Meet The Women Serving Time For Murder (Prison Documentary) | Our Life

my second visit to indiana women's prison began in its segregation unit the prisoners here are among the most dangerous and some have been punished for breaking the rules they're locked down for 23 hours a day and have no contact with the rest of the institution ms bart some people here would like to meet you thank you very much for coming out of your cell to talk to us no problem how long have you been in this segregation unit in about a week it'll be four months so what's that like it's hard especially being pregnant you're pregnant yeah well when did you find out you were pregnant where um when i got arrested they gave me a pregnancy test at um the county jail while i was there and i found out there and i was already like a month in my pregnancy because i'm five months right now it's one thing to be pregnant in in any general prison population must be particularly agonizing to be pregnant and to be in a segregated cell yeah like i said you feel alone you feel like i mean it's so depressing to where like every day at six o'clock where when we get mail you sit there on your bed and you look under your door to see if you get mail and when you don't like i sit there and i cry because i feel like everybody just forgot about me and being pregnant is even worse because my hormones are driving me crazy one minute i'm mad one minute i'm even mad at one minute i'm really upset it's just an emotional roller coaster in this little room by myself when was your last communication with the father of your child before we came here is this your first baby no i have a daughter she's five she's got my mother right now what does your five-year-old make of uh of your situation because she is probably of the age where she's just about beginning to comprehend that her mother is not around oh yeah i talk to her she knows that i've been in trouble and she tells me like it is i'll call her at home and she'll tell me why can't you just stop being in trouble and be home with me and you know she tells me she's she's like the mom and i'm the child that's what it seems like right now boyd escaped from a prison work program which was based in the local community [Music] her punishment is six months in this unit pregnant women who do follow the rules and who have committed less serious crimes are put in a separate wing [Music] once they're about to give birth they are taken to a local hospital their babies will then spend the first months of their lives back here brooke how long have you been in prison i've been here since september and when was he was born december 6th what's his name zayden satan how well did they look after you in this facility when you were in the advanced stages of your pregnancy they looked after us really well once i had to go and be induced so they took me out like wednesday evening and i went to the hospital got induced and i had him later on that night and we get to stay there 24 to 48 hours depending on whether you bottle feed or breastfeed how does that work in hospital are you do you have a somebody looking over you you have a guard there while you give birth yes the officer usually sits in the room 24 7 and you're shackled to the bed unless you're in active labor then they actually let you stay unshackled until you give birth after you give birth you have to get shackled back to the bed you're shackled to a bad one just your ankle just your ankle but you're shackled to them yes it's not the most precious no circumstances in which to have something which is so intensely yes personal it's very embarrassing very embarrassing may i see the cell where you spend most of the your time yes thank you see yes how how different would this be in its physical surroundings if you were at home at home he would have his own room i wouldn't have my bed in here he would have a dresser changing table what what would you tell your son when he is old enough about where he was born and the circumstances in which he was born um i really haven't thought about that question yet um i would just tell him that mommy made a big mistake and it was for the better why i came here it made mommy learn a lot and i hope he can learn from my mistakes and see how embarrassing it was to be here and hopefully he won't ever come to a place like this he'll tell him he was born in prison yes it's visiting time and kim is preparing to take baby gabriela outside the unit at times like these offenders are sharply reminded of where they are [Music] so you have to be accompanied by these visits out uh kim do you um when we have the babies yes yes why is that um just for their safety [Music] i mean there's sexual offenders here that have done crimes like that so that's one of the reasons why we escorted it's difficult to to believe that people will want to do anything to a child being taken out to a visiting area you know that it might happen yeah and you have to make sure he doesn't yes sir this after all kim is a is a women's prison so it's rather difficult to imagine that a woman would do something against a child oh yeah for me it's it's hard for me to fathom that a mother or any woman would be able to do that to a child but it happens and there's actually women in this prison that have hurt their children yeah yeah i couldn't imagine one thirty two one seventy-three [Music] this is rockville correctional facility the largest women's prison in the state of indiana with more than 1200 conflicts lieutenant brad gray is taking me to dormitory five one of the largest in the prison inmates here are allowed the freedom of the unit during the day come night time they're locked in 16 to a room are there outbreaks of disorder with 16 women in one small space occasionally yeah we have just like any other environment where you have that many people in a small space once they get on each other's nerves to the point that they feel a physical altercation or a verbal altercation is their only means of resolution then we'll have arguments or fights from time to time much more fundamentally how do you how do you choose or do you choose