August 8, 2023 • 47 mins
This weeks guest, Marci Marie Simmons, is building a new life after surviving 10 years in a Texas Prison. With over 250K followers on Tiktok, Marci answers questions about what life was really like behind bars. She's become an activist and advocate for those still inside. She's also become a friend of Rosie's, having captured her interest and respect - first online with her prison cooking antics and then in person as a fierce woman who refuses to give up on herself and others.
Still on parole, Marci, who was never a violent offender in or out of custody, shares her experience with openness and honesty.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Well, hey, everybody, it is me Rosie O'Donnell, star of
Wide Awake. What. Yeah, that was Night Shyamalan's first movie
and I played a nun and it's a very good film. Okay.
My friend Marcy Marie spent almost eleven years in prison
on the charge of embezzlement, and while she was in there,
(00:34):
her children, two who were in diapers and two who
were in middle school, had to survive without her for
over a decade. She's now an advocate. She talks about
what's wrong with the prison system. She still is on probation.
She's very wise, she's a close friend, she's lovely, and
(00:55):
I wanted her to truth is. She was just here
at my house stay over with her fiance and I
was talking to her in the backyard. I said, let's
get and sit right down, let's just talk on this.
And we just started talking and I think you're going
to enjoy it. Marcy Marie Simmons follow her Marcy Marie
on TikTok. She's a phenomenal woman and an advocate for
(01:17):
women in prison. So take a listen and there'll be
no questions at the end. It's a little different. It's
sort of like the Reality Winner episode. So we'll be
talking about a little bit more serious topics, no trigger warnings,
just letting you know it's kind of a little bit heavy,
but it's really worth listening to. Thank you very much, Marcy, Marie.
(01:49):
How are you, Marcy.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I'm awesome, Rosie. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks
for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Well, I'm so happy that we finally got to meet
in real life.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Me too, because we've been kind of interacting on zoom
and messages and TikTok and I'm excited too.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So what happened was I found Marcy on TikTok and
I thought, who is this gorgeous blonde woman who is
showing us how to make food while incarcerated. As soon
as I saw your first TikTok, I did a deep dive.
I went and I listened to all of your tiktoks,
and I was like, what a story this is. You
(02:29):
have been out of prison for two years.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I have been home for two years, and you actually
the first comment that I noticed that you sent on
a TikTok video. My mom said, hey, I think Rosie
o'donald put a comment on one of your videos, and
it was actually a video of how we would wet
our pants and iron them out and dry them with
(02:53):
our fan and I was like, Oh, my gosh, that
is her, and I was so excited. And then I
saw that you followed me, and then I was really
excited because I grew up you were a household item
in our home, right, So.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
How sweet is that. I was just fascinated by your story.
And let's do a quick recap for everybody of what
happened to you. You were very young, you were a
young mother. You had how many children at the time
of your arrest? I had five children at the time
of my wrist. I had three in middle school and
(03:25):
two in diapers. And you had never done anything illegal
before this. No, I mean I had traffic violations, Rosie,
But I was not about that life, absolutely not. And
you got a job working for a company and they
kind of taught you how to embezzle for them, but
you weren't very aware of what you were doing at first.
(03:48):
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Well, they were kind of cooking their books in a way,
and they were moving their finances around to make it
look like their business was a lot more profitable. And
from that first thing, that happened is it made me
lose respect for them, And then it also showed me
how they were making so much money kind of being shisty,
(04:11):
and instead of being the person that said, I don't
want to be a part of this, I'm going to
go find another job, I thought, hmm, I did something
really stupid and I ended up kind of using that
same technique that they were doing to take money for myself.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And how is it that you got caught? Like were
the police in on it or did one of them
turn you in? Or how did you get the blame
for what innately older men taught you and told you
was your job to do well.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
And it's kind of like in a situation where I
took what they were doing a step further right. So
I was literally taking money for myself. Instead of kind
of moving it around between their accounts, I was moving
it into my account. So I did that for a
number of years. And the way that I was doing it,
it was a system where the money had to keep moving.
(05:06):
If it was stagnant, it would get caught up. And Rosie,
I live in Texas. There was an ice storm. Nobody
drives in ice in Texas. We don't know how to
do it. The state shuts down, my internet was out,
I couldn't get to work, and the money was stagnant there,
and it threw a red flag up and the bank
(05:27):
called my employer.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
That's how it started. And your employer was aware of
what was going on. They were not just notified in
shop that little Marcy Marie had done in bezzling. They
knew that that's what they had hired you in a
way to do well.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They definitely knew that there was shystiness going on. What
they didn't know is that I was benefiting directly from it.
They thought it was just moving their money around, and
so they were surprised to know that I was in
a and flat out. Let's just get blunt with it,
as I was stealing from him, right, Please show up
(06:06):
at your house. The detective showed up at the office. Actually,
I walk into work one day and my big boss
had flown in and he was sitting at my desk
in my chair when I get to work, and I knew,
you know, I knew what time it was, and he
had some papers in front of him and he said,
(06:28):
what in the hell is all of this? You know?
And Rosie at that point. There was a weight that
lifted from me at that time, right, So yes, fear, yes, dread, yes,
uncertain about what the consequences were going to be, but
also like, thank god all of this is over. It's
(06:49):
coming to an end, because there was just so much
and I just told him, I just laid it out, well,
this is what's going on. And just a couple of
minutes after, Thattive walks in and says I needed to
come talk to me. I wasn't under arrest at that point,
all without an attorney, which I do not recommend.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I was going to say, didn't you watch Law and Order?
Don't you know you're supposed to ask for an attorney.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
And it messed me up, honestly, So I knew that
I probably needed an attorney, but I was still naive
enough to think that, well, I'm guilty. I'm not going
to ever try to say I'm not guilty, because I
just needed it to be done. And I still have
faith in our legal system that if you're going with them,
(07:34):
I can believe them. When the detective says, well just
tell me and I'm going to try to help you,
I believed it. I wasn't aware of all the injustices
at that time, and.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
How old were you? I was thirty. Okay, so you're
thirty and you have five little kids, a few in diapers, right, yes,
some in middle school? And did he take you right
to jail? Right then?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
So he takes me to this little room and it
was like like you see on Law and Order, just
that little detective interrogation.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Room with a double sided mirror.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yes, yes, yes, the whole thing. And I remember sitting
there thinking, holy cow, how how did I ever let
my life get to this point that I'm on this
side of an interrogation like this? And again he had
some papers and Rosie. They didn't know exactly how I
was doing it. And I was so naive and silly
(08:29):
enough to yes, I was doing this, and not only yes,
with I doing this, but no, this is what happened.
This is how it was going down. And I should
have said, I do want to talk to y'all, but
I need to call an attorney. I wish I had
said that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Right, but you didn't know.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I didn't know. I just still really had faith that
they just wanted it to be over. Also, I just
wanted it to be over.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So what was the effect on. No one in your
life knew you were doing this, No one, not your family.
You have a very supportive family, very close family. Your
parents are still with us, and your grandmother still alive.
Did you have to go face your family or you
didn't get to go home? That was it. You stayed
(09:15):
in prison from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
After I kind of laid it out for the detectives,
they said, well, just wait right here, and they left
the room and went and talked to the DA and
came back with an arrest warrant. So I was arrested
at that time, but I had one hundred thousand dollars
bond and my family, my grandmother and my husband at
that time, split it. It cost ten thousand dollars for
(09:40):
me to get out of prison at that time, and
they split it probably what my grandmother had saved up,
quite honestly, and I got to go home for a
short time. They changed the charge on me, and two
weeks later I ended up back in prison. But those
two weeks that I was home, I had a lot
of explaining to do, and I am grateful that I
(10:01):
had that time, because you can't talk about an open
case on your phone in County jail while you're waiting
for sentencing. You that's not something that you can do.
And so I was able to just lay it out
for my family. My parents did not raise me to
think that that was okay, that it was not acceptable.
(10:24):
They would not have been approving of that. My husband
at the time, absolutely, he was the kind of guy
that if he went in the grocery store and he
was thirsty while he was shopping, he was going to
go pay for his drink and then finish shopping. He
wouldn't even open a coke before he paid for it.
So definitely they wouldn't have been approving. But the thing is, Rosie,
(10:45):
they knew something was wrong with me because I had
been committing my crime for about three and a half years.
