Episode 5: A Stitch for Every Pound

Raised by her grandparents in Carrboro, North Carolina, April was a fiery, independent teen, until one relationship altered the course of her life forever. In this episode, we explore the power dynamics involved in coercive control and the realities of teen pregnancy and parenting while incarcerated. Featuring expert insight from Yasmin Vafa and Marsha Levick. 

Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with adult language.

A partnered production of The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AIFCS), The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY), Green Buzz Agency and our expert panelists. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

About 14, I get a summer job and I meet this guy. He brought a rose out to the car and didn't realize that this guy was quite a bit older than me. Maybe the fact that I was missing that father figure in my life is what drew me to him. But I was 14 and he happened to be 29. That was the beginning of what changed everything.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Before They Could Dream. If you're just joining us, this podcast series explores the history, real-world experiences, and hidden realities of youth incarceration in the United States. I am your host, Abullah Latif. The story you will hear today is personal and unique. But it also represents the stories of thousands of children in the United States today, many of whom suffer in silence. In this episode, we'll be talking about coercive control, challenges around teen pregnancy, and parenting while incarcerated as we hear about April's story. Yasmin Vafa and Marcia Levick are also featured in this episode to help us contextualize and gain insight on these topics. Out of care for our listeners, we want to advise that each episode of our podcast series is unvarnished and truthful. Therefore, topics may be difficult for some listeners. Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse along with adult language.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

My name is April Barber Scales. I am from Carlborough, North Carolina. I was incarcerated, sentenced to two consecutive life terms beginning at the age of 15, and I was released at the age of 46 after serving 31 and a half years. I didn't have the best examples of what to look up to as far as my parents were concerned. My mother had me when she was 16, and she really didn't have a hand in raising me. She led a life of crime and substance use disorder. When she was in charge, it was kind of like a free-for-all. Because we were so close in age, about 16 years apart, she was more of my older sister than my mother, like from my entire life. And probably allowed me to get away with things that I shouldn't have gotten away with. If she got in trouble in another county, we would have to go bail her out. And then that was taken away from just whatever, whether it be sleep or just attention or whatever, certain things like that took away from me as a child. My grandparents, that was her parents, so they were there to support her and to help try to navigate her through her challenges. So my grandparents eventually adopted me. I didn't have a lot of neighborhood children come over, nor did I go to their house. So my playmates growing up were the adults in my life, which were my grandparents. And so I like to cut wood and then grass and everything. I was maybe three when I learned how to read and write, and I remember probably six learning how to cook in an oven. I had my own little apron and a little pan for my biscuits. And so I learned how to manage a household and how to clean and and pay bills and make biscuits and and everything from scratch very early in life. I had to grow up really fast, and you know, maybe if some of my childhood would have been kept a childhood, situations may not have turned out like they did. About 14, I get a summer job saving money and stuff, and I meet this guy who was quite a bit older than me. Maybe the fact that I was missing that father figure in my life is what drew me to him. But I was 14 and he happened to be 29. He just had it together. It seemed to dote over me. I mean, I always got gifts, you know, whether it be jewelry or perfume or flowers or something. So that was something that was very odd to me. It was foreign, but I mean it it kind of drew me, it drew me to him.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

Typically with grooming, it starts as building relationship, building a a strong rapport and fulfilling a need in that child's life that is unmet. I'm Yasmin Waffa. I'm a human rights attorney and the co-founder and executive director of Rights for Girls. Rights for Girls is a national human rights organization that works to address gender-based violence against vulnerable young women and girls in the United States. What we know about children who are prosecuted as adults, an overwhelming percentage of them suffered childhood abuse. I'm, you know, much more familiar with the data on girls. Over 84% of them suffered physical and sexual abuse when they were children. And so it's really important to realize that we're talking about wounded children, children who are in need of services, are in need of support, and people who were preyed on by predatory adults. Once they develop that strong bond, it becomes very difficult for that child to see they're being manipulated, that they're being uh taken advantage of in some kind of way. It becomes very hard for them to refuse this adult's wishes, especially if it's a romantic situation.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