who is one of the 16 in one of those rooms and how do you do that we just do it through through the offenders behavior those offenders who who display more difficult behavior we have closer to the officer's station would you put say somebody who's been guilty of check fraud with somebody who's committed murder would you would you put them in one dome yes we would because it again is predicated more by the the offender's behavior once they're in the environment than it is by the crimes yes absolutely i've been told about one of the most difficult people in this unit kiana ball is in for armed robbery hello i'm trevor i'm kiana how are you i'm good it's a very crowded space to be in yes it is it's it's kind of odd being in a room with so many females and not really having your own personal space like you have your own personal space but it seems like it's not enough what's the atmosphere like when everybody's here um it can be a little off balance a little frustrating because all the different uh moods and attitudes it's like a lot of different personalities and they tend to clash and you have like half the room has their good days and then half the room has their bad days so it's like it's real crazy it's real crazy out of airshot of her cellmates i asked to talk to ball about her crime [Music] in 2009 kiana ball and her boyfriend carlton wright attempted to steal a van at gunpoint the owner reynaldo santiago resisted and was shot at point-blank range this is ball and right moments after the shooting they hide their weapons in a nearby apartment block when she was arrested police discovered these guns in kiana ball's handbag how old are you now you are i'm 22 i will be 23 november in november so you were 19 years of age yes when you came to prison it's a lot to handle and i have kids at home so that makes it a little more harder to cope with than anything how many kids do you have at home i have two kids at home i have a little girl brianna she's six she'll be seven july 16th and i have a four-year-old son e zion he will be five june 12th how were you caught how you found out we found ourselves in a jam um with a guy that we had met and um things just got out of hand and we were we were trying to rob him and just things like i said things got out of hand things got carried away and he ended up being shot and we you shot him yes how severely was the victim hurt he was severely hurt on the left side of his face the bullet came into close contact with his eye and he struck him in the face yes it came into close contact with the side of his face by his eye now he's permanently blind in his left eye wow yes what's your emotional response knowing what the consequence of your action was i didn't have any feeling at all about it i didn't feel sorry about it i didn't regret it i didn't want to take it back i didn't want to fix anything i didn't feel i didn't feel bad at all but after the fact i felt bad because it's like this is an innocent man i don't know him from anywhere he doesn't know me from anywhere he's never done anything to me because we don't know each other so when i thought about i was like i almost took an innocent man's life and your sentence was my sentence was um i signed a plea pleading guilty to armed robbery with serious bodily injury and i was sentenced to 30 years due 15. you have to deal to the realization that the formative years of your children's development yes will go on yes um without you it bothers me because like all the little things that i'm missing out on are all the little things that i would love to be there for like my son's first day of school just all the all the little things is what are the most important to me so it it hurts it is quite conceivable that they might have been out of school by the time you yeah yeah by the time you get up if there's a possibility that's if i don't keep if i don't keep myself out of trouble and i keep down the path that i've found myself being on getting into trouble constantly in and out of luck if i keep myself on that path then i'll find myself not getting home to my kids until they're grown and that's something i don't want to happen i want them almost until they're added yes so i would like to make it home to them before it's too late i would like to be able to spend some time with them before they're too grown kiana ball is one of those who finds it extremely difficult to cope with life in prison compounded by the fact that bad conduct has got her an additional nine [Music] years evening recreation at rockville prisoners have an hour's free time before lights out the tedium of the unimaginable sameness of long days poses difficulties for even the toughest offenders [Music] and for some there's the constant pain of living with the memory of what you do dawn hopkins was convicted of the battery and manslaughter of her three-month-old son after almost 15 years she's about to be released hello do you mind if you interrupt your game for a brief while how much how much time do you get to play table tennis every day we spend about an hour a day doing that monday through friday it gives us something to do and gets us off the housing unit it's a little bit of exercise but it's not really intense how long have you been at this facility i've been incarcerated this facility for one year but i've been incarcerated for 14 and a half years 14 and a half years yes but it's almost over i have two years left in like 29 months i go home in your darkest moments here have you reflected on the circumstances which actually brought you to prison yes um three months into my incarceration i tried to take my own life because i couldn't deal with the guilt of what i had done to bring my stuff here i was very lucky that an officer found me and saved my life i hung myself three months into my stay you tried to hang yourself yes i did i was facing the rest of my life incarcerated i was 25 years old i had taken another person's life and i couldn't live with that and i did try to take my own life when i was first incarcerated so the trigger for your attempting to to take your own life was the fact that you were