During that time, you can imagine nobody knew what was
going on. But there was extra money, and I was
having to lie and lie and lie. And as you're
doing that with the people that you love and care about,
(11:08):
you're putting up a wall and you're creating a distance.
And my family felt that my mama knew, Yeah, my
mama knew something was up. Absolutely, they weren't. They were
surprised at the amount and the extremness of it. But
they knew something was going on. So you go to
trial and what are you assuming? What are they telling
(11:31):
you might be your sentence? Like, I know you were
stunned at the sentence you got, but what were you
expecting at that time? So in the county jail, while
I'm waiting to go to court, the girls are telling me, oh,
you've never been in trouble. You're gonna get probation. You're
probably gonna have to pay the money back. And I
really thought I would be ten years probation, working my
(11:54):
tail off, making monthly payments to pay the money back. Right,
the first time I go to court, I do the
whole thing, try to I'm going to court in my
jail clothes, so I'm trying to make myself look as
least amount of looking like a criminal as I can
in jail clothes, right, And I'm like making homemade mascara
(12:15):
with toothpaste and ink, trying to open my eyes up
a little bit, and trying to smooth down my hair
the best I can. And I go in shackles and
handcuffs and I'm escorted by an officer. And this is
how you walk into court when you don't have money
to make your bond or your bail. This is how
sixty percent of Americans walk into court looking like they're guilty.
(12:36):
For sure. For me, I was pleading guilty. That wasn't
the issue. But you can see how that could be
a disparity for marginalized communities. Right. But I go in
and my lawyer comes to see me. I'm in a
holding cell at the courthouse, and he comes to see
me and says they've got an offer. The DA made
(12:58):
an offer. Said okay, well what is it. I'm thinking
he's fixing to tell me probation and he says forty years.
Oh my god. My heart fell to my stomach. I
was nauseous and I realized right then, there's I was
(13:20):
not getting probation. That wasn't he my attorney, who we
did pay for he wanted me to sign for forty years. Yes,
I am for forty years. My god. So you're a
thirty year old that's your whole life, Yes, that's all
my kids, completely, grown, grandchildren, everything. That's what I kept thinking, like,
(13:46):
that's it's over. It's you know.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So you didn't take that deal?
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Oh absolutely, Now you went to trial so I didn't
go to trial because I pled guilty. I pled guilty,
and I didn't take that deal. And the way that
works is it's negotiating over months, right, So you say no,
and then you go back to the county jail and
wait another month or three weeks, and then you come
back and they have another offer. And so then it
(14:14):
was like twenty seven years, and then it was like
twenty five years, and then it was you know, down
and down, and then it was twenty, and then it
was twenty, and then it was twenty. And I kept
telling him, if you get it to ten, in my mind,
I could make that work. In my mind, twenty I
just couldn't imagine. And then the third time I went
(14:36):
with that twenty offer, he said, look, they want to
arrest your husband. And he had nothing to do with it,
absolutely not. He didn't know anything and he had nothing
to do with it, and he was home taking care
of my two babies. And I just thought that can't happen,
and I signed the paper for twenty. When I got
(14:57):
back to the county jail, I had to call home
and let my parents know, and my dad, Rosie, he
was so upset. Yeah, we just didn't think it was
going to be twenty. We knew it was going to
be something. Yeah, it was hard. That was a hard
phone call.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Oh my god, Hey, don't go away, there's more to come.
(15:43):
So you go in for twenty and you're thirty years
old and you've lived a life where you've gotten in
no trouble. You have no experience with prison or with
any kind of even the people that were in prison,
like must have been a shock to you to be
kind of surrounded by criminals, but you come to find
(16:05):
out their life story, and there's so many stories similar
to your own very much.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
So I you know, my parents raised me to love
everybody and be open minded and treat everyone with equality
and love. But they also raised me kind of in
this bubble, in this middle class, white suburban neighborhood. And
so I go into prison and it's diverse. It's people
(16:35):
from all walks of life, with stories that I could
never even imagine, stories that I saw on television that
I didn't even ever picture real people, real women having
to deal with. And I quickly learned listening to these ladies,
just how kind of messed up our justice system is. Right,
(16:59):
We're we're putting mentally ill people in prison as the answer.
People with substance abuse disorders, and these ladies, Rosie, I
met some of the absolutely most beautifully spirited and beautifully
hearted women that I have ever met in my life.
And I met them in the penitentiary, right, And you
were in for ten years until you got was it
(17:22):
paroled or what was it commuted or how what is
the term that you got your sentence from twenty to ten.
I made parole at ten years, and so now I'm home.
I'm still on parole, so kind of technically, I'm still
serving my sentence. I'm just serving it out here in
our community. And so do you have to do that
(17:43):
for ten war years? Yes, until twenty thirty. So you
have a probation officer.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I do, and you have to report to him on
a scheduled basis.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I do. I'm completely accountable to him and the State
of Texas. To be able to come here, I had
to check in with him. He had to give me
a travel permit. I had to submit to a urine
analysis to make sure I wasn't on any illegal substances.
When I go back, I have to report to him
within twenty four hours yeah, they keep a close eye
(18:13):
on us.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Now, since you've been out, you have dedicated a lot
of your free time to really helping change the system
and the women's penitentiaries in Texas. This weekend, you're here
in Los Angeles at a TikTok gathering of prison TikTok.
If you're not familiar with prison TikTok, it's a hashtag
(18:37):
that you can click on and it's people who are
now out and who most of them are that I'm
watching are using their experiences to try to help change
the system like you're doing. And you recently had a
big victory with getting a law passed. Right, we did,
We really did.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
So. I'm with an organization called Linus Justice Impacted Women's Alliance,
and we are made up of formally incarcerated women and
currently incarcerated women, and what we do is we advocate
for change within the prison system, mainly for women. And
the law that we got pasted is about a medical
(19:21):
transport bill and it's now we're waiting for Governor Abbott
to sign it, so it's not officially a law quite yet,
but it passed the House and past the Senate and
it will just offer women privacy using the restroom as
something as simple as that, just give them just a
little more dignity.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well, so this was you told me the story yesterday.
I was fascinating that when people are transferred to another facility,
it's often a six to nine hour bus ride and
there's no bathroom. Like when you go on a bus
to Vegas or something, or I've only been on buses
to Atlantic City. There's a bathroom in there that closes
(20:05):
you're of privacy, but here there's not.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Oh, it's nothing like that. If you guys can imagine,
everybody's been on a school bus at some time in
their life. Right, If you take one of those bench
seats out of the school bus and you just build
a square wooden box and put a hole in that,
that's what the bathroom is. There's no curtain, there's no privacy.
(20:29):
There's people sitting just within inches from you on your left,
and with just inches from you on your right. There's
people directly across from you. And you can imagine, as
a woman in particular, how humiliating that can be, like
changing feminine products, this type of thing. So, Rosie, my
(20:50):
first time on a transport bus, I was being transported
from my intake unit to my ID unit, and it
was in Dayton, Texas, which is near Houston. All the
way up to Gatesville. It was a seven or eight
hour trip, and I was handcuffed to a lady who
had done about twenty three years, and I said, about
(21:11):
three hours into the trip, I said, I think I
have to go to the ladies room. And she said, girl,
you should have put on a bunch of Maxi pads
like I did. Wow. And a few hours later I
watched a young lady have to change her tampon. In
that environment, there are men, there are guards, mail guards
on the bus. The bus driver perhaps is the guy.
(21:34):
You can't even have your hands free to wipe or
to change. Imagine your hand is handcuffed and you're trying
to change and replace a tampon in front of all
of these people.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You know. It's just the lack of basic human dignity,
you know. And that was the reality of what you
were entering.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yes, ma'am. That was kind of just the foreshadowing of
the kind of things I was going to see while
I was incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
So you get in there, and you're there the first week,
and you are in your bed, crying, what are you
doing well.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I spent a lot of the nights with my head
kind of under my cover, just still in shock that
I was there, that I had put myself in that situation.
So there's so much shame and guilt behind that that
(22:27):
it was eating me from the inside, missing my kids.