He admit my mother, they were close to the same age. I think that they actually were a greater part in school. Looking back, you know, I don't even think that we had that much in common. I I think, you know, he was lacking something clearly in his life that would even make him want to be attracted to someone half his age, much less a teenager. We began to sneak around, and Wilkes County's kind of small, and the town started whispering, and uh my grandparents got wind and been over a year, about a year and a half. They asked me, of course, if I was messing around with this guy. I've lied uh profusely. And I just wonder at at that particular moment had I said yes, that one word answer could have changed things. My grandmother suspected that I was pregnant. I had never gone to the doctor, but you know, people know they gave me the option of forcing me to have an abortion or having this guy that I was now madly in love with arrested for statutory rape. No, they had never met him, but this guy is white and 15 years older than me. What was supposed to happen was supposed to be a lifetime movie. I was so afraid I was gonna lose my unborn child that I just wanted something to be done to intervene. We were going to scare them, and they were supposed to be all embracing of him and us in the situation, and that that scare, that plan was the beginning of what changed everything. My boyfriends had brought over a red can of gasoline, put it on the back porch. Then I brought it inside around nine or ten o'clock that night and just poured it down the hall. After I went outside and I saw some flames, it was like, damn, what did I just do? I tried to call 911 and the fire had already gotten to the phone, so I ran to the neighbors and told them the house was on fire. I I tried to undo it, but there was no way for it to be done. Like it was the damage was immediately done. We set the house afire and they died as a result. My grandfather died of smoke inhalation, my grandmother died later, but her complications were due to the smoke that was ingested. You know, I remember being very quiet and just kind of numb. I'm still pregnant, and nobody knows, so I'm still pregnant worrying about this child, you know, and then the what's next. About one or two o'clock in the morning come the detective and everyone coming to question me. I was handcuffed. They weren't supposed to handcuff me. They questioned a 15-year-old with no parent, no no guardian present. And then I sat for 17 hours being in interrogated. They broke a lot of rules to get the information and to get me down to the station. And that was my first personal experience with the legal system. The statement that convicted me was a typed narrative of what they stated. I said, my original statement was quote unquote thrown away. I'm still thinking about this boyfriend. What is gonna happen to him, even sometimes more so than myself, but things are going on behind the scenes that I'm not that aware of because he had a retained attorney that said that he was under my influence. They basically charged me as being the the mastermind. The fact that we were in a relationship that I couldn't have consented to because I was a minor, that was never um introduced. As time evolved, things began to start click a little more.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Oftentimes, women and girls of color are also seen as agents in their own abuse. And so a lot of this comes down to a form of adultification bias, the ways in which they are portrayed by the public, by the criminal justice system, by the media. Often they're denied, you know, their status as children. They're portrayed as hardened criminals or perpetrators. There is very little effort made to discuss their background and you know the relationship between themselves and the exploiter or the adult perpetrator. And it's really important to paint that dynamic because it provides the a critical context that goes to the culpability.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

By the time I got to Superior Court, my charges were two counts of first degree murder, first degree arson and conspiracy to commit murder. If I pled guilty to the two counts of first degree murder, then they would remove the first degree arson and conspiracy. So I stood before the judge and pled guilty. But in fact, they manipulated this 15-year-old to close this this case to make their lives easier.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

One of the things that we see happening a lot um in legal proceedings involving kids is that we're interested in solving crimes more than we are the rights of individuals who may be suspected of having participated in criminal activity. My name is Marcia Lovick and I'm the co-founder of Juvenile Law Center. The fact that in every state a child can be tried as an adult is something that is often held over the head of kids. And prosecutors will threaten adult criminal prosecution in exchange, really, for getting the child to essentially confess to something. It really perverts the justice system. It perverts the idea of due process of the idea that we we think we believe that the state has to prove the case against you beyond a reasonable doubt. But when a prosecutor can say, look, if you don't confess to the crime, I'm going to try you as an adult and you're going to go away to prison for 30 years, the notion of due process and impartial justice feels like very foreign terms that aren't really a part of the system at all.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

I never knew that it was going to be an open plea. That's up to the judge's discretion what to give you. And he sentenced me to life. And then the DA said that this is not Burger King, she shouldn't have a two-for-one deal, and that's how I ended up with the two consecutive life terms. My psychological evaluation was denied. So no one ever investigated the why. It was just the act itself. If I had wanted to do harm, we had tillers and lawnmowers and stuff, there was gasoline already there. I take accountability for my actions, but I was very much, very much under the influence of my boyfriend.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

It's very important for law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and frankly, all individuals in the criminal justice system to be educated on the dynamics of coercive control, to be educated on the dynamics of what we call forced criminality, and to really understand what's at stake for these children when they are in such a relationship or in such a dynamic, to really understand the choices or lack of choice that they have in committing such acts. Often this individual preys on someone that they know is vulnerable, seeks to fulfill a vital role in their life, and then over time will manipulate and coerce them to commit various acts. They're going to be apt to act out on whatever is asked, whether that is colluding to commit a crime, to take part in some type of sexual act, and then the reality does not become apparent, if at all, until much, much later, until the damage is done, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

