Six Hours Between Two Worlds

RJ Donovan Prison sits just outside Chula Vista, California, close enough to the Tijuana border that you can almost feel the hum of another country on the horizon. I may even have heard the faint sound of a mariachi band playing. The drive in is deceptively simple, but the road turns rough and rattling when you get onto the grounds, the kind that makes your coffee tremble in its cup. It is a strange prelude to what lies ahead, a reminder that the path to connection is not always smooth.

There is a certain kind of anxiety that curls in your stomach when you are heading to a new facility for the first time. Will they decide my outfit is wrong? Will they make me take off my shoes? Did the system even keep my confirmed appointment? Are the visiting officers going to be kind or curt? And who will I find myself standing next to in that waiting line, and what are their stories?

The parking lot is jammed when I arrive, yet the entrance line is empty. I realize most of those cars belong to staff, and visitors like me are pushed into a far-off lot. It is a small sting, nothing I can change. From that lot, I watch correctional officers adjust their belts, fasten their vests, and step into their shifts. I check my own essentials: Photo money in ones and quarters, Real ID, everything locked away for the six hours I will be gone, including my phone, my constant lifeline.

The doors do not open until noon on Fridays, something I had not realized. So I stand beneath the overhang, looking up at bird nests tucked in the corners, a pigeon perched in a nest like a statue on top of the vending machine. People start to arrive: a young mother carrying a sleeping baby and a bag of supplies big enough to fuel an expedition; an older couple who might be parents, a young woman who could be a sister or girlfriend. There was a beautiful young woman in a knee-length white dress with a delicate lace overlay, her hair neatly tied back. A small white sweater rested on her shoulders, and bright white tennis shoes stood out against her bare legs. She looked no older than twenty, and it was her wedding day. Every face carries the weight of a story they have probably told too many times or never dared speak aloud, stories that have weathered stigma, judgment, and the long exhausting logistics of love across prison walls.

Check-in is a choreography of small intrusions. My name and my loved one’s CDCR number. An inventory of my jewelry, my glasses, my car key, my cash. Shoes off. Hair lifted. Ankles shown. Pass the metal detector, step through the gates that buzz open when the man in the tower decides you are cleared to move. There is a tunnel-like passage, though it is really just a series of caged gates, leading to a short shuttle ride. Controlled movement. Eyes on you at all times. Everywhere you turn, unblinking eyes in the sky follow, silent sentinels that record every breath, every glance, every step taken.

The visiting room is its own world. Cool air, vending machines stocked with an odd mix of ice cream bars, burgers, burritos, salads, cold brew. People claim their numbered tables. Every pop of a door makes heads swivel, wondering if it is their person. I watch parents play cards with their sons, young fathers cradling babies like something holy, and girlfriends who arrive in either high heels or sweatshirts. Love does not wear a uniform, but here it moves under the same ceiling, measured in minutes and monitored by watchful eyes.

Some visits take place across glass. A sister in a flowy bright orange dress poses in front of a mural for a photograph before returning to the phone to speak to her brother on the other side of the glossy barrier. Nearby, a mother visiting with a toddler lifts her child up to stand on the ledge so he might see his loved one better through the glass. The boy presses his small hands against it, smiling as if distance could dissolve under the weight of wanting.

We called the vending area “Café La Vend,” a bit of humor in a place that needs it. There is even an outside section with metal benches that somehow manage to be uncomfortable in every possible way. Shade comes and goes. There is no green space, no soft edges, just concrete and sky, illuminating a small plastic sized basketball hoop with no ball. A small boy, innocent and unaware of where he truly is, turns the hoop into his own game while his parents watch with quiet contentment. Around them, people lean close, talk, laugh, and do their best to forget where they are.

Goodbyes are their own ritual too. Couples hold on a little too long, mothers wipe at their eyes, fathers embrace sons, and people step back through the gates with the same small ache every time. The shuttle ride back feels different, like reentry into a less controlled but no less complicated world. You walk to your car with your keys, and your freedom, while your loved one goes back to the echo of doors slamming, the crackle of the intercom, the long hours under a fluorescent sky. Thoughts linger with the mix of honeysuckle and vinegar, their essence still clings to your collar and you knowing understand, deep in your bones that you have left a part of you behind with them. It's a sacrifice that millions of men women and children make, every weekend all over the united states. It is a diabolical dance between souls locked away and the loved ones who cross their own River Styx to waltz with the dead.

You drive away knowing that in that room, for a few hours, you both got to be something other than the sum of the bars, the walls, and the razor wire. And that is enough to make the trip worth taking again and again. The sacrifices are endless, enduring, and not for the weakhearted. Incarceration does not just punish the person behind the walls, it sentences the whole family.