I was still dreaming, like my dreams were halfway in
prison and halfway in the free world, and my kids
were kind of with me, or I was in my
prison clothes and the free world with them having to
run back in time for count time in prison, and
I would wake up in these night sweats. It was
(22:50):
a hard adjustment. It was really hard figuring out how
to live with myself after I had done what I
had done.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Were you scared right away? Did you feel as though
there was violence everywhere you were in danger? Or were
you more like depressed and calm? Like was it was
a terror right away?
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Walking into the prison. You hear so many stories like,
don't take anything from anybody, don't people are going to
try to get over on you. People are you know?
But man, right from the start, Rosie, the ladies were helpful.
They were giving me the lowdown because the state really
(23:32):
doesn't tell you anything. The officers don't tell you anything.
It's the ladies that live there that are going to
tell you. We eat at this time, this is how
you do this, this is don't do that, or you'll
get in trouble. Put your shoes here, or you'll be
in trouble. These kind of things, and they were helpful.
I never feared anybody that I was incarcerated with, and
I spent my time. I was on a maximum security unit.
(23:54):
Texas kind of jumbles everybody together, so I was there
with people that were never going to come home again.
And I never felt fear from the ladies I was
incarcerated with. The only fear I felt had to do
with staff.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, because you've told me stories and maybe we could
tell some right here. I mean, I worry that you're
on parole and they might go I don't like you
telling the truths and do something to send you back.
Do you worry about that as well? Like you're allowed
to have free speech on parole. But you're talking a
lot about the reality of prison, which I assume the
(24:30):
prison industry doesn't really enjoy, do you.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Know, Rosie, I talk about it right in front of
those legislators too, And I go right on boldly. And
this is why I'm confident, because I just only tell
the truth about it, right, and so everything I say,
they cannot prove that I was not telling the truth
because it's factual.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Right, guards who were just cruel, and so many men
and so much of abuse of misogynists behavior that you
had to put up with the guards exposing themselves to
you and riding you. You know, you're a very attractive woman.
(25:11):
They would say, you know, horribly sexual things to you,
And how did you know how to survive all that?
You know right away? Who has all of the power
in there and who has none? And as an incarcerated person,
your word doesn't mean anything. You don't have any control
(25:32):
over any situation. The only thing you have control over
is how you react. So you learn that very early on.
So you can't It's not a situation where an incident
happens from staff and you out here. You might look
at somebody crazy if they said some sexual innuendo towards you.
(25:54):
You can't even do that. You kind of have to
play it off.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
You just know how to avoid that situation, and you
know how to pay attention to your surroundings and not
put yourself in a situation where you could be off
camera alone with an officer or something like that. And
I'll also say I met lots of staff members that
would never dream of abusing their power, you know, that
(26:20):
were there to have a job and feed their families
and get benefits, help benefits, right, But I also just
met an equal or more amount that horrified me quite frankly.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
So, you were pretty much a good prisoner, but then
you went through a phase where you kind of lost yourself.
You lost your mind, and you were put in segregation
in the hole. Whatld we people out here in the
free world say from we know from watching these shows
that it's you were put in isolation. For how long
(26:55):
were you put there?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
I was in and out of the whole for about
two years, in and out of medium custody, and in
and out of the whole. I did completely lose myself, Rosie.
They weren't I wasn't making parole. I felt like I
was doing everything that I was supposed to be doing
to make parole. My daughters that I had left in
(27:20):
diapers were in elementary school and kindergarten in first grade,
and I just remember thinking to myself that if I
had died instead of committing this crime and taking myself,
removing myself from my kid's life, then they, by now
they would have healed from that. By now they would
(27:42):
have moved on. And as it is now, they're living
with themselves every day. My mom's in prison. And I
just couldn't. I did not know how to forgive myself
and move forward at that point, and I wanted, I
didn't care. I started acting crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
I did it.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
I was talking back to the I was, I mean, just.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Rebellious. You were enraged at yourself, you were enraged at
the situation, and you kind of gave up a little bit, right, Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
How horrible was the whole I mean, we see it
all the time, and it's been you know, declared unconstitutional
to put people in isolation like that, especially there are people,
as you know, who've been in segregation for years of
(28:28):
their life, years and years. That's like cruel and unusual punishment.
How horrible was it was? It at the worst part
of your prison experience was being isolated like that in
the segregated unit.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I think the worst part was probably when I went
to had to go to the crisis management center, which
is like if you have a suicide attempt and we
can get to that, that was the whole was probably
better than that, but it's exactly like what you can imagine.
It's a small, dirty little cell. You might find like
(29:05):
feces on the wall, I mean, they're filthy, graffiti all
over the walls. You see a lot of religious pictures
where people had drawn in or carved religious pictures or
like prayers or God Helped Me kind of things on
the wall. And then there's a sense of desperation in
(29:25):
that entire building.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
It was.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
It's sad. It's hard to be in there with nothing
but yourself and your thoughts, especially when you're in a
situation that you've already realized you can't really figure out
how to live with yourself. So the suicide rates for
inmates in the hole are really high. You hear people
(29:51):
crying out.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
It's sad. Yeah, it's really sad. And you did you
get to a point where you were suicidal? I did, yeah,
And was their mental health help and any capacity.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
So if you attempt a suicide, or if the staff
believes that you're suicidal, because sometimes you might be suicidal
and you might tell the staff and they don't believe
you or don't take you seriously. That happens, or sometimes
people say they're suicidal because they just want to leave
the situation that they're in, or you know, and so
(30:28):
that happens too. But what they do is in Texas
for women, they take you to the crisis management center,
which is on another unit. First you go to the hole,
and I was already in the hole when I went.
But then they take your panties, your bra They leave
you in one gown and they take your mattress, they
(30:50):
take your sheets. You don't have anything. You're just in
the cell, nothing but your gown. And they have an
officer posted outside your door watching you to make sure
or that you don't hurt yourself. And then you're waiting
for transportation to go to the crisis management center. The
crisis management center. When you go in there, they take
your gown so you're completely nude. There's no bed, it's
(31:17):
just a concrete room. There is a toilet, stainless still toilet.
The officers come by every fifteen minutes mail look at
you naked, mail or female to look at you. I mean,
they're checking to make sure you're alive and doing what
they're supposed to be, but you are completely naked and
(31:37):
you don't get a blanket. I didn't get a blanket
till my second day there, so I didn't have any coverage.
It was horrible. I was there for twenty days. Oh
my god, Marcy, how'd you survive that? First of all,
how is that supposed to help someone who is suicidal?
I know it taking everything out prevents you from trying
(31:58):
to make a noose or do something that would hurt you.
But that's even worse than standard prison.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
In the hall. At least you have a bed in there, right,
So you come from this suicidal, desperate place to a
worst place.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
That's exactly right. So one of two things happens. Right
if you either are to a point where you just
don't even care about the conditions, because that's how deep
you've gotten down into your depression and you just you're
just there and that's kind of how I was. Or
you are still suicidal and still having these invasive thoughts
(32:41):
and you just tell them I'm not suicidal. I feel okay,
because when you say those words, they send you back
to the unit, and.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
So you in some ways are able to free yourself
from there by saying that.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
That's right, that's right. But then if you're still having
those thoughts, you're still not getting help, and you're still
at risk for losing your life or taking your own life.
Were there a lot of deaths while you were in there?
A lot of suicides. I know personally eleven people that
took their lives while I was incarcerated. Those are the
(33:17):
ones that I knew personally, nine inmates and two officers.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Wow, that is intense.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
The conditions in that environment are very harsh. They're harsh
for the people that are housed there, and they're harsh
for the people employed there.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Stay tuned, we'll be back now. Talk about harsh. I mean,
(33:57):
you know, we've known each other a while now, and
I I've heard so many of these stories. But the
one that haunts me the most, I believe, is the
temperature inside the prisons in Texas that if you google it,
it says that Texas prisons have air conditioning, but the
reality is they do not. So explain that.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
So it's tricky because some of the areas in the
prison where I was at were air conditioned. The areas
where the officer sit the picket, the administrative offices, the
visitation room, the chapel, the education building. But the buildings
that actually house the inmates are absolutely not air conditioned,
and they're miserably hot, dangerously hot.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
There was a thermometer that you were able to sort
of get, and they put black masking tape over the temperature,
so inmates can't see just how hot it is. But
how hot was it when you got that masking tape off?
It was one hundred and thirty six degrees In the
dorm where I lived the last summer I was incarcerated.
