First published in The Record, Jan. 4, 2023

After a life of violence, can she ever be free?

 Shirin Stallings carried these things into the woods: A razor blade. A switchblade knife. A fat bag of marijuana. A cellphone. A bottle of pills to treat high blood pressure.

And the knowledge that she will die as she lived.

In a cage.

Unfree. 

She considered the knife. The blade. She reached instead for the pills.  

Jailed.

Stallings is 45 years old. She first attempted suicide at age 13. She was removed from her parents’ home in Gloucester County, in southern New Jersey, and spent 10 weeks locked inside a nearby psychiatric hospital.

She spent the rest of her childhood confined to institutions. Crisis centers. Residential treatment centers. Group homes. Juvenile detention. And more psychiatric hospitals.

“I never got out,” she said. “I never went home.”

At 19, Stallings was arrested and charged with a series of armed robberies. She spent a year in the Gloucester County jail. Eleven and a half years at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey’s infamous prison for women. Two more stints at Edna Mahan followed, one for nearly seven years, and another for two years.

Then the prisons released her. She was free, but never for long. Even when she wasn’t in jail, Stallings lived mostly in de facto jails, in psychiatric hospitals and crisis centers, more places where the doors locked from the outside.

“I didn’t have any outside time,” Stallings said. “I went from one institution to the next to the next.”

This is not a story about a person wrongfully accused. Stallings did the crimes. She surveilled the gas stations. She learned which store owners had safes stuffed with cash. She recruited young, pretty women to work inside. She ran in with a handgun. With a single-barrel sawed-off. With her fists, when she had to.

“I was the ringleader,” she said. “I recruited whatever people was needed for the job.”

Stallings is out of prison, for now. She is not free. She faces the fiercest prison of all: her mind.

This is a cliche. It is also true.

She thinks something up there in her head is broken. It breaks her mind down the middle, a perfect 50/50 split. On one side stands the smart, charming, skillful woman who remembers the name of every person she meets. This woman feels a kinship with Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor who wrote books describing life in concentration camps.  

On the other side lives a woman in pain. She slithers. She connives, and she robs. If you have money, this Shirin may point a Glock at your head. If no Glock is available, this Shirin may beat you with tiny tattooed fists.  

Recently, Stallings received a diagnosis. Multiple sclerosis. Already, movement is growing difficult. She may lose motor function. Her relationships with family and friends are scarred by violence. There is no one left to take her in.

“I’ll be crippled. I won’t have anybody to take care of me,” she said. “So I’ll go right back to the same institutions where I lived for all those years.”

Life is jail. Jail is life. Inside. Outside. No freedom found.

Barehanded.

Who likes to party? Shirin Stallings likes to party. Shake off that depressing stuff, my dudes, let’s chill. It was 40 degrees and sunny as Stallings walked into the Quick Fair Food Market in Elizabeth, New Jersey, one recent afternoon. The man behind the counter spoke little. She paid him cash for a pair of BluntVille cigars. She walked the block back to her friend’s apartment, where she opened each cigar with a fingernail.

Out came the contents. In went a mixture of tobacco and weed. She formed a cigar so fat the paper could barely seal around it.

She smoked one down. Then she lit the second.

“It helps with the pain” from multiple sclerosis, Stallings said, plus a broken rib from a recent fistfight. “And it takes my mind off negative stuff.”

When she’s relaxed, the stories from her not-so-distant days of crime float more gently to the surface. The event stuck most firmly in her mind is her most recent robbery attempt, in February 2011. Released from prison 60 days before, now she was confined again, in a psychiatric hospital in Elizabeth. She told the hospital staff her plan: When they released her, she would buy a Glock handgun for $200. She would use the gun to steal the safe from a nearby convenience store.

“I told them the crime I was going to commit,” Stallings said. “I was thinking very basic things. Desperation. I was thinking I need money for a place to sleep.”

The hospital released her. She executed the plan, with one important deviation: The Glock was unavailable. She attacked a store anyway, armed only with her hands.

Stallings stood 5-foot-6. She weighed 122 pounds. She fought three store workers, alone, barehanded. She was pummeled. She didn’t get the cash.

But she could have gotten away.

The store’s owner tied Stallings’ wrists with a shoelace. It took a couple minutes for her undo the knot.

Then Stallings just sat there and waited for the police to arrive.

“He didn’t subdue me,” Stallings said. “I was in the mindset that if I get caught, I'm guaranteed a bed, clothes and food."

From leaving the hospital to sitting in the police station, getting booked for assault and attempted robbery, Stallings was free for eight hours.

Haunted.

Stallings hasn’t seen the inside of a prison since April 17, 2020. Since then she’s been confined to several hospital emergency rooms and treatment centers. But it’s the longest she’s avoided jail in more than a quarter-century.

This does not imply that Stallings embraces the life of a law-abiding taxpayer.

“How do you know I’m not doing something stupid and illegal right now?” she said in December.

Still, there is progress. She sleeps on the couch of a friend she met in prison. She can walk outside anytime she chooses for some fresh air and a stroll in Jefferson Park, north of downtown Elizabeth. With age and therapy, she can stand outside her mind and observe its wiring. She speaks indirectly of hard times as a child, of some difficult experiences she will not describe, of trauma so deep and inescapable it split her brain in two. She knows she needs help to address those memories, and the trauma of so much time locked inside institutions where everyone — jailers and inmates — views violence as a legitimate recourse.

“I sabotage everything, bro,” Stallings said. “If I’m going to ever have a good quality of life and appreciate the things I have in my life, I need reprogramming. I need help.”

She has charm. She has her crafty ways. She has multiple sclerosis. She has friends, but no one close enough to be a caretaker as she grows sicker. She gets $188 a month in food stamps, enough to buy food for a week.

Will she struggle for peace? Will she release herself to the old violence, directed at herself and others? Stallings makes no promises.

“There is a very sweet, kind, empathetic woman inside of me. And then there’s a callous, brutal sociopathic woman inside me,” she said. “This is all I know. This is natural to me.”