Orange Is the New Black (18 page)

I didn’t.

Carlotta stepped back, to better deliver the truth that, when she contemplated holy matrimony, made her heart beat faster. She pushed her palm toward me, index finger pointing skyward for emphasis. “So bitches can
hate
!”

Er… bitches?

“That’s right. I’m going back to my neighborhood, and I’m going to get married, and that will show all those bitches who talk shit about me. I’ll be married, with my man, and you know what they’ll have? No man. A bunch of babies by a bunch of guys. I cannot
wait
to get married, so those bitches can just hate on me!”

I studied Carlotta, her pretty face bright and animated as she envisioned her future—one that included her man, some bitches, and a ring around her finger. I was fairly certain that she would get what she wanted. Among all the women at the Camp, she was one who could always figure out an angle. She had a primo prison job training the service dogs, she had all the contraband onions she needed, she ran a side business doing pedicures, and rumor was that she even had a cell phone secreted somewhere in the prison, so she could call her man on the outside without waiting in line and paying the prison’s sky-high rates. She was a smart cookie, with an unsentimental eye on the world. Rick, I concluded, was a lucky guy.

A
S FOR
me, I felt caught between the world I lived in now and the world to which I longed to return. I saw that those who couldn’t come to terms with their imprisonment had a very difficult time
with staff and with other prisoners. They were in constant conflict because they couldn’t reconcile themselves with their fellow prisoners. I saw young women who had been running wild in poverty most of their lives rail against authority, and middle-aged, middle-class women who were aghast to find themselves living among people they thought were beneath them. I thought they were all unnecessarily unhappy. I hated the control the prison exercised over my life, but the only way to fight it was in my own head. And I knew I wasn’t better than any other woman locked up in there, even the ones I didn’t like.

On the other hand, some people were way too comfortable in prison. They seemed to have forgotten the world that exists on the outside. You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It’s not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.

So I became obsessed with the almost daily departures and found myself asking
Who’s going home this week?
I kept a running tally in my mind, and if I liked the person, I would head up to the front door of the visiting room after breakfast to wave them off, a ritual observed by a gaggle of prisoners for every departure. It was bittersweet to watch them leave, because I would have given anything to be going with them. People planned their going-home outfit, which someone from the outside would ship to Receiving and Discharge (R&D) for them; their friends would prepare a special meal; and they would start to give away all their stuff—commissary clothing and “good” uniforms
and blankets and other things of value that they had accumulated while doing their time. I fantasized about giving all my stuff away.

Watching people arrive was less pleasant but also interesting. I certainly felt bad for them, but my regard was tinged with a funny little sense of superiority, because at least I knew more about the workings of the Camp than they did and thus had a leg up. This impulse was often proved wrong when someone turned out to be returning to Danbury after violating the terms of their probation—they would often march right into the counselors’ office and ask for their old bunkie and job assignment back. I knew that as many as two-thirds of all released prisoners are locked up again, a fact that mystified me at first—there was no way they would get me back in prison. Ever. And yet… no one ever seemed surprised to see a familiar face return to Danbury.

“Self-surrenders” who came to the Camp were easy to spot. They were usually white and middle-class and looked totally overwhelmed and scared to death. I would ask myself,
Did I look that wigged out?
and then I’d go get them some of the extra shower shoes and toothpaste I now kept stashed in my locker for such occasions.

But most new arrivals had been in custody for a while, sometimes since their initial arrest if they had not been granted bail or couldn’t make the bail payment, and they were coming from county jails or from federal jails, called MCCs or MDCs—metropolitan correctional centers or metropolitan detention centers. The county jails were described to me as universally nasty, full of drunks, prostitutes, and junkies—not up to the standards of us
federales.
No shock then that the women arriving at Danbury from county usually looked fried. They seemed happy to get to Danbury because the conditions were better—that depressed me.

Also intriguing were the women like Morena who had “earned” their way up the hill from the high-security FCI to the minimum-security Camp—in theory, the really hardened and potentially dangerous criminals. They were always very composed in terms of physical appearance—hair done and uniforms just so, with their own name and
reg number embossed on the shirt pocket. (Campers didn’t get that.) They never looked scared. But they were often freaked out because they were unaccustomed to as much “freedom” as we were afforded, and they reported that there was far less to do in the Camp in the way of programs and recreation. In fact many of them were miserable in the Camp and wanted to go back to max lockup. One woman, Coco, marched right into the counselors’ office and explained that she couldn’t handle the freedom, and would they please send her back down the hill, because she didn’t want to lose her good time due to an escape attempt. I heard that the truth was she couldn’t stand to be apart from her girlfriend, who was still down in the FCI. Coco was sent back the next day.

S
PRING WAS
coming slowly to the Connecticut hills, and we were starting to shake off the cold. Being cooped up with so many “wackos” was affecting my worldview, and I feared that I would return to the outside world a bit cracked too. But I was learning something every day, resolving some new subtlety or mystery through observation or instruction.

The track by the field house gym was now mush, but I slogged determinedly around it, encouraged by the fact that I kept getting thinner and thinner and every visitor who came to see me said with astonishment, “You look fantastic!” I was making those mucky circles in silence, because the commissary was still out of the damn crappy headset radios that cost $42. Every week I put the radio on my shopping list before I turned it in, and every week, no radio. The commissary CO, who was a real prick in public and friendly in private, just barked, “No radios!” when I asked when they would get some. All the other new arrivals were in the same boat, and we commiserated bitterly. Movie night was all about reading lips for me, and my time on the track or in the gym left me with my thoughts echoing noisily in my skull. I had to have that radio!

Lionnel, the inmate consigliere of the warehouse, was one of my
closest neighbors in our cramped quarters. Her bunkie had been the target of Lili Cabrales’s protest pee on my first morning in B Dorm, and it was she who had sopped up the puddle. Lionnel had a black name plaque like Natalie’s, indicating that she had been down the hill in the FCI and probably had a long sentence. She was formidable but still friendly, a no-nonsense player when it came to doing time, and a cheerful Christian who was quick with a wry observation. Lionnel was vocal about what you might call “community issues”—not stealing, “acting right” during count, treating other prisoners with respect. She wasn’t about to go out of her way to befriend a random white girl like me, but she would still say good morning and occasionally smile at my attempts at humor when we found ourselves side by side at the bathroom sinks.

One quiet afternoon as I was fixing lights in B Dorm, Lionnel materialized outside her cube. This was unusual, as she would normally be at work in the warehouse. I seized the opportunity to find out more about the mysterious radios.

“Lionnel, I hate to bother you, but I’ve got a question.” I quickly explained my radio problem. “I’m going crazy with no music. I just can’t get the CO to tell me when they’re coming in. What do you think?”

Lionnel gave me a skeptical, sidelong look. “You
know
you’re not supposed to ask warehouse folks about that, we’re not allowed to talk about any goods in the warehouse?”

I was taken aback. “No, Lionnel, I didn’t know that. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sorry.”

“No problem.”

May was a week away. The sun was really starting to make itself known now, drying up the mud. There were leaves on the trees, migratory birds, and tons of baby bunnies all over the track. I realized that it wasn’t so bad to be listening to my own thoughts when there was so much to look at. I had made it three months, almost a quarter of my sentence. If I had to watch silent movies for the next ten, so be it. I almost didn’t bother putting the radio on my commissary list that
week; someone who had already shopped was complaining that they were still out. So when a new radio headset came flying past the register to land in my grocery pile, I just stared at it.

“Is there something wrong with you, Kerman?” shouted the CO. “It’s true what they say about blondes, huh?”

I looked past him, into the glassed-in commissary, and spotted Lionnel. She didn’t meet my eye. I just smiled to myself as I signed my receipt and handed it back to him. It was funny how things worked around here, how other prisoners could make things happen. I wasn’t really sure what I had done right, but did it matter?

That week the entire population of the Camp was summoned into the main hallway for an impromptu meeting with the staff—a bunch of white men looking too bored to smirk. We were told:

1. Your sanitation is wanting! We will hold more inspections!
   

2. No smoking under the unit manager’s window! You have been warned!
   

3. No sex in the Camp! No exceptions! Zero tolerance! This means you!!
   

We were collectively unimpressed. All of us prisoners knew that Finn, the senior counselor, was way too lazy to bother inspecting the Dorms beyond the bare minimum and didn’t care enough to enforce most rules. The only thing Finn did appear to care about was hierarchy (as demonstrated to us by the nameplate fiasco). And the administrative unit manager didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything having to do with the Camp.

True to the staff’s charges against us, though, there had been quite an uptick in “sexin’” among the ladies since Butorsky’s departure, which led to some comical matchups. Big Mama was a cheerful leviathan who lived in A Dorm—quick with a play on words, generally benevolent, and prodigious in girth. She was slim on modesty, however, as was proven by her shameless sexin’ with a series of much younger, much skinnier girls in her open cubicle. I liked Big Mama
and was fascinated by her romantic success. How did she do it? What were her tricks? Were they the same as those employed by fat middle-aged men to get young nubile girls to sleep with them? The girls didn’t then turn around and disrespect her, so was it curiosity on their part? I was curious, but I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask.

There was a constant dance
between the prisoners and the staff around the rules. With a new rotation of officers on detail in the Camp, the dance would start anew. I was washed in relief to be rid of Gay Pornstar; it was amazing how much more bearable it was around the Camp with him gone.

In Pornstar’s place we now had Mr. Maple, who seemed to be his predecessor’s exact opposite. Mr. Maple was young, recently out of the military after service in Afghanistan, and exaggeratedly courteous and friendly. He was instantly popular with the women of the Camp. I still considered all COs the enemy on principle, but I was beginning to understand a bit better why a prisoner might look at them with anything other than a baleful eye. Regardless of “gay for the stay,” the vast majority of female prisoners are heterosexual, and they miss male companionship, male perspective, and male attention. A fortunate minority have a husband or a boyfriend who visits regularly, but most are not so lucky. The only men they come in contact with are prison guards, and if the CO is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.

It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world—cops, elected officials, soldiers—we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying. And pretty unsurprising when the extreme inequality of the daily relationship between prisoners and their jailers leads very naturally into abuses of many flavors, from small humiliations to hideous crimes. Every year guards at Danbury and other women’s prisons around the country are caught sexually abusing prisoners. Several years after I came home, one of Danbury’s lieutenants, a seventeen-year corrections veteran, was one of them. He was prosecuted and spent one month in jail