(Content warning: Pet loss, solitary confinement)

(Mailed from Jefferson County Jail, August 16, 2024)

Dear Mom, 

One year ago today, you brought Stella to the vet to cross the Rainbow Bridge. I was in Dane County Jail “seg” (solitary confinement). My goodbye to the cat I’d loved, cared for, and who slept by my side for the past 12 years was said over a DCJ phone at 16 cents a minute. 

I’m grateful you were able to be there for her in those last moments, and to make that hard, final choice. I’m grateful I could read off a Facebook post to have typed and shared to honor her. I’m grateful she held on long enough for me to make it out of my cell for that one hour to make that phone call.

In reality, I was lucky I was even able to get on the phone for that small shred of involvement in Stella’s final days. For eight days prior, I was “on precautions” in solitary confinement. I had stated I was not suicidal – confirmed by Dane County Corporation Counsel, a psych doctor, Dane County Human Services, and members of Dane County Jail’s own mental health staff (Wellpath LLC). 

I was held “on precautions” regardless, locked in a seg cell for eight days with no phone calls, books, personal possessions, hygiene access, clothing, or human contact. To this day, no justification has been provided for such extremely punitive treatment. The reason given was simply that the mental health director had placed a “hold” on the status before departing for the long weekend. It was a “hold” only she could lift, while she was simultaneously absent from work at the jail where any assessment of the need for it could be rendered. 

When the cell door opened for the first time in eight days to allow me out for one single hour, I immediately called home. Stella had been on my mind all week. She had been ill before I landed in DCJ, but was on meds from the vet. She was the matriarch of every home I’d lived in since 2012 – taking charge of humans, dogs, other cats, even hamsters.

Stella knew she was large and in charge from day one with me. From the first time she saw me with a beer in front of me, she’d swat it away. It was her trademark move. It drove me absolutely nuts, but in hindsight, I should have taken the damn hint. She did what she could, swatting down beer after beer. 

The news from the vet wasn’t good. Stella had a bad respiratory infection, the meds weren’t helping, and cancer was aggressively impacting her eyes. Stella had been blind for eight years at that point but managed along without missing a beat, always the boss cat in charge. It would be her eyes that finally betrayed her in the end. 

That mid-August morning Stella passed, I got to take my first shower in the Dane County Jail, ever. I had begun coming to DCJ following relapses in 2023 and found myself inside that summer, beginning early July 2024. That exact shower had been a 30 second walk from my cell. It was located literally around the corner from where I sat, clothed in only a blanket I was simultaneously instructed to “wipe” with, while being denied toilet paper. As the water splashed on my filthy, neglected body, I thanked Stella for what seemed like such a miracle; it could only be her way of saying goodbye. I sobbed, whispering apologies to her into the shower stall for not being there at the end. 

The eight charges that brought me to that exact moment ultimately resulted in one single conviction. I was acquitted (found “not guilty”) on six felonies in a jury trial. Another felony was fully dismissed after actually being investigated. The sole remaining misdemeanor consisted of text messages expressing my fear of the Madison Police Department (MPD). Those fears are now facts held within the narrative of a civil lawsuit in the Western Wisconsin federal court.

Maybe my cat crossing the Rainbow Bridge got me into my first ever Dane County Jail shower that day, maybe not. The bottom line is that no one should have to pray for supernatural intervention for basic, humane treatment. Not in DCJ, not in any incarcerated setting, not in the world. 

My account of those details, my own charges, my own cat, my own shower, is retold not because I feel I am the most extreme case of systemic injustice or abuse. Quite the opposite. It is retold because my background, my education, and my privilege give me a voice to tell it. Even more, my past contributions to it demand that I tell it.

The reality is that the stakes are much higher for many awaiting trial. We currently live in a society in which you do not need to be convicted of a single crime to find your way into long-term jail time and these conditions that come with it. Human beings find themselves locked behind bars while loved ones have emergencies – serious injuries or illness. Family, friends, children, and partners dying trigger no clemency process or temporary release from jail, regardless of whether a criminal conviction exists or not. 

As our nation now turns our heads towards the actions of the federal government and ICE, we must consider that this humanitarian crisis rings true more than ever. Individuals only accused of immigration violations are placed indefinitely inside subhuman detention facilities while the legality of their very existence is subjected to bureaucratic inertia.

Post-conviction is worse. Death signifies only the end of a sentence. On Taycheedah Correctional Institute grounds, there exists a cemetery full of nameless headstones. Buried there are the stillborn babies of inmates alongside “unclaimed” inmate bodies. They receive only a plot number, signifying where they are, not whom.

My phase of quickly unlearning “the criminal justice system” was ushered in with Stella and a seg cell. To claim I’ve even scratched the surface would be an insult to thousands who understand more than I ever will. My 46 days of “seg” nearly broke me, yet pales in comparison to the lived experiences of entire generations, families and communities impacted by mass incarceration.

Mom, while I lack those lived experiences, growing up in a military and law enforcement family and serving 8 years as a law enforcement officer instilled in me that this nation is one we have been proud to serve because of the most fundamental values on which it was built. Those values are inscribed within the U.S. Constitution to this day. Among them, the eighth amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment; and the 14th amendment, guaranteeing equal protection and due process of law. The status of modern incarceration is an injury to those within it, and an insult to the values from which this country was born.

Stella came into my world as a larger than life cat. With much gratitude for a platform to do so, I commemorate her death the same way, as she would have wanted.

Still me,

Eli