So I spent, you know, pretty much my whole pregnancy in jail. There's a separate section. It was dorm H. That's where you stayed until you were two weeks from your due date. But being that I was a pregnant 15-year-old, not even allowed to be around regular population, I was in an isolation room, which was a section in the back of the infirmary, not too far from the lockup section. Had it happened out here now, then I'm sure someone would have planned to baby shower and give me 15 toasters. Yeah, that that would have been nice. I was able to take a couple of pictures, some fun stuff. There was some song, I don't remember the artist, but it was called Wiggle It and say Wiggle It just a little bit. And I would sing that song and shake my belly back and forth. That was one of my favorite pregnancy moments. I didn't give birth in prison. When I was taken to the hospital, I did have the leg irons, I had the handcuffs. I didn't have the waist chain on because it would not fit around me, and I was escorted by two arm guards. I was due on April 25th, but I gave birth six days earlier. I couldn't get any pain medicine, they said because my contractions were too close together. I gave a completely natural childbirth, which luckily didn't last but a couple of hours, seven pounds, five ounces, and I guess a stitch for every pound. It was different, like holding uh a baby that was my own, and then like what to do when they when they cry. I don't know. It seemed like he would just cry sometimes, and I had no idea what to do with it. I had an older guard that was with me say, honey, come give me that baby. It would have been nice to have celebrated the life that's coming into the world. Because I was with him like two and two days, and then on the third morning is when I passed him over to my friend. So now that I don't have a baby and my stomach is still sore, I have this waist chain now. So I have my hand shackle, I have my waist shackle, I have my leg shackle, and I'm going back to the prison. Just having a baby. Two and a half days ago. I still don't feel bad for myself as much as I think I do for just the lack of not being able to connect with him. They do not seek you. They don't have any post care in place for you. They give you a bunch of those big extra pads and some cabbage leaves. Cabbage leaves are what draws your breast milk up. No post care, no um supervision, no nothing. You just get a six-week checkup and it's just another day in paradise. No one said, Are you okay after giving birth? No one said, How are you? 20 years into your life sentence. There was never a moment where anyone checked on me but me.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Only 15 years old, having just given birth to her child, still a child herself, April no longer had her son caught. Now she faced two life sentences in an adult facility.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

After I got locked up, I mean I was just alone. I mean, I was thrown into something called long-term adjustment. Long-term adjustment was created so you could process the amount of time that you had. They want you to stay 60 days in a box by yourself, and that's how you start your sentence.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Think about yourself as a 15-year-old. If you have a 15-year-old, if you have a cousin or a sibling who is a teenager, think about what it would be like for them to be locked in a very small space, think eight by ten feet, uh, put your arms out, and that's that's the walls for on each side of you, often with nothing in that room with you, not with your cell phone, not with your iPad, not with necessarily even books, none of those comforts and none of the daily human interaction that those of us who are not in prison experience every day of our lives. The consequences of that kind of isolation, literally isolation, can be devastating. Many of the young people who find themselves in the criminal justice system go into that system with some mental health challenges. They will be exacerbated, they will be made worse by the experience of solitary confinement, they will be made worse even if they are not in solitary confinement.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

After my 60 days, I went to regular population. My first roommate, gosh, she was probably in her fifties at least, looking back. Raleigh, um, that particular prison was about 13 acres. So I had to get help learning where to go if I wanted to go to the library, to the dining room, um, to the infirmary, and you had to have a walking pass. So everywhere you went, the officer still had to give you permission to walk to um your appointments. I didn't spend that much time in in the date room all the time because they seemed to watch the same stuff. The same lifetime movie that I thought my life was, they would watch the same one, and I was like, oh, this can't be happening. I had to figure it out myself. I didn't have time to be as afraid because I needed to try to understand as much as I could what was going on. There's no rule book when you go to prison, not for whatever rule you Break and the consequence for that. And you don't get a rule book that says this is how you navigate through XYZ. Pretty much all of your days are bad. You're just trying to make the best of your situation, which is what I did. But being that I was a teenager, I was still rebellious. Even though I always went to school, I took advantage of all the opportunities. I still had a little sigh that says, I'm going to do this my way. The rules, some were just silly to me. Male and female staff alike, some help you rehabilitate yourself, and then you're going to have some that were inadvertently and on purpose re-traumatize you because they can take advantage of the fact that women are often viewed as weak. An infraction is something as simple as having too many pairs of socks. That can lead you like ten days in a hole. Ten days in segregation for like an extra pair of socks. I mean, so what I had six pairs of socks. We were only allowed two wash days. I spent a lot of time in what's called segregation. The majority of my infractions just had to do with maintaining my own identity and my own individuality. They leveled out over time, but first few years from like fifteen to twenty-one, it's a pretty rough period of time there.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Teenagers when they first enter a criminal correctional setting, because they are at that point in their lives where they are as a matter of just adolescent development experimenting, taking risks, trying to figure out who they are, maybe being a little provocative, maybe making some bad decisions, are not going to adjust well to that institutional setting as they f literally find their way, as they find their footing. For the first five or ten years, they may find themselves constantly getting disciplinary infractions, often for incredibly dumb things, but there's very little you're allowed to do in a correctional setting. So everything is an infraction. Look in the wrong direction, step out of line, walk in the wrong direction. These are all disciplinary infractions that can put someone in the hole, as we say. So it is it can be protective. It can also, though, be a matter of discipline. Uh the consequences are the same. They're devastating. For a young person, they're devastating for an adult. They're especially devastating for a young person.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