(35:05):
Were people having seizures all.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
The time, rosy heat induced seizures. I didn't even know
that was a thing until I got to prison. In
the summers, there are so many ladies. My girlfriend Britney
suffered from heat induced seizures during the hot summer. She's
been home three and a half years now and hasn't
had one since. They are definitely heat induced. It was
(35:28):
a very dangerous situation. The problem is if you have
any other health ailment, diabetes, any kind of heart diseases,
the heat exasperates that so intensely, and so then when
an lady incarcerated person goes to the hospital or passes
away in the summer, it's because of her heart disease. Well,
(35:51):
it's because she, yes, she had heart disease, and she
was housed in extreme temperatures. That's the real problem.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Now, speaking of Brittany, you guys met in prison and
you fell in love, and she got out before you
and set up an apartment and waited for you to
get out, and then you got out and you've been
together ever since. So how long have you been together
with Brittany.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
We've been together for five years, since twenty seventeen. And Rosie,
we're getting married soon.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I heard it and I better be invited.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Absolutely, we can't wait. We're yeah, we're making it official.
We're just out here building our life together and healing
from our traumas together, and we're just very much happy
and in love. And my family just adores her, right,
(36:49):
and your kids love Your grandkids call her their best friend.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yes, I have two grandsons and they're the cutest things ever.
And they they'll say, Mama, can we come spend the night?
And I'll say, sure, is my best friend there?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Now? Was there were there? You were not gay before
you went in, but you always sort of knew in
the back of your mind that that was a possibility.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Correct, That's absolutely right. I had never been in any
kind of long term relationship with the woman before I
went to prison. But I was always attracted to women
or men. I you know, I don't think a lot
about how someone's built on the outside necessarily. I really
(37:38):
feel like I feel their energy and their spirit, and
that's kind of what I'm attracted to.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
And I had really not been in very many long
term relationships. I've been married twice, and once to my
high school sweetheart, and divorced just for a short time
and then got remarried. So it's not like I have
all this experience. Frankly, I had more relationship in prison
that I had my entire free world life.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Right. And you were so young too, Right. You were
young when you had your first child. You were a
teen mom, and you had a wonderful husband while you
were in prison, who would bring your girls to you
every time he could, and he would sit, you told me,
with his cowboy hat, push down over his eyes and
(38:26):
take a nap and let you just have them all
to yourself, climbing on top of you, and you know
that's not the rule is you can't touch, right, But
what do you do with a baby that's five and six? Right?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And there was actually in Texas you for children that
are set under seventeen, they're allowed to hug their mom,
they're allowed to be with her, sit in her lap.
My kids set in my lap. Even my middle school
son his first visit with me when I got incarcerated,
he set in my lap the whole visit. Just needed
(39:01):
to feel that and thank goodness that we are allowed
to do that. There was a short time we had
one warden one time for like six months she said, no,
kids can't sit in your lap?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right, how marrible?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Marrible?
Speaker 1 (39:14):
It was terrible.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
The girls were used to being able to braid my
hair and you know, this was our ritual. We all
braided each other's hair every visit and they were used
to sitting in my lap and one on each leg.
And they were when that happened. I think they were
about seven and eight. And it was hard. Yeah, it
was really hard.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
There are like moments that you tell me of just
pure cruelty. Like there was a pond that was a
man made pond on the prison grounds and you got
a new warden, and she said, fill it up with
dirt for no reason. There was no incident around having
a pond, a little bit of nature, a little bit
of life, and something beautiful to look at, and it
(39:56):
was just taken away without incident.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
That's exactly right. She also had us to cut all
of the rose bushes down, dig them up, get rid
of them. They were there for no reason. She didn't
want she didn't want us to have any relief, I
think from the harsh environment we were in. You know,
just sometimes you can imagine if you're walking down the
(40:20):
road and you see a rose, you know, you might
stop and admire or look up, you know, and that's nice,
and it's the same thing in there. You might be
going back to your dorm and we would be like,
oh the roses are blooming. Oh it's got new blooms.
And that was just.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Take it away, just take it away. You told me
about the prison jobs that you had, especially the one
pulling weeds. Can you just describe what that was like?
Because when you told it to me, and you visually
leaned down in the manner that you were allowed to
do it, you couldn't bend your knees to pick the weeds, like,
(40:57):
tell people what that was.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
That's called the field squad and the kind of the
nickname is called the hoe squad. And the work that
we did was very similar to plantation work. We had
an officer that was on horseback, he was armed. That
was our boss. And the pulling weeds part. We would
(41:20):
all line up at the end of the garden and
each one of us in a row, and you were
responsible for pulling all the weeds. And you would have
to if you just stand up and bend at the waist.
You can't bend your knees and you're just bent at
the waist there pulling weeds. You're not allowed to stop.
(41:41):
You're not allowed to stand up and rest your back
or stretch your back. You're not allowed to squat down
and bend at all. And you're just doing that the
whole the whole shift, the whole work shift. Sounds like slavery, right,
looks like slavery. It absolutely does it absolutely it is
(42:02):
it is and we're doing it with no pay. I
mean it is, yeah, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Now, one thing that you learned to do in prison,
which I really fell in love with you when I
was watching you on tiktoks with this prison cooking thing
that you would do, Like I can't even explain you
talk to people about food that you would make in
prison with just stuff from the commissary. What was the
(42:30):
best thing that you made that everyone went crazy about
in the prison because you were a renowned prison cook,
weren't you.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I was a really good cook in prison, and I
cooked and fed a lot of people while I was there.
I think probably my best recipe was maybe a pizza.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Pocket, which you made out of what.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So I would take crackers and crush them down and
kind of make a masa for a crust and lay
them out, and then maybe turkey bites, which is like
mebe a slim gem made out of turkey, Slice those up,
make a sauce out of ketchup.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, that's why you do what you have to do.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yes, catch up in garlic powder, cut up some jalapenos,
squeeze cheese, cream cheese, and you fold your pocket together.
And then we would we call it frying, but really
it's air frying. It's with a hair dryer, right, And
we'd put it in a bag and our bag would
be our oven, and we'd put that blow dryer in.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
It's unbelievable what you would like mc iver in there, right,
you could take anything from the commissary and make something
delicious for everyone to look forward to. I mean, what
a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
You know, food in the free world brings people together,
and food in prison that brings people together as well.
And we did have moments. As horrifying as the conditions were,
we still supported each other and had moments of celebration.
We played games on holidays, we got together when it
(44:02):
was a weekend and the TV's were on and there
was a movie coming on the whole dorm would watch.
And we did these things for survival and for companionship
and friendship, and there were a lot of beautiful moments.
I have good memories from that time because there were
good people there.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Right, And you're still friendly with many many women that
you served with, and when they get out, I know
you have them on your TikTok and on your podcast.
Tell everybody about your podcast now.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yes, So we started a podcast. It's called On the
Reckyard Women's Prison Podcast, and we try to talk about
things that we might talk about on the Prison Reckyard.
We talk a lot about some of it more heavy
and in depth about the disparities in our legal system,
(44:53):
and some of them more lighthearted, like prison late Nights,
how that went down in coffee shop and how we
celebrated and it's fun. It's great. It feels good to
talk about those things and we do it. We're live
on YouTube, so that's exciting also because it's live. We
(45:13):
take questions live and it's a lot of people we're
incarcerated will pop in and give questions and excellent.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Well I'm about to go jump on and do it,
so yeah, listen. I love you, Marcia. I think you're phenomenal.
I love Britney too. I think that you're an amazing woman.
And what you've done now since you've been out trying
to help the women who are still incarcerated and make
life a little bit easier for them and more humane.
I mean, it's really it's really tragic what we do
(45:43):
to inmates and in the guise of rehabilitation when there
really is none in prison and it's only getting worse,
and we incarcerate more people than any country in the
world by far, and it has to change in our country.
I'm very proud of all the work that you're doing.
In order to make that a reality. So thank you
(46:05):
for being my friend, and thank you for coming and
spending the night here. And we'll see you at the
wedding for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Rosie, right back at you, well, I hope that you
enjoyed that. I certainly enjoyed talking to her. Follow her
as I said on TikTok, Morcy Marie, you will enjoy it. Okay,
(46:37):
next week we have Samantha Bee. I love Samantha Bee.
