Dakina Walks Free

Being in prison, there is so much you have to give up. The one that still breaks my heart is not being able to show up for my friends the way I would like to. Especially the new ones — women who don't always have much of a support system to begin with, and have even less of one when they're serving time far from the state where their family lives.

What I do have is friends on the outside, people I've known for years. Some of them have quietly made it their work to stand in for me out there. They go to my new friends' court dates, the ones I can't attend because I'm in here. They call shelter after shelter, looking for a bed for a woman about to be released. A woman in here once told me her daughter was sleeping outside and couldn't find shelter; the next day my friends had new clothes for her, invited her to a FreeFood meal, and were calling shelters in every borough.

When my friend Kevin heard that Dakina had a court date, he hopped on a train and headed upstate.

What follows is his account.

Dakina was a second-time offender of federal aviation safety laws, scaling the fence at an airport and running after the planes on the runway. The lady is obsessed with flight.

The word of the day in the court on a snowy Friday in upstate New York was flummoxed. How do you explain a woman like Dakina? The judge, prosecutor, and probation officer were at a loss for what to do with her.

They might have been short on answers, but all of them—all women—seemed to have an intuitive sense of how not to trigger this very triggered woman in a very triggering situation. They spoke calmly and clearly and respectfully to her and about her. She sat in her lime green prison jumpsuit looking around and nodding rhythmically.

This was not an evil or malicious person they could put in an easy box, or even someone who had fallen in with the wrong crowd due to difficult circumstances—someone they could admonish and send on her way.

Dakina is also disarmingly and genuinely charming. When asked if she had anything to add to her response about her plea conditions, she said, with all sincerity, the one thing that needed saying in that moment to the youngish judge: "Your hair looks cute." The judge said thank you, and meant it. A moment of touching sweetness that broke through even the muscled marshals, holstered pistols at the ready.

There was no going through the motions either. When asked if she understood that her supervised release could turn into real jail time if she breached any of her conditions, she mused, "Harsh, but I get it," in a pleasing drawl that sounded southern.

The real flummoxing came when it was time for Dakina to sign the plea deal. She told the judge she agreed to the plea and the conditions of release, but when pressed to actually sign, she didn't want to. With some coaxing from her attorney, she reluctantly agreed.

She signed. Her attorney, looking visibly alarmed and not a little flustered, brought the paper up to the judge.

The judge said to Dakina, with admirable calmness: "So here, where it has the line for your signature, you've written: 'No weapon formed against. In God we trust.'"

"That's right, ma'am. That's what I wrote." Consternation. The judge, defense, prosecution, and probation officer visibly composing themselves to deal with this unwelcome curveball.

The judge looked up the rule on signatures, saw there was nothing prohibiting how a person should sign to affirm consent, and made Dakina confirm a few times on the record that by writing those words she intended them to serve as her signature. Okay, that's your signature. No weapon formed against. In God we trust. Indeed.

And then it was time to release Dakina. With a list of conditions for supervised release as long as the airport runway—it included ankle monitoring (the only one she objected to), mental health evaluations, drug testing, and no entering any part of the airport.

Dakina was free to walk, but not quite. She was still in a County Jail's neon lime jumpsuit and needed street clothes. The marshals took her to a room and cuffed her, and she screamed, wanting out immediately. Her attorney left to buy her street clothes from the Goodwill.

I found them again in pretrial services—her attorney on calls, and Dakina, now dressed in red pants, a black knit sweater, and a thin puffer jacket.

It looked cute, as Dakina would say, but it was not nearly enough for the swirling snow coming down outside.

I said hello, Dakina, and waited for her attorney to finish a call before introducing myself.

"Who you?" Dakina said, leaning into me, a little suspiciously.

"I'm a friend of Nicole's and Rachel's from MDC," I said. I am not sure whether she actually registered what I was saying, but it satisfied the exacting vibe check I was being subjected to. She went back to pacing around the room in circles and nodding, while her attorney spoke on the phone.

My only prior contact with Dakina had been a few months earlier, on a legal video call in MDC with Rachel. For the entire hour of the call, an extremely loud, rhythmic bark boomed into the enclosed room from the far end of the dorm. A plane taking off would have been quieter. Dakina was registering to all concerned that the vibe was no bueno that day.

Dakina's new threads were cute, but they weren't geared for Rochester in December. She would need something warmer.