When you give someone 15 two life sentences and you give them an eligibility date at the age of 55, I I I can't even see that. I spent all of my teens in prison. What I am told that I missed was being able to drive, being able to drink, being able to vote, being able to go to the prom. I missed the everyday, the everydays. I missed being able to still sit on the porch. I missed being able to ride my bike around and up and down the street. So that I know that I missed from my childhood and my teenhood. The woman that took care of my son was kind enough to bring him during visitation. Cole and I were in pretty good communication until about the time he was 14. The caregiver, at some point along the way, she forgot that that was not her child. She got too attached to a degree to the point to where she stopped including and involving me with decisions and excluding me with his life. And then the caregiver went through some financial challenges. Like she had other children and she had to move around and stuff a lot. Her challenges kind of overrode things, and there was a period from about uh 14 to 18 where I I wasn't able to hear from him. Luckily, when he turned 18, he's been very much present ever since then. I always kept my thirst for knowledge. I was already in the tenth grade, and um I it's basically a matter of going to school and seeing how far you were gonna test out of. So fortunately, I had completed my GED, and they do have graduation, so I had a graduation cap and gown. So I invited my son and the woman uh that was taking care of him, and they got to see me uh walk across the stage and receive my um GED. They had a university that has Shaw in uh St. Aug. In '94, uh laws had changed, and if you had a class A sentence, you were not allowed to obtain a degree. Because they said you were wasting the taxpayers' time and money because you were never gonna get out to um use it. That kind of set the degree aside for a minute, and I went to um I took a computer class, I think, next, computer information systems. Um, I took that and I also obtained um a culinary degree. And then there were a few certification uh courses that were offered inside, like um maybe career readiness, different classes like that in there that you could get a little certification just to say that you accomplished something. You want to have a lot of stuff in your permanent jacket, the good, the bad, and the ugly, what you do in prison. So when and if the day comes, people go back and look at how did you spend your time? What did you do with your time? So I tried to put as much good stuff in my permanent jacket as I could.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

The experience that kids have in prison uh could not be more starkly different than what their peers are doing on the outside. Their peers on the outside are going to school. They may be engaging in after-school activities, they are at home with their parents or guardians and siblings, they are engaging with the folks who live around them in their community, and they are being given an opportunity to go through that natural maturation process. For young people who find themselves in the criminal legal system and find themselves incarcerated in a prison in the United States, in an adult prison, all of that is absent. Some of that's obvious. Of course, they're not home, of course they're not with their family, of course they're not with their friends and their peers. But it's it goes way beyond that because they're also not in school. There are really no requirements generally across the U.S. that adult prisons provide opportunities for young people who are still of school age to get a high school diploma, to do anything beyond getting a high school diploma. We don't place any kind of emphasis or priority on giving those young people coming into that system the opportunity, even in a partial way, in a you know, almost kind of pretend way to experience some of the natural trajectory of adolescent growth and development. Um so their experience is nothing like what their peers are experiencing. And it's not just uh, again, sort of the things that we can tick off. They're not going to school, they're not with their families, they're also not having the normal kinds of human interactions that their peers are having on the outside. So the ability to form friendships uh in a setting that is not constrained by a variety of rules and regulations about how you are permitted to interact with under individuals. The ability to engage in employment as young people pass from adolescents to young adulthood to adulthood, they will have opportunities to engage in the workforce. And that creates a whole other set of uh opportunities and experiences for them to interact with other individuals, to test out their abilities and their competencies to do certain things, to be responsible for themselves and sometimes for others around them. All of these natural life experiences are taken away from the children that we place into the criminal legal system.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

Confused and limited by the extremely harsh realities of the adult prison system, but still striving to find her place as a child and make an effort to grow, April was about to face yet another serious challenge.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