She is so smart, she is so astute, she is
so beautiful, she's a great mom, she's a wonderful friend,
and I love her. And she's got a new podcast
and we're going to tell you all about it. So
next week, Samantha Bee, don't miss it. It's Rosie O'Donnell.
This is Onward
Well, hey, everybody, it is me Rosie O'Donnell, star of
Wide Awake. What. Yeah, that was Night Shyamalan's first movie
and I played a nun and it's a very good film. Okay.
My friend Marcy Marie spent almost eleven years in prison
on the charge of embezzlement, and while she was in there,
(00:34):
her children, two who were in diapers and two who
were in middle school, had to survive without her for
over a decade. She's now an advocate. She talks about
what's wrong with the prison system. She still is on probation.
She's very wise, she's a close friend, she's lovely, and
(00:55):
I wanted her to truth is. She was just here
at my house stay over with her fiance and I
was talking to her in the backyard. I said, let's
get and sit right down, let's just talk on this.
And we just started talking and I think you're going
to enjoy it. Marcy Marie Simmons follow her Marcy Marie
on TikTok. She's a phenomenal woman and an advocate for
(01:17):
women in prison. So take a listen and there'll be
no questions at the end. It's a little different. It's
sort of like the Reality Winner episode. So we'll be
talking about a little bit more serious topics, no trigger warnings,
just letting you know it's kind of a little bit heavy,
but it's really worth listening to. Thank you very much, Marcy, Marie.
(01:49):
How are you, Marcy.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I'm awesome, Rosie. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks
for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Well, I'm so happy that we finally got to meet
in real life.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Me too, because we've been kind of interacting on zoom
and messages and TikTok and I'm excited too.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So what happened was I found Marcy on TikTok and
I thought, who is this gorgeous blonde woman who is
showing us how to make food while incarcerated. As soon
as I saw your first TikTok, I did a deep dive.
I went and I listened to all of your tiktoks,
and I was like, what a story this is. You
(02:29):
have been out of prison for two years.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I have been home for two years, and you actually
the first comment that I noticed that you sent on
a TikTok video. My mom said, hey, I think Rosie
o'donald put a comment on one of your videos, and
it was actually a video of how we would wet
our pants and iron them out and dry them with
(02:53):
our fan and I was like, Oh, my gosh, that
is her, and I was so excited. And then I
saw that you followed me, and then I was really
excited because I grew up you were a household item
in our home, right, So.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
How sweet is that. I was just fascinated by your story.
And let's do a quick recap for everybody of what
happened to you. You were very young, you were a
young mother. You had how many children at the time
of your arrest? I had five children at the time
of my wrist. I had three in middle school and
(03:25):
two in diapers. And you had never done anything illegal
before this. No, I mean I had traffic violations, Rosie,
But I was not about that life, absolutely not. And
you got a job working for a company and they
kind of taught you how to embezzle for them, but
you weren't very aware of what you were doing at first.
(03:48):
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Well, they were kind of cooking their books in a way,
and they were moving their finances around to make it
look like their business was a lot more profitable. And
from that first thing, that happened is it made me
lose respect for them, And then it also showed me
how they were making so much money kind of being shisty,
(04:11):
and instead of being the person that said, I don't
want to be a part of this, I'm going to
go find another job, I thought, hmm, I did something
really stupid and I ended up kind of using that
same technique that they were doing to take money for myself.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And how is it that you got caught? Like were
the police in on it or did one of them
turn you in? Or how did you get the blame
for what innately older men taught you and told you
was your job to do well.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
And it's kind of like in a situation where I
took what they were doing a step further right. So
I was literally taking money for myself. Instead of kind
of moving it around between their accounts, I was moving
it into my account. So I did that for a
number of years. And the way that I was doing it,
it was a system where the money had to keep moving.
(05:06):
If it was stagnant, it would get caught up. And Rosie,
I live in Texas. There was an ice storm. Nobody
drives in ice in Texas. We don't know how to
do it. The state shuts down, my internet was out,
I couldn't get to work, and the money was stagnant there,
and it threw a red flag up and the bank
(05:27):
called my employer.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
That's how it started. And your employer was aware of
what was going on. They were not just notified in
shop that little Marcy Marie had done in bezzling. They
knew that that's what they had hired you in a
way to do well.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They definitely knew that there was shystiness going on. What
they didn't know is that I was benefiting directly from it.
They thought it was just moving their money around, and
so they were surprised to know that I was in
a and flat out. Let's just get blunt with it,
as I was stealing from him, right, Please show up
(06:06):
at your house. The detective showed up at the office. Actually,
I walk into work one day and my big boss
had flown in and he was sitting at my desk
in my chair when I get to work, and I knew,
you know, I knew what time it was, and he
had some papers in front of him and he said,
(06:28):
what in the hell is all of this? You know?
And Rosie at that point. There was a weight that
lifted from me at that time, right, So yes, fear, yes, dread, yes,
uncertain about what the consequences were going to be, but
also like, thank god all of this is over. It's
(06:49):
coming to an end, because there was just so much
and I just told him, I just laid it out, well,
this is what's going on. And just a couple of
minutes after, Thattive walks in and says I needed to
come talk to me. I wasn't under arrest at that point,
all without an attorney, which I do not recommend.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I was going to say, didn't you watch Law and Order?
Don't you know you're supposed to ask for an attorney.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
And it messed me up, honestly, So I knew that
I probably needed an attorney, but I was still naive
enough to think that, well, I'm guilty. I'm not going
to ever try to say I'm not guilty, because I
just needed it to be done. And I still have
faith in our legal system that if you're going with them,
(07:34):
I can believe them. When the detective says, well just
tell me and I'm going to try to help you,
I believed it. I wasn't aware of all the injustices
at that time, and.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
How old were you? I was thirty. Okay, so you're
thirty and you have five little kids, a few in diapers, right, yes,
some in middle school? And did he take you right
to jail? Right then?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
So he takes me to this little room and it
was like like you see on Law and Order, just
that little detective interrogation.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Room with a double sided mirror.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yes, yes, yes, the whole thing. And I remember sitting
there thinking, holy cow, how how did I ever let
my life get to this point that I'm on this
side of an interrogation like this? And again he had
some papers and Rosie. They didn't know exactly how I
was doing it. And I was so naive and silly
(08:29):
enough to yes, I was doing this, and not only yes,
with I doing this, but no, this is what happened.
This is how it was going down. And I should
have said, I do want to talk to y'all, but
I need to call an attorney. I wish I had
said that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Right, but you didn't know.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
I didn't know. I just still really had faith that
they just wanted it to be over. Also, I just
wanted it to be over.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So what was the effect on. No one in your
life knew you were doing this, No one, not your family.
You have a very supportive family, very close family. Your
parents are still with us, and your grandmother still alive.
Did you have to go face your family or you
didn't get to go home? That was it. You stayed
(09:15):
in prison from that moment on.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
After I kind of laid it out for the detectives,
they said, well, just wait right here, and they left
the room and went and talked to the DA and
came back with an arrest warrant. So I was arrested
at that time, but I had one hundred thousand dollars
bond and my family, my grandmother and my husband at
that time, split it. It cost ten thousand dollars for
(09:40):
me to get out of prison at that time, and
they split it probably what my grandmother had saved up,
quite honestly, and I got to go home for a
short time. They changed the charge on me, and two
weeks later I ended up back in prison. But those
two weeks that I was home, I had a lot
of explaining to do, and I am grateful that I
(10:01):
had that time, because you can't talk about an open
case on your phone in County jail while you're waiting
for sentencing. You that's not something that you can do.
And so I was able to just lay it out
for my family. My parents did not raise me to
think that that was okay, that it was not acceptable.
(10:24):
They would not have been approving of that. My husband
at the time, absolutely, he was the kind of guy
that if he went in the grocery store and he
was thirsty while he was shopping, he was going to
go pay for his drink and then finish shopping. He
wouldn't even open a coke before he paid for it.
So definitely they wouldn't have been approving. But the thing is, Rosie,
(10:45):
they knew something was wrong with me because I had
been committing my crime for about three and a half years.
During that time, you can imagine nobody knew what was
going on. But there was extra money, and I was
having to lie and lie and lie. And as you're
doing that with the people that you love and care about,
(11:08):
you're putting up a wall and you're creating a distance.