looking ahead at this vast expanse of time that you had to do in jail and the guilt the guilt of taking somebody's life the pain that i had caused my family and i just felt like i was never going to be able to do anything positive with my life ever again it must be strange to think of going home after all this time actually it's terrifying the world has changed in so many ways and when i'm done i'll have done 16 years and the amount of ways that the world has changed in that time it's scary and i don't have a lot of family support so it'll be like standing on my own two feet for the first time in my life what was your early life like i was a full-time college student i have a bachelor's degree in accounting and i ran a bar that my step-dad owned when i go home i also have a degree in philosophy that i've earned since i've been incarcerated when i go home i'm hoping to eventually own my own like bakery coffee shop i want to get my pastry chef license and do that kind of stuff when i go home you seem to have worked it out pretty well you have you seem determined not to be somebody who comes back and you have a plan for your life in the future absolutely i think that's what you have to do you have to set goals and you have to turn your dream into a goal set the steps and accomplish them one at a time to be able to reach your goal otherwise you're just treading water for most prisoners here treading water is the sum total of their lives and i'm about to meet a woman who spent more time in prison than any other in the state of indiana at indiana women's prison 69 inmates are here for life they will of course be denied any chance of a return to their families for the majority that's the agony that constantly haunts them one of the prisoners here came to this place years ago as a teenager this is called the programs building my escort is officer frank breyer good morning welcome thank you i am mjm this is our community outreach these ladies up here are working on a quilt i believe disregard the visiting room meeting okay these are some examples of some of the things they're making i've been here since i was 16 years old i've done 38 years so you've been here since yeah i don't get out much yeah you've been here since you were 16. yes yeah but uh that's a pretty early age to come to prison yeah i'm the youngest i was the youngest offender ever here and now i'm the longest one to have ever spent as much time here yeah that's your tag yes i've got the shortest dlc number which year did you come to this prison which year 275 1975 1975. yes i've never driven a car uh i never went on a date um never had a checking account i was never able to be a mother but a lot of these people in here that are younger i'm mom do you have many family collections do people come to visit you my sister does with her kids and her great and her grandkids so i still have a connection out there yeah how do they regard you what do they think of you and of your situation oh they want me to come home they want me to my uh that hurts yeah my my two nieces they went and broke their piggy bank and took their money to their mom my sister and said is this enough to get aunt cindy out gosh yeah and that that's what makes me emotional it's it's very difficult to me to talk about to talk to somebody who's been in this situation for 38 years when i look back on my life and think all the things i have done in that time yeah and to some extent yours has it's in a box you came into prison at age 16 what for murder i committed murder what were the circumstances in which you killed someone i was abused i was extremely abused from a basically a home that i was living at and i tried to leave and i set a fire trying to get out and it got out of hand and they died in the fire so you started the fire trying to escape right and how many people six six people were in the house yes and they died yes did you not know there were people there i knew the people were there what i was thinking was if i set a fire then everybody can get out and i can run that was my intentions the fire got out of hand how quickly were you apprehended a couple of months later i was in the hospital because i was i had burns yeah so you burnt yourself too trying to save them that's how i got burnt i kept trying to go back into the house to get them didn't didn't work no no this is probably a brutal way of of putting it and i acknowledge that but the fact is for you this is it right you will end your life here you will end your days here yeah i am looking forward to growing old in here because you're looking forward to that yes because you know i i'm going to know that my life is not going to be much longer and there's something always positive on the other side and i believe that it's it's very good to meet you thank you thank you thank you for talking to me thank you god bless you thank you all of [Music] you early child lineup [Music] another day is beginning at rockville although the majority of inmates here will be released into the community one day prisoners talk endlessly about the years of family life they have missed [Music] the story of one of the people here though is different she watched her children grow up when by law she should have been doing life for murder linda darby's story is remarkable by any standard in 1972 she escaped from prison she went on the run for more than 30 years and in that time managed to create an entirely new life to evade capture she abandoned the family and the town she knew she set out to start again in a small town in tennessee darby's escape from the indiana state women's prison was bloody i was scratched up and bloody and everything from going over the barbed wire for the past 30 years or so the now 64 year old has been living in pulaski even darby doesn't know how she kept her 30-year secret married with two children eight grandchildren a playset is in the backyard she cleaned houses for a living today though this fugitive has a message for people who believed her to be linda mcelroy and not linda darby this is who i am this is who i am so you escaped and you decided to make a clean breast of