The Single Hardest Day Of the Year

Inmates Mark the Yuletide With Reflection and Regret

It's easy to forget Christmas when you're locked up, Earl Walker said. But that wasn't exactly true.

It was midmorning, and Walker sat alone on the fifth floor of the Arlington County Adult Detention Center, reading the newspaper and drinking hot cocoa mixed with decaf coffee. He was nine months into an 11-month sentence, trying to kick a drug problem.

"You're in a building all day, so you forget about the seasons," he explained. "You don't even notice the weather."

But reminders of the holidays crept in all around him. A construction-paper cutout of a Christmas tree hung in the lounge. In Walker's cell, holiday cards were on display, lined up on his desk as if arranged on a mantelpiece.

A year earlier, he had spent Christmas morning with his 6-year-old son. Warren woke him at sunrise with an announcement: He had discovered a trail of presents from his bed to the Christmas tree. "He said, 'Daddy, Santa Claus has been in my room!' " recalled Walker, 36.

After dinner, Walker planned to call Warren at his grandmother's house, and next year, he was sure he would be back with Warren again. A job as a janitor in a D.C. school was waiting for him when he got clean, he said.

But this wasn't his first time in jail for drugs.

"New start at 37?" Walker had written on a handmade addiction recovery poster over his bed.

For inmates, their families and jail staff alike, no day of the year is more difficult than Christmas. The absence of a loved one is more acute, the guilt is sharper and tensions are highest. Jail staffs try to make the best of a bad situation by arranging extended visiting hours, better meals and additional religious and psychological services. But there is a delicate balance to find in celebrating a holiday that hurts while encouraging behavioral changes and reinforcing family commitments.

A total of 587 men and women spent Christmas in the Arlington jail, one of more than a dozen jails across the region where inmates and their families came together for a less-than-perfect holiday. Unlike prisoners at state and federal facilities serving long sentences for more serious crimes, jail inmates are typically confined for less than a year, on charges such as drunk driving and parole violation.

For many, it wasn't their first Christmas in confinement.

At the Arlington facility on North Courthouse Road, a steady stream of visitors came through the metal detectors beginning at 9 a.m., waiting for their 15 or 30 minutes of conversation through a thick glass barrier. Inmate David Jones, 24, said that if he put his face up close to the vents that allow the confined and their visitors to communicate, he could smell his girlfriend's perfume or his sister's candy. He showed them the white rosary necklace a fellow inmate fashioned using thread from a sock. He was making a rosary himself to give to his girlfriend, Tina Sousa, this one made from jumpsuit thread and wax and fingernail clippings shaped into a heart.