And my family felt that my mama knew, Yeah, my
mama knew something was up. Absolutely, they weren't. They were
surprised at the amount and the extremness of it. But
they knew something was going on. So you go to
trial and what are you assuming? What are they telling
(11:31):
you might be your sentence? Like, I know you were
stunned at the sentence you got, but what were you
expecting at that time? So in the county jail, while
I'm waiting to go to court, the girls are telling me, oh,
you've never been in trouble. You're gonna get probation. You're
probably gonna have to pay the money back. And I
really thought I would be ten years probation, working my
(11:54):
tail off, making monthly payments to pay the money back. Right,
the first time I go to court, I do the
whole thing, try to I'm going to court in my
jail clothes, so I'm trying to make myself look as
least amount of looking like a criminal as I can
in jail clothes, right, And I'm like making homemade mascara
(12:15):
with toothpaste and ink, trying to open my eyes up
a little bit, and trying to smooth down my hair
the best I can. And I go in shackles and
handcuffs and I'm escorted by an officer. And this is
how you walk into court when you don't have money
to make your bond or your bail. This is how
sixty percent of Americans walk into court looking like they're guilty.
(12:36):
For sure. For me, I was pleading guilty. That wasn't
the issue. But you can see how that could be
a disparity for marginalized communities. Right. But I go in
and my lawyer comes to see me. I'm in a
holding cell at the courthouse, and he comes to see
me and says they've got an offer. The DA made
(12:58):
an offer. Said okay, well what is it. I'm thinking
he's fixing to tell me probation and he says forty years.
Oh my god. My heart fell to my stomach. I
was nauseous and I realized right then, there's I was
(13:20):
not getting probation. That wasn't he my attorney, who we
did pay for he wanted me to sign for forty years. Yes,
I am for forty years. My god. So you're a
thirty year old that's your whole life, Yes, that's all
my kids, completely, grown, grandchildren, everything. That's what I kept thinking, like,
(13:46):
that's it's over. It's you know.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So you didn't take that deal?
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Oh absolutely, Now you went to trial so I didn't
go to trial because I pled guilty. I pled guilty,
and I didn't take that deal. And the way that
works is it's negotiating over months, right, So you say no,
and then you go back to the county jail and
wait another month or three weeks, and then you come
back and they have another offer. And so then it
(14:14):
was like twenty seven years, and then it was like
twenty five years, and then it was you know, down
and down, and then it was twenty, and then it
was twenty, and then it was twenty. And I kept
telling him, if you get it to ten, in my mind,
I could make that work. In my mind, twenty I
just couldn't imagine. And then the third time I went
(14:36):
with that twenty offer, he said, look, they want to
arrest your husband. And he had nothing to do with it,
absolutely not. He didn't know anything and he had nothing
to do with it, and he was home taking care
of my two babies. And I just thought that can't happen,
and I signed the paper for twenty. When I got
(14:57):
back to the county jail, I had to call home
and let my parents know, and my dad, Rosie, he
was so upset. Yeah, we just didn't think it was
going to be twenty. We knew it was going to
be something. Yeah, it was hard. That was a hard
phone call.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Oh my god, Hey, don't go away, there's more to come.
(15:43):
So you go in for twenty and you're thirty years
old and you've lived a life where you've gotten in
no trouble. You have no experience with prison or with
any kind of even the people that were in prison,
like must have been a shock to you to be
kind of surrounded by criminals, but you come to find
(16:05):
out their life story, and there's so many stories similar
to your own very much.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
So I you know, my parents raised me to love
everybody and be open minded and treat everyone with equality
and love. But they also raised me kind of in
this bubble, in this middle class, white suburban neighborhood. And
so I go into prison and it's diverse. It's people
(16:35):
from all walks of life, with stories that I could
never even imagine, stories that I saw on television that
I didn't even ever picture real people, real women having
to deal with. And I quickly learned listening to these ladies,
just how kind of messed up our justice system is. Right,
(16:59):
We're we're putting mentally ill people in prison as the answer.
People with substance abuse disorders, and these ladies, Rosie, I
met some of the absolutely most beautifully spirited and beautifully
hearted women that I have ever met in my life.
And I met them in the penitentiary, right, And you
were in for ten years until you got was it
(17:22):
paroled or what was it commuted or how what is
the term that you got your sentence from twenty to ten.
I made parole at ten years, and so now I'm home.
I'm still on parole, so kind of technically, I'm still
serving my sentence. I'm just serving it out here in
our community. And so do you have to do that
(17:43):
for ten war years? Yes, until twenty thirty. So you
have a probation officer.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I do, and you have to report to him on
a scheduled basis.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I do. I'm completely accountable to him and the State
of Texas. To be able to come here, I had
to check in with him. He had to give me
a travel permit. I had to submit to a urine
analysis to make sure I wasn't on any illegal substances.
When I go back, I have to report to him
within twenty four hours yeah, they keep a close eye
(18:13):
on us.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Now, since you've been out, you have dedicated a lot
of your free time to really helping change the system
and the women's penitentiaries in Texas. This weekend, you're here
in Los Angeles at a TikTok gathering of prison TikTok.
If you're not familiar with prison TikTok, it's a hashtag
(18:37):
that you can click on and it's people who are
now out and who most of them are that I'm
watching are using their experiences to try to help change
the system like you're doing. And you recently had a
big victory with getting a law passed. Right, we did,
We really did.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
So. I'm with an organization called Linus Justice Impacted Women's Alliance,
and we are made up of formally incarcerated women and
currently incarcerated women, and what we do is we advocate
for change within the prison system, mainly for women. And
the law that we got pasted is about a medical
(19:21):
transport bill and it's now we're waiting for Governor Abbott
to sign it, so it's not officially a law quite yet,
but it passed the House and past the Senate and
it will just offer women privacy using the restroom as
something as simple as that, just give them just a
little more dignity.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well, so this was you told me the story yesterday.
I was fascinating that when people are transferred to another facility,
it's often a six to nine hour bus ride and
there's no bathroom. Like when you go on a bus
to Vegas or something, or I've only been on buses
to Atlantic City. There's a bathroom in there that closes
(20:05):
you're of privacy, but here there's not.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Oh, it's nothing like that. If you guys can imagine,
everybody's been on a school bus at some time in
their life. Right, If you take one of those bench
seats out of the school bus and you just build
a square wooden box and put a hole in that,
that's what the bathroom is. There's no curtain, there's no privacy.
(20:29):
There's people sitting just within inches from you on your left,
and with just inches from you on your right. There's
people directly across from you. And you can imagine, as
a woman in particular, how humiliating that can be, like
changing feminine products, this type of thing. So, Rosie, my
(20:50):
first time on a transport bus, I was being transported
from my intake unit to my ID unit, and it
was in Dayton, Texas, which is near Houston. All the
way up to Gatesville. It was a seven or eight
hour trip, and I was handcuffed to a lady who
had done about twenty three years, and I said, about
(21:11):
three hours into the trip, I said, I think I
have to go to the ladies room. And she said, girl,
you should have put on a bunch of Maxi pads
like I did. Wow. And a few hours later I
watched a young lady have to change her tampon. In
that environment, there are men, there are guards, mail guards
on the bus. The bus driver perhaps is the guy.
(21:34):
You can't even have your hands free to wipe or
to change. Imagine your hand is handcuffed and you're trying
to change and replace a tampon in front of all
of these people.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You know. It's just the lack of basic human dignity,
you know. And that was the reality of what you
were entering.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yes, ma'am. That was kind of just the foreshadowing of
the kind of things I was going to see while
I was incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
So you get in there, and you're there the first week,
and you are in your bed, crying, what are you
doing well.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
I spent a lot of the nights with my head
kind of under my cover, just still in shock that
I was there, that I had put myself in that situation.
So there's so much shame and guilt behind that that
(22:27):
it was eating me from the inside, missing my kids.
I was still dreaming, like my dreams were halfway in
prison and halfway in the free world, and my kids
were kind of with me, or I was in my
prison clothes and the free world with them having to
run back in time for count time in prison, and
I would wake up in these night sweats. It was
(22:50):
a hard adjustment. It was really hard figuring out how
to live with myself after I had done what I
had done.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Were you scared right away? Did you feel as though
there was violence everywhere you were in danger? Or were
you more like depressed and calm? Like was it was
a terror right away?