it start a new life i just changed my last name changed one digit to my social security and that's how i survived were you always in a position where you were looking over your shoulder wondering whether the next tap on your shoulder would be that of a of an arresting officer a policeman somebody in authority there's always the chance i was just i just kept asking god please let me raise my children i couldn't imagine them not being able to take care of themselves did you ever confide in anybody at all about what had happened to you no there was nobody you felt you could talk to about your life in prison before i knew that if i involved them then that would put them in the middle of it too so no i did not but it it it must be difficult when people talk about their lives you know you drift into talking about what you did earlier how was how was it possible never to mention anything about your past to your closest friends it was hard it was very hard but i just kept it within on the day that policemen came to your house on that fateful day what were you what were you planning to do on that day i had just got through working i was working for a cleaning house that day and we had came in fixed dinner and i was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette my daughter went to the phone went to the door and joe robinson who was the policeman that came to the house and i knew him for 30 years he said i'm going to show you this picture and linda tell me if you know who this person is and i said it's me he said no he said i told him they were wrong he said i've known you 30 years i said joe what's the sense of me lying i could sit here and lie all day to you and fingerprints don't lie i said you know it soon as you took my fingerprints what did you say to your children i told them and they said mom we're behind you 100 because we know you didn't do it i told them that back in 1970 i was accused and convicted then of killing my first or my second husband what did they say they said we don't believe it we know you didn't do it and my husband said the same thing were you surprised that you were an escaped prisoner for so long did it surprise you and now and now all i can do is try my best to work my way out legally walking out the front door i've never heard a story of somebody who's been on the run for 35 years i've never heard anything quite like it [Music] linda darby will probably die in this prison but unlike the other women here she has memories of 35 years of freedom [Music] i'm back at indiana women's prison i'm here to see one inmate whose story i had found particularly disturbing cindy white has the unenviable record of being the longest serving female prisoner in the state of indiana release for her is unlikely [Music] at the start of her sentence she was a teenager she's appealed against that sentence again and again [Music] cindy white was in court again today and her attorney asked the judge for just one thing that the court considered whether she was competent to stand trial at the time that she went to trial in 1976 but the johnson county prosecutor says cindy white deserves to be in just one place in prison for the murder of a number of people six people charles and carol roberson with four of their children who all burned in a fire that white set more than 20 years ago in this greenwood neighborhood i set the fire it wasn't to kill anybody it was to ask my way of asking for help but white now says that she was not fit to stand trial back in 1976 she claims that she had been traumatized by years of sexual abuse by her father and even by the people she eventually murdered today cindy white hopes that a judge will overturn her murder convictions [Music] none of her appeals has been successful her last was about 10 years ago remember my extended family i said that i have created it here yeah well this lady right here that's needle pointing this is my daughter evie all right hello evie hello how are you doing i'm fine how are you she taught you a lot yes she's probably the strongest woman i've ever met really why do you say that because i can't imagine being faced with what she's been faced with and staying as strong as she is having been here for such a such a long time yes and i just i love her here it's kind of like you see what you get it's we've all been kind of in the same boat hurt disappointed despair so when you can reach out to someone that's walked in your shoes then it makes it easier so which which is your i'm in the bottom one the messy one welcome to my home wow home which is shared with yes this is my bunkie would you introduce yourself cheyenne pennington hello and uh we'll get along really well i'm mama to her she says another member of your extended yes uh i get them without even realizing i have them and which is your bun this is my bunk this is where i am secluded in i come in and when i don't want to be bothered with somebody or just alone i will pull out and get down there and hide for just a little bit you must have seen her people come and go here over the years um yeah this unit there's a lot of ins and outs what we call they finish their time and they go home and i really don't deal with them too much because well it hurts because you see people who come here you get to know them and then they leave and you stay yeah and it hurts i'm not going to say it doesn't uh because i really wanted to have that hope of going home but as it is now i know what's for real and i had to be in reality i can't hope on false hopes but it's so it's a recurring hurt because you see people come and go oh yes constantly i'm excited to see them go home because i know that they're going to be doing something that i can't do and that is be with their family but i have made a family in here to take away the pain why do they keep you why in your mind if they decided to keep you in these conditions i don't know that's a question i ask all the time is what is it that i am not doing you know if they tell me what it is that i can do to say okay yes you can go i'll be more than happy to i'll be more than happy to do it you've been up for parole