After quickly introducing myself to her attorney, I left the courthouse to make some calls. The team dove into action—calling around for facilities that might take her, immediately ordering a jacket and some socks, and somehow finding someone who could deliver it to me outside the courthouse right then and there. Our little team of miracle workers. Hustling for love.

When the snow got too much, I crossed the road and waited in a tiny box of a Dunkin' across the street with a convenient window view of the court entrance. I wanted to make sure Dakina did not suddenly emerge and vanish into the Rochester streets. I felt like I was casing the joint, but with a mission of inserting love and care, not taking anything.

The angel delivering the coat arrived a few minutes later. I took the bag, we took a selfie of the handoff—both thrilled—and she zoomed off in her white Nissan.

I went back to my Dunkin' and, after giving things a while for the inevitable paperwork, went back in to find Dakina. After a chat with her very nice probation officer, I went back down to pretrial, where Dakina and her attorney were in a little interview room. The attorney was on a call and I was going to wait outside, but Dakina saw me through the window, opened the door wide, and ushered me in.

"It's cold out, so we got you a coat," I said. Her attorney—a federal defender who had no doubt seen the worst of the system—melted, having been a little frosty earlier to this stranger wandering into what was likely a fairly difficult day with a client who, based on past record, was likely to be back in the system within the hour.

Dakina immediately came over to the bag and opened it. "What size y'all got? Ooh, nice color," she said, pulling it out. "Ooooooh, it's Guess!!! Fancy!!! Y'all got good taste." She looked me up and down again, wondering how this suited stranger in front of her had delivered this perfectly curated coat from the heavens.

"My ex-wife bought it," I yammered, unthinkingly. "She does have good taste." It was my turn to flummox them, momentarily.

Dakina tried on her coat and it fit perfectly, and the color looked great on her. She beamed. She did a half twirl each way, totally unselfconsciously, and her attorney and I looked on admiringly. Suddenly just three people having fun in a room—divorced from the extremely strange roles we were all playing in this strange scene. Dakina had flipped the script on us.

Then she leaned into me with her throaty growl—hoarse from shouting over her year caged in MDC—and said, "I need some boots and a YWCA." Her attorney chimed in: "Yes, she wants to go to the gym at the Y in winter so she can exercise."

When the judge had asked Dakina earlier about her history of mental health treatment, her answer was that she'd been doing walking exercise in MDC and that it had helped her a lot mentally.

I'm ashamed to say a former me would have bristled. A mental Mr. Limkins from Oliver Twist thinking, "You want moooore!!!"—covered with a fake smile and nod and something non-committal.

But I've learned to hear the feminine. And I've learned about the dignity and power of receiving. The simple request for what's needed, from a place of deep and simple wisdom. That's power. Nothing more, nothing less. Just the facts, ma'am. A pair of winter boots and a gym membership so she can exercise through the winter.

"Let's see what we can do, Dakina," I said. With that, Dakina and her attorney were ready, and we all walked out into the snow. The Uber was right there to take Dakina to a shelter.

The story would get more complicated a short time later, when Dakina locked herself in the bathroom at her shelter and refused to come out. I do wish I had gone along to help with the next phase of her difficult transition. But for that one moment, as she drove away in her new coat, it was a good end to the day Dakina got released.

—

Kevin read me this on our next visit while I watched his face. We were sitting at the same plastic table we always use.

He'd taken a train upstate on a snowy day in December because I'd mentioned Dakina had a court date coming up. No one organized it. No one issued an assignment. The team heard a name, and the team moved.

I think about the bodhisattva vow a lot in here—the commitment to move toward need rather than away from it, to go back for the ones still stuck, to not stop because the conditions aren't ideal. You can say it beautifully in a meditation class. It is something else entirely to get on a train in a snowstorm to a town you'd never been to, introduce yourself to someone, and her lawyer, who you'd never met before, wait in a Dunkin' across from a courthouse for a coat, to watch a woman try on a Guess coat and do a half twirl.

Dakina is obsessed with flight, like something in her needs to move toward something moving fast and going somewhere. I understand that more than most.

I could imagine her in my mind, in her new Guess coat, driving off toward her shelter. Whatever came next, for that one moment someone was there. My heart filled up knowing she hadn't been there alone. That is what we do. That is what we have always done.

And it keeps happening without me. Which is exactly what it was supposed to do.