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Walking into the prison. You hear so many stories like,
don't take anything from anybody, don't people are going to
try to get over on you. People are you know?
But man, right from the start, Rosie, the ladies were helpful.
They were giving me the lowdown because the state really
(23:32):
doesn't tell you anything. The officers don't tell you anything.
It's the ladies that live there that are going to
tell you. We eat at this time, this is how
you do this, this is don't do that, or you'll
get in trouble. Put your shoes here, or you'll be
in trouble. These kind of things, and they were helpful.
I never feared anybody that I was incarcerated with, and
I spent my time. I was on a maximum security unit.
(23:54):
Texas kind of jumbles everybody together, so I was there
with people that were never going to come home again.
And I never felt fear from the ladies I was
incarcerated with. The only fear I felt had to do
with staff.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, because you've told me stories and maybe we could
tell some right here. I mean, I worry that you're
on parole and they might go I don't like you
telling the truths and do something to send you back.
Do you worry about that as well? Like you're allowed
to have free speech on parole. But you're talking a
lot about the reality of prison, which I assume the
(24:30):
prison industry doesn't really enjoy, do you.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Know, Rosie, I talk about it right in front of
those legislators too, And I go right on boldly. And
this is why I'm confident, because I just only tell
the truth about it, right, and so everything I say,
they cannot prove that I was not telling the truth
because it's factual.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Right, guards who were just cruel, and so many men
and so much of abuse of misogynists behavior that you
had to put up with the guards exposing themselves to
you and riding you. You know, you're a very attractive woman.
(25:11):
They would say, you know, horribly sexual things to you,
And how did you know how to survive all that?
You know right away? Who has all of the power
in there and who has none? And as an incarcerated person,
your word doesn't mean anything. You don't have any control
(25:32):
over any situation. The only thing you have control over
is how you react. So you learn that very early on.
So you can't It's not a situation where an incident
happens from staff and you out here. You might look
at somebody crazy if they said some sexual innuendo towards you.
(25:54):
You can't even do that. You kind of have to
play it off.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
You just know how to avoid that situation, and you
know how to pay attention to your surroundings and not
put yourself in a situation where you could be off
camera alone with an officer or something like that. And
I'll also say I met lots of staff members that
would never dream of abusing their power, you know, that
(26:20):
were there to have a job and feed their families
and get benefits, help benefits, right, But I also just
met an equal or more amount that horrified me quite frankly.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
So, you were pretty much a good prisoner, but then
you went through a phase where you kind of lost yourself.
You lost your mind, and you were put in segregation
in the hole. Whatld we people out here in the
free world say from we know from watching these shows
that it's you were put in isolation. For how long
(26:55):
were you put there?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
I was in and out of the whole for about
two years, in and out of medium custody, and in
and out of the whole. I did completely lose myself, Rosie.
They weren't I wasn't making parole. I felt like I
was doing everything that I was supposed to be doing
to make parole. My daughters that I had left in
(27:20):
diapers were in elementary school and kindergarten in first grade,
and I just remember thinking to myself that if I
had died instead of committing this crime and taking myself,
removing myself from my kid's life, then they, by now
they would have healed from that. By now they would
(27:42):
have moved on. And as it is now, they're living
with themselves every day. My mom's in prison. And I
just couldn't. I did not know how to forgive myself
and move forward at that point, and I wanted, I
didn't care. I started acting crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
I did it.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
I was talking back to the I was, I mean, just.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Rebellious. You were enraged at yourself, you were enraged at
the situation, and you kind of gave up a little bit, right, Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
How horrible was the whole I mean, we see it
all the time, and it's been you know, declared unconstitutional
to put people in isolation like that, especially there are people,
as you know, who've been in segregation for years of
(28:28):
their life, years and years. That's like cruel and unusual punishment.
How horrible was it was? It at the worst part
of your prison experience was being isolated like that in
the segregated unit.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I think the worst part was probably when I went
to had to go to the crisis management center, which
is like if you have a suicide attempt and we
can get to that, that was the whole was probably
better than that, but it's exactly like what you can imagine.
It's a small, dirty little cell. You might find like
(29:05):
feces on the wall, I mean, they're filthy, graffiti all
over the walls. You see a lot of religious pictures
where people had drawn in or carved religious pictures or
like prayers or God Helped Me kind of things on
the wall. And then there's a sense of desperation in
(29:25):
that entire building.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
It was.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
It's sad. It's hard to be in there with nothing
but yourself and your thoughts, especially when you're in a
situation that you've already realized you can't really figure out
how to live with yourself. So the suicide rates for
inmates in the hole are really high. You hear people
(29:51):
crying out.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
It's sad. Yeah, it's really sad. And you did you
get to a point where you were suicidal? I did, yeah,
And was their mental health help and any capacity.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
So if you attempt a suicide, or if the staff
believes that you're suicidal, because sometimes you might be suicidal
and you might tell the staff and they don't believe
you or don't take you seriously. That happens, or sometimes
people say they're suicidal because they just want to leave
the situation that they're in, or you know, and so
(30:28):
that happens too. But what they do is in Texas
for women, they take you to the crisis management center,
which is on another unit. First you go to the hole,
and I was already in the hole when I went.
But then they take your panties, your bra They leave
you in one gown and they take your mattress, they
(30:50):
take your sheets. You don't have anything. You're just in
the cell, nothing but your gown. And they have an
officer posted outside your door watching you to make sure
or that you don't hurt yourself. And then you're waiting
for transportation to go to the crisis management center. The
crisis management center. When you go in there, they take
your gown so you're completely nude. There's no bed, it's
(31:17):
just a concrete room. There is a toilet, stainless still toilet.
The officers come by every fifteen minutes mail look at
you naked, mail or female to look at you. I mean,
they're checking to make sure you're alive and doing what
they're supposed to be, but you are completely naked and
(31:37):
you don't get a blanket. I didn't get a blanket
till my second day there, so I didn't have any coverage.
It was horrible. I was there for twenty days. Oh
my god, Marcy, how'd you survive that? First of all,
how is that supposed to help someone who is suicidal?
I know it taking everything out prevents you from trying
(31:58):
to make a noose or do something that would hurt you.
But that's even worse than standard prison.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
In the hall. At least you have a bed in there, right,
So you come from this suicidal, desperate place to a
worst place.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
That's exactly right. So one of two things happens. Right
if you either are to a point where you just
don't even care about the conditions, because that's how deep
you've gotten down into your depression and you just you're
just there and that's kind of how I was. Or
you are still suicidal and still having these invasive thoughts
(32:41):
and you just tell them I'm not suicidal. I feel okay,
because when you say those words, they send you back
to the unit, and.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
So you in some ways are able to free yourself
from there by saying that.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
That's right, that's right. But then if you're still having
those thoughts, you're still not getting help, and you're still
at risk for losing your life or taking your own life.
Were there a lot of deaths while you were in there?
A lot of suicides. I know personally eleven people that
took their lives while I was incarcerated. Those are the
(33:17):
ones that I knew personally, nine inmates and two officers.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Wow, that is intense.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
The conditions in that environment are very harsh. They're harsh
for the people that are housed there, and they're harsh
for the people employed there.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Stay tuned, we'll be back now. Talk about harsh. I mean,
(33:57):
you know, we've known each other a while now, and
I I've heard so many of these stories. But the
one that haunts me the most, I believe, is the
temperature inside the prisons in Texas that if you google it,
it says that Texas prisons have air conditioning, but the
reality is they do not. So explain that.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
So it's tricky because some of the areas in the
prison where I was at were air conditioned. The areas
where the officer sit the picket, the administrative offices, the
visitation room, the chapel, the education building. But the buildings
that actually house the inmates are absolutely not air conditioned,
and they're miserably hot, dangerously hot.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
There was a thermometer that you were able to sort
of get, and they put black masking tape over the temperature,
so inmates can't see just how hot it is. But
how hot was it when you got that masking tape off?
It was one hundred and thirty six degrees In the
dorm where I lived the last summer I was incarcerated.