Medical care is shabby at best. After my 24th birthday, I woke up and I say, something is wrong I can't see. So I finally go to sit call and one of the familiar nurses pointed to the eye chart and they said, What do you see? And I said, Nothing. Over the course of a week I see a variety of doctors. I went through a barrage of tests, and the neurologist comes back with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. I ended up with a weekly injection that I took for the next 22 years. And I always wondered in the back of my mind the what ifs, how I'm gonna navigate through this new um potentially debilitating and devastating disease, and also emotionally navigate through the next however many moments, days, seconds of my life. We were allowed to be outside until until, like your parents said, street lights came on. Being outside was always very grounded. That was the one time that you could just look up at the sky and not see a fence and feel connected to something else. You know, something on the other side. It made me feel free. Governor Roy Cooper had put a committee in called the Juvenile Sentencing Review Board, who were to review the cases of people sentenced under the age of 18 to lengthy sentences in North Carolina. They check our home plan, what we have done, our accomplishments, where we would live, whether it's a solid plan with support in place, and our infraction record. Luckily, my good outweighed my bad. So after almost a year-long vetting process, the governor signed an executive order after serving 31 and a half years and six days. I was released March 24, 2022. The day that I was leaving, they called me to receiving. The prison is huge. And you wouldn't typically hear what's going on on the opposite side of the prison, but I heard it. Like I heard them screaming and crying and cheering. It was like it was a like a gigantic ball game or something. It was like a baseball game. We were outside, and you know, everyone was so excited to see me go. It gave them hope and inspiration. I got out when my son was 33, so he has uh my life mapped out, meaning that he said when I get older, when I get like 70 or 80 or so, that I'm gonna be living with him because, you know, I'm gonna be someone who needs someone to take care of me. I think he always knew that I tried to communicate. I mean, kids know, but luckily it was only physical distance. It was never emotional distance. This is the reason why I was able to withstand that 31 and a half years because this was always what I wanted to be. People, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a singer, I want to grow up to be this, I wanted to grow up to be Colt's mom. I'm very transparent with my story and my journey because I do not want this to happen to another 15-year-old girl. Not only was I a child, but I was a child having a child. So I had to navigate through adulthood being thrown into prison, then I had to navigate parenting behind bars, I had to navigate through having a life-altering disease while behind bars, and then I had to readjust and be able to acclimate to the world when I was thrown into it once again as an adult and not a child. But 50, you know, it's that halfway point. Theoretically, you got half in front of you and you've had half behind you. Um, I do hope that this is the best half is yet to come. I'm a full-time student enrolled in an online bachelor's of science and criminal justice. I'm also a peer support specialist. Half my caseload are in the community, the other half are in jail. I I want to be that person who has just made sense of this senseless carceral system. I love the work I do. I love advocating. It was a big factor in my release, and I wouldn't have gotten released as soon had it not been for the help of all the advocates in my life. I am an expert in this field. Who would have ever thought that the fact that your life has been jacked up makes you an expert? I appreciate the lessons learned from the good and bad people in my life. Loving myself looks like getting up somewhere running between two and ten miles a day, listening to the birds just because I can hear them walking on the grass because I can, you know, and calling my son when I want to. You can't really make up for lost time, but it's being able to make new memories. My definition of love back then was what someone could pour into me. My definition of love now is what I can pour into someone else. Now I'm able to love me first, and with that, I'm able to give that love away. Everyone has their own story. There's a book inside of everybody, but it's up to you to tell it. But the fact that I can go back and be that voice for people, I mean, you really, you really can't beat that. I don't have to wear a suit and tie. All I have to do is wake up and be me, and that is the best job that I could ever ask for.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

A deeply valued member of our Incarcerated Children's Advocacy Network, April's indomitable spirit is woven through every part of her story and reflected in the way she moves through the world. Her peer work, lived experience, and unwavering commitment to advocacy are helping to change the future for children who deserve more than the systems they've been given. April's story reminds us that resilience can become resistance, and that one voice, when lifted with purpose, can help reshape what's possible. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Before They Could Dream, brought to you by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions in partnership with the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth and Green Buzz Agency. We are deeply grateful to all of our episode contributors for their courage and insights in helping us to tell these vital stories. If you are enjoying this podcast and the work we are doing to explore youth justice in the United States, please be sure to like and share this episode with others. It is one of the most powerful ways you can help us expand the conversation and reach a wider audience. You can also subscribe and listen to BeforeThey Could Dream wherever you get your podcast. Be sure to check out our next episode as we continue to uncover the truth behind youth justice and incarceration and learn James' story. You can also find all of our past episodes at BeforeTheyCohdream.org.