Orange Is the New Black (23 page)

She looked at me helplessly.

“Okay, how about… fuel-efficient cars?” I suggested.

Mrs. Jones had been locked up since the mid-1980s. I tried to explain to her what a hybrid car was.

“Sounds good!” she said.

Larry was perplexed when I asked him to put in the mail some basic Web articles on hybrids. I tried to explain about the OG’s term paper. He was totally swamped, having just started a new job as an editor at
Men’s Journal.
Part of his job negotiations had included securing permission to work a half-day every Thursday or Friday, so that he could visit his girl in prison. I tried to imagine what exactly that conversation had been like. The lengths he went to for me were amazing. Soon I got a packet of information at mail call and started to slog through
Managing in the Next Society.

A
MONG THE
last prisoners to show up in May, before the Camp was “closed” to deflect Martha Stewart to another facility, were three new political prisoners, pacifists like Sister Platte. They had been arrested and sent to prison for protesting at the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army training center for Latin American military personnel (read: secret police, torturers, and thugs) located in Georgia. These special newbies were pretty much central-casting leftists, earnest palefaces who were willing and eager to sacrifice for their cause—and to discuss it ad nauseam. One of them looked like Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
, all watery blue eyes, bad posture, and Adam’s apple, and she seemed irritated by her situation; the other was like a young novice in a convent, with shorn hair and a perpetually surprised expression; then there was Alice, about five feet tall with the thickest Coke-bottle glasses I had seen in a long time. She was as friendly as the dogs in the Puppy Program, and as garrulous as her partners were withdrawn. Sometimes they would all join us for yoga class.

These three made a beeline for Sister Platte and followed her around like ducklings. I thought it was cool that Sister had a posse of pacifists in prison—yes, the government wasted millions of taxpayer dollars prosecuting and locking up nonviolent protesters, but here on the inside the political prisoners now had a community of like-minded folks. Sister certainly enjoyed their company,
discussing theories and tactical strategy for bringing the military-industrial complex to its knees for hours on end in the dining hall. Alice and her codefendants managed to get jobs teaching in the GED program, the gig I had previously longed for but that didn’t interest me any longer.

I felt guilty about preferring CMS work, but I had been observing the unpleasant developments in the education department and was keeping my distance. Following the mold shutdown of the GED program in the winter, all the tainted books and curriculum materials had been thrown out and were not replaced. The prison had transferred a popular female staff teacher out of the Camp and down the hill—I guess she was too sympathetic to prisoners. In her place the new head of education in the Camp was a mullet-wearing, Trans-Am driving vulgarian—I called him Stumpy—who rumor held had basically flunked out of the postal service, only to be picked up by the BOP. He was an inadequate excuse for a teacher, who resorted to (and clearly enjoyed) threatening and verbally abusing his pupils. He was universally loathed by all Campers and most of all by the inmate tutors who worked for him. According to them, his attitude toward his pupils was simple: “I don’t care if they never learn that one plus one equals two. I get paid for eight hours of work.”

One day I returned from the electric shop to find the Camp in an uproar. Stumpy had been on a serious tear that day in the classroom, more abusive than usual, and Alice the pacifist had finally had it. She wanted to be released from her job as a tutor. Stumpy went ballistic, screaming and ranting and writing her up with a shot for defiance, or resisting a direct order, or something along those lines.

Pennsatucky, who had been in the classroom (and was probably the object of his initial abuse), said that his dumbass face had turned purple. He had gone storming out of the Camp and down the hill, but now rumor had it that he was trying to have Alice locked up in the SHU, and everyone was outraged.

Sure enough, after dinner and mail call, we heard the thud of heavy boots and the rattle of chains. Massive men, their boots making the most stereotypically ominous storm-trooper noise, entered the
Camp carrying restraints. They stomped by the phones, down the stairs, and down the hallway toward the Camp CO’s office. Every prisoner picked up on those sounds no matter where they were in the building, and the front hall quickly and quietly filled with women, gathering to see it go down. Sometimes when someone was getting locked up for doing something shitty, or when the miscreant was widely disliked, there was an air of the tumbrels on the way to the guillotine. This was not one of those times.

The PA crackled as Mr. Scott called the condemned: “Gerard!” Little Alice Gerard came up to the office and stepped inside. The door closed, and she was in there with those three huge men, as the lieutenant read her the shot that had been filed against her.

A buzz was building among the women. “This is BULL-shit!!”

“This ain’t no thing for the SHU… that little lady didn’t do a damn thing that didn’t need to be done.”

Someone started to cry.

“I can’t believe these pansy-ass cracker cops got nothing better to do with their time than lock up Alice!”

The door to the office swung open. Alice stepped out, followed by the three jailers. They loomed over her, making her look extra tiny as she gazed up at the assembled crowd. Blinking through her Coke-bottle glasses, she said brightly and clearly, “I’m going!” One of the lieutenant’s goons cuffed her, not that gently, and the buzz among the women surged to a low roar. Then Sheena started to chant: “Al-ice, Al-ice, Al-ice, Al-ice, Al-ice!” as they led the little pacifist away. I had never seen prison guards look scared before.