(35:05):
Were people having seizures all.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
The time, rosy heat induced seizures. I didn't even know
that was a thing until I got to prison. In
the summers, there are so many ladies. My girlfriend Britney
suffered from heat induced seizures during the hot summer. She's
been home three and a half years now and hasn't
had one since. They are definitely heat induced. It was
(35:28):
a very dangerous situation. The problem is if you have
any other health ailment, diabetes, any kind of heart diseases,
the heat exasperates that so intensely, and so then when
an lady incarcerated person goes to the hospital or passes
away in the summer, it's because of her heart disease. Well,
(35:51):
it's because she, yes, she had heart disease, and she
was housed in extreme temperatures. That's the real problem.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Now, speaking of Brittany, you guys met in prison and
you fell in love, and she got out before you
and set up an apartment and waited for you to
get out, and then you got out and you've been
together ever since. So how long have you been together
with Brittany.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
We've been together for five years, since twenty seventeen. And Rosie,
we're getting married soon.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I heard it and I better be invited.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Absolutely, we can't wait. We're yeah, we're making it official.
We're just out here building our life together and healing
from our traumas together, and we're just very much happy
and in love. And my family just adores her, right,
(36:49):
and your kids love Your grandkids call her their best friend.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yes, I have two grandsons and they're the cutest things ever.
And they they'll say, Mama, can we come spend the night?
And I'll say, sure, is my best friend there?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Now? Was there were there? You were not gay before
you went in, but you always sort of knew in
the back of your mind that that was a possibility.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Correct, That's absolutely right. I had never been in any
kind of long term relationship with the woman before I
went to prison. But I was always attracted to women
or men. I you know, I don't think a lot
about how someone's built on the outside necessarily. I really
(37:38):
feel like I feel their energy and their spirit, and
that's kind of what I'm attracted to.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
And I had really not been in very many long
term relationships. I've been married twice, and once to my
high school sweetheart, and divorced just for a short time
and then got remarried. So it's not like I have
all this experience. Frankly, I had more relationship in prison
that I had my entire free world life.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Right. And you were so young too, Right. You were
young when you had your first child. You were a
teen mom, and you had a wonderful husband while you
were in prison, who would bring your girls to you
every time he could, and he would sit, you told me,
with his cowboy hat, push down over his eyes and
(38:26):
take a nap and let you just have them all
to yourself, climbing on top of you, and you know
that's not the rule is you can't touch, right, But
what do you do with a baby that's five and six? Right?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And there was actually in Texas you for children that
are set under seventeen, they're allowed to hug their mom,
they're allowed to be with her, sit in her lap.
My kids set in my lap. Even my middle school
son his first visit with me when I got incarcerated,
he set in my lap the whole visit. Just needed
(39:01):
to feel that and thank goodness that we are allowed
to do that. There was a short time we had
one warden one time for like six months she said, no,
kids can't sit in your lap?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right, how marrible?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Marrible?
Speaker 1 (39:14):
It was terrible.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
The girls were used to being able to braid my
hair and you know, this was our ritual. We all
braided each other's hair every visit and they were used
to sitting in my lap and one on each leg.
And they were when that happened. I think they were
about seven and eight. And it was hard. Yeah, it
was really hard.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
There are like moments that you tell me of just
pure cruelty. Like there was a pond that was a
man made pond on the prison grounds and you got
a new warden, and she said, fill it up with
dirt for no reason. There was no incident around having
a pond, a little bit of nature, a little bit
of life, and something beautiful to look at, and it
(39:56):
was just taken away without incident.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
That's exactly right. She also had us to cut all
of the rose bushes down, dig them up, get rid
of them. They were there for no reason. She didn't
want she didn't want us to have any relief, I
think from the harsh environment we were in. You know,
just sometimes you can imagine if you're walking down the
(40:20):
road and you see a rose, you know, you might
stop and admire or look up, you know, and that's nice,
and it's the same thing in there. You might be
going back to your dorm and we would be like,
oh the roses are blooming. Oh it's got new blooms.
And that was just.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Take it away, just take it away. You told me
about the prison jobs that you had, especially the one
pulling weeds. Can you just describe what that was like?
Because when you told it to me, and you visually
leaned down in the manner that you were allowed to
do it, you couldn't bend your knees to pick the weeds, like,
(40:57):
tell people what that was.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
That's called the field squad and the kind of the
nickname is called the hoe squad. And the work that
we did was very similar to plantation work. We had
an officer that was on horseback, he was armed. That
was our boss. And the pulling weeds part. We would
(41:20):
all line up at the end of the garden and
each one of us in a row, and you were
responsible for pulling all the weeds. And you would have
to if you just stand up and bend at the waist.
You can't bend your knees and you're just bent at
the waist there pulling weeds. You're not allowed to stop.
(41:41):
You're not allowed to stand up and rest your back
or stretch your back. You're not allowed to squat down
and bend at all. And you're just doing that the
whole the whole shift, the whole work shift. Sounds like slavery, right,
looks like slavery. It absolutely does it absolutely it is
(42:02):
it is and we're doing it with no pay. I
mean it is, yeah, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Now, one thing that you learned to do in prison,
which I really fell in love with you when I
was watching you on tiktoks with this prison cooking thing
that you would do, Like I can't even explain you
talk to people about food that you would make in
prison with just stuff from the commissary. What was the
(42:30):
best thing that you made that everyone went crazy about
in the prison because you were a renowned prison cook,
weren't you.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I was a really good cook in prison, and I
cooked and fed a lot of people while I was there.
I think probably my best recipe was maybe a pizza.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Pocket, which you made out of what.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So I would take crackers and crush them down and
kind of make a masa for a crust and lay
them out, and then maybe turkey bites, which is like
mebe a slim gem made out of turkey, Slice those up,
make a sauce out of ketchup.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, that's why you do what you have to do.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yes, catch up in garlic powder, cut up some jalapenos,
squeeze cheese, cream cheese, and you fold your pocket together.
And then we would we call it frying, but really
it's air frying. It's with a hair dryer, right, And
we'd put it in a bag and our bag would
be our oven, and we'd put that blow dryer in.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
It's unbelievable what you would like mc iver in there, right,
you could take anything from the commissary and make something
delicious for everyone to look forward to. I mean, what
a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
You know, food in the free world brings people together,
and food in prison that brings people together as well.
And we did have moments. As horrifying as the conditions were,
we still supported each other and had moments of celebration.
We played games on holidays, we got together when it
(44:02):
was a weekend and the TV's were on and there
was a movie coming on the whole dorm would watch.
And we did these things for survival and for companionship
and friendship, and there were a lot of beautiful moments.
I have good memories from that time because there were
good people there.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Right, And you're still friendly with many many women that
you served with, and when they get out, I know
you have them on your TikTok and on your podcast.
Tell everybody about your podcast now.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yes, So we started a podcast. It's called On the
Reckyard Women's Prison Podcast, and we try to talk about
things that we might talk about on the Prison Reckyard.
We talk a lot about some of it more heavy
and in depth about the disparities in our legal system,
(44:53):
and some of them more lighthearted, like prison late Nights,
how that went down in coffee shop and how we
celebrated and it's fun. It's great. It feels good to
talk about those things and we do it. We're live
on YouTube, so that's exciting also because it's live. We
(45:13):
take questions live and it's a lot of people we're
incarcerated will pop in and give questions and excellent.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Well I'm about to go jump on and do it,
so yeah, listen. I love you, Marcia. I think you're phenomenal.
I love Britney too. I think that you're an amazing woman.
And what you've done now since you've been out trying
to help the women who are still incarcerated and make
life a little bit easier for them and more humane.
I mean, it's really it's really tragic what we do
(45:43):
to inmates and in the guise of rehabilitation when there
really is none in prison and it's only getting worse,
and we incarcerate more people than any country in the
world by far, and it has to change in our country.
I'm very proud of all the work that you're doing.
In order to make that a reality. So thank you
(46:05):
for being my friend, and thank you for coming and
spending the night here. And we'll see you at the
wedding for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Rosie, right back at you, well, I hope that you
enjoyed that. I certainly enjoyed talking to her. Follow her
as I said on TikTok, Morcy Marie, you will enjoy it. Okay,
(46:37):
next week we have Samantha Bee. I love Samantha Bee.
She is so smart, she is so astute, she is
so beautiful, she's a great mom, she's a wonderful friend,
and I love her. And she's got a new podcast
and we're going to tell you all about it. So
next week, Samantha Bee, don't miss it. It's Rosie O'Donnell.
This is Onward
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