blood was contaminated.

“I knew I had to get help, but I couldn’t find any place that would take me. I started using cocaine because I was afraid to go to sleep. I thought I might die at any moment.

“I was at my mom’s house, and I slit my finger while I was doing the dishes. My son was there and two little girls that my mom baby-sits for. There was all this blood in the sink, and I started screaming, ‘Nobody touch that blood.’ I was terrified that I would infect one of them. I cleaned the sink with bleach, wrapped the dishes up as well as I could and put them in the garbage bin.

“After that, I knew I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t take the chance. I left my mother’s house and ended up with this girl, who was willing to let me stay, even though I told her I was going to die.”

Because she was afraid to sleep, Cagle consumed ever-growing quantities of cocaine. It wasn’t cheap, but she was unwilling to return to prostitution because she feared infecting her partners. “The next thing I knew,” she says, “we were doing robberies. One day I woke up in a jail isolation ward. They told me I was charged with nine armed robberies. I was so out of it, I thought I’d done them all. But as it turned out, I’d done two and attempted another.

“I was in terrible shape. What was tearing me to pieces were my regrets. I’d lived a life on drugs since I was 13 years old. The first person to stick a needle in my arm was my sister. My brother had turned me on to other drugs, like weed, LSD and downers when I was even younger. All I could think was that I had lived a wasted life. I hadn’t even been a good mother to my son. We have a good relationship now. But I still feel incredible remorse that for most of his life I’ve been on drugs.

“You know, dying is one thing if you’ve had the chance to make things OK with the people around you, if you’ve had the chance to redeem yourself by doing something for other people. But when you haven’t, it’s as if your whole life had been wasted.”

How does Cagle think of her life now?

“Not as a waste. I have been in custody for six years and I have worked so hard to make it something different. My son and I have a great relationship now. I went to college, and I only need a few credits for my AA. I like to write and I’ve done a lot of that. I’ve learned computer programming and word processing. I’ve made two videos on AIDS and drug use. I met and married my husband, John Paul Kirk.

“But, most of all, I’ve been eternally changed by what I’ve seen and been through here. Five of my friends have died here. For the first one of them, I made a quilt because her family wouldn’t visit. They didn’t even come to pick up her clothes and things when she died. She really died alone. That’s one of the things I fear.

“In the AIDS unit at Frontera, the women who were close to dying would want to stay in the unit as long as they could because, when they took them to the hospital, they put them in a room by themselves and the door would be locked and they would die alone in that room. So, they tried to stay on the unit as long as they could, because there were people there to help them and be with them, usually me. You help them eat. You read Scriptures to them. You talk to them about better times. You listen a lot. You pray to God that they won’t have to suffer.

“One woman died in her room next to mine. I heard her death rattle in the night. Since I came here to Ontario Community, two other women have died. One of them was right across the hall and the guard told us we couldn’t go in to see her anymore because she was dying. Well, we were all she had. So, I fought. I went to the captain, and I said, ‘It’s not right that we can’t go in her room. It’s not right for you to make her die alone. Nobody should have to be alone when they’re dying.’

“The captain told them to let us in. So, I went in and just read to her and talked to her and sat there. That’s all you have to give is yourself and your time, even when you don’t have much of it left. But it feels good to make things a little easier for somebody else. When you do that, your life isn’t a waste.”

Despite the range and depth of her support, the most compelling case for Judy Cagle’s release is the one she makes for herself:

“When you’re dying, you want to give something back to life. If you’re not allowed to do that, it’s a cheat.”