O
NE HOT
afternoon found me under a tree, trying to stay out of the sun. Along came Mrs. Jones, with Inky, her constant companion. I had finished her final paper, a pretty straightforward essay I had pieced together about the role that hybrid cars might play in the future economy. I had tried to pull some big ideas from
Managing in the Next Society
into my argument about knowledge-based economies, globalization, and the ways in which demographics change society. But it
was upsetting to think about what role the millions of Americans who were former prisoners might play in the next society—I knew from the Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) newsletters (which many prisoners received) that over 600,000 returned home from prison every year. The only markets most of them were accustomed to participating in were underground economies, and nothing about the prison system that I had seen showed them any other route to take when they hit the streets again. I could count on two hands the number of women in Danbury who had participated in a real vocational program—Pop, who had earned a food service certificate down at the FCI; Linda Vega, who worked as the Camp’s dental hygienist; and the handful of women who worked in Unicor. For the rest, maybe their work scrubbing prison floors or in the plumbing shop might translate toward a real job, but I was skeptical. There was no continuity at all between the prison economy, including prison jobs, and the mainstream economy.

“Hey, Mrs. Jones! Did you get the paper back yet?”

“I was just coming to talk to ya about that. I’m mad as hell!”

I sat up, worried. Had she been busted? Maybe a disgruntled classmate had ratted her out? That wouldn’t shock me. “What’s wrong?”

“We got an A-minus!”

I laughed, which only made her more irritated.

“What was the problem?” she wailed. “It was a great paper! I read it, just like I said I would!” She was very indignant.

“Maybe he didn’t want you getting too cocky, Mrs. J. I think an A-minus is just great.”

“Hmph. I don’t know what they’re thinking. Well, anyway, I wanted to say thank you. You’re a nice girl.” And with that she jerked Inky’s leash and marched off.

A
COUPLE
months later she was marching again; all of the women who had completed the GED or college classes were honored in a ceremony held in the visiting room. Miss Natalie, Pennsatucky,
Camila, and of course Mrs. Jones would be wearing mortarboards, along with a number of other women. Each graduate was allowed to invite a set number of guests from either the outside or the inside, and I would be attending as a guest of the OG.

The valedictorian was Bobbie, who had scored the highest on the GED exam. Over the weeks leading up to the ceremony she agonized over her address, writing and rewriting it. The day dawned scorching hot, and the room was set up with two banks of chairs facing each other, graduates vs. guests. The women filed in solemnly, looking sharp in their caps and gowns—black for the GED students, bright blue for the collegians. There was a podium, where Bobbie would give her speech, but first we would have to hear from Warden Deboo. This would be her swan song; she was getting a brand-new prison in California to supervise, and we were getting a new warden, a guy from Florida.

Bobbie gave a great speech. She had picked a theme—“We did IT!”—and was off and running, congratulating her fellow students for getting IT done, reminding all assembled that achieving a diploma was not easy in this setting but they had done IT, and proclaiming that now that everyone knew they could do IT, there was nothing else they couldn’t do, if they stuck with IT. And they each had a diploma to prove IT to the world. I was impressed by the care Bobbie had put into her words and by how well she delivered them, with just the right edge of defiance. The speech was brief, lean and mean, but firmly asserted that it was the graduates’ day to celebrate, not the institution’s. She spoke forcefully, naturally, and with pride.

Afterward, the prisoners were allowed to have pictures taken. Against a fake cherry-tree backdrop in a corner of the visiting room, I stood with my friends, each of whom I was proud to know. Bobbie, posing with a group of us clustered around her in our khakis, looked stern and short in her robes and special gold-corded valedictorian’s robe, but her hair was blown out and beautifully curled. In one snapshot Pennsatucky and another Eminemlette grin as widely as any high school senior in America on their last day; I look so old next to them, smiling in my khaki uniform. My favorite is the photo of me
and Mrs. Jones: I stand happily behind her, and she is seated, radiant in her royal blue robe and cap, holding her diploma in front of her with pride. On the back of the picture, in her terrible handwriting, it says:

I
hit a groove, and the days and weeks seemed to go faster. I passed milestones—one-quarter of my sentence, one-third of my sentence—and prison seemed more manageable. The outdoors showed me the natural passage of time in a way that was new to a lifelong city girl. I went from trudging through ice, then mud, then grass (mowed by the ladies in grounds). Trees budded, and wildflowers and even peonies bloomed. Baby bunnies appeared at the side of the track and grew into saucy teenage rabbits right before my eyes as I ran around and around that quarter-mile loop thousands of times. Wild turkeys and deer freely roamed the federal reservation that the prison sat on. I developed a deep distaste for Canada geese, who shat dark green goose poop all over my track.

One sunny afternoon I was loitering on the bench in front of the electric shop in the sun, listlessly trying to read a slim volume of
Candide
that some wiseacre had sent me. Mr. DeSimon had not shown up to work, a mercifully common experience. That morning it had been difficult to read because of the thundering gunfire. Very close by the CMS shops, hidden about a quarter mile away in the woods, was the prison’s rifle range. Correctional officers could spend quality time with their firearms down there, and the hammering of multiple rounds was typical background noise during our workdays. There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you.

When we got back from lunch, the gunshots had ceased, and it was once again a placid rural Connecticut day. One of the institution’s white pickup trucks pulled up next to me in front of the carpentry shop.

“What the hell are you doin’, convict?”

It was Mr. Thomas, the boss of the shop. The carpentry and construction shops were housed in one building, to the left of the electric shop and on the other side of a shambling greenhouse. The electric shop did not have a bathroom, and we had to walk over to use the one in their building. The bathroom was for single use only, a spacious private room on whose walls someone had painted pretty blue designs. I loved that bathroom. Sometimes when my coworkers in electric were squabbling, or watching illicit trash television when DeSimon wasn’t around, I would just flee to the bathroom for a few blessed minutes of privacy and quiet. It was the only door in the prison that I could lock.