i've been up several times and each time i'm refused and i finally got tired i i because the disappointment when i go up before him i'm like yes this year i'm going home i just know it there's no other way but i'm tired of doing that and i'm tired of getting my feelings hurt and i figured this way if they haven't let me go in 37 years that i have tried to go they're never going to let me go so i've got to make do with what i have and make the best of it how have you survived this for so many years i tried to find somebody worse off than me i try to find someone that needs a kind word that needs a hug that needs to be shown that they care i need to care for something or someone i want to love i want to be loved it's a kind of escape from which there is in fact no escape yeah it's just that you find that thing that makes you want to say okay i'm going to be okay today and hold on to it however you mentally come to terms with it it's a very difficult adjustment to make i want something to show for my life other than a doc number a prison prison record number right and right now i don't have it there's nothing out there that says sarah cindy white exists other than the number [Music] i'm on my way again to the rockville correctional facility for the last time of the litany of crimes you hear about in this prison perhaps the most shocking is that of a mother who kills her child [Music] i'd come to see an inmate i'd met before dawn hopkins is now looking forward to her release [Music] she had been forced to give up her first two children because she'd abused them but in 2001 she was convicted of killing her third child three-month-old noah how often do you reflect on the chain of circumstances which actually got you here sometimes it just sneaks up on you like that and you don't even realize it and you're happy and then you realize that you're sad you know and it's something that maybe it's a song that played or something that somebody said or last weekend was mother's day and somebody wished me a happy mother's day and it was not good it just brings all of that back your son was only three months old the realization that you [Music] took the life of someone to whom you gave birth must be probably the most horrendous thing of all absolutely you know i uh i can still remember when i found out i was pregnant you know i was six weeks pregnant and they did this ultrasound and there was this little life and you know they told me he was like an inch and a half long and at that moment you could see his heartbeat and i promised at that moment to keep him safe forever and i didn't and that makes me feel like a monster and it makes me feel like i don't even deserve to be alive some days as an educated person you must go through a lot of self-analysis you must look back and try to analyze your actions i don't i honestly don't even have an answer for you i i don't know i struggled with postpartum depression after the birth of my son um i was seeing a psychologist regularly i was actually in his office the day that i took the life of my son it was a normal everyday day i had been to the craft store to buy a christmas stocking for him it was right before halloween and i sat you know working on the little felt pieces for this stocking for him for his first christmas and you know it was just him and i that day and i i don't know he was fussy because he was running it had a cold and i don't know i i lost my temper and i should have been better than that was that a moment of blind rage in a moment life changed you know i was sitting on the couch feeding him giving him a bottle and talking to my mom on the phone watching the simpsons and 15 minutes later i was on the phone to the paramedics getting instructions on doing cpr because he wasn't breathing wow gosh that's a terrible terrible moment life happens in a moment you know and you never you take life for granted you never realize what moment it's going to be that your life is going to change forever what did you do when you discovered your son wasn't breathing i called the paramedic i called 9-1-1 talked to the paramedics began performing cpr until police officer came in and took over cpr then the paramedics got there we all went in an ambulance to the hospital um they after i don't know about they called in saying that they had a child coming in with unresponsive so they had a chaplain there waiting to talk to me when i got there and uh they were able to get his heart beating again but due to the brain damage his he was not breathing on his own brain damage yes um he died from shaken baby syndrome how quickly did they blame you for your son's death but they didn't blame me i was honest with them i told them exactly what happened as much as i could remember because at that point all i wanted to do was save his life as possible and it didn't matter what happened to me going through that long process of being in police custody that must have been pretty traumatic knowing what had happened there were death threats made against me and what what why people thought you were you were a child killer a mother who kills her child is probably held up as one of the most yes horrific in our society i mean the only other the most contemptuous would be a sex offender you know somebody that's a pedophile other than that you're baby killers so you were classed as a baby killer i was that i am that i'm a lot more than that as well but that's who i am i eventually took my leave of indiana and the many women behind bars in this state the thoughts that stay with me are of horrendous crimes and the staggeringly long sentences the thoughts too of wasted lives and the families left [Music] behind [Music] you

Channel: Our Life

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Keywords: our life, documentary, world documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, prison, jail, women in prison, women in jail, women's prison, women who kill, female criminals, women criminals, prison documentary, women behind bars, trevor mcdonald

Id: uCgpIURqzB4

Length: 44min 11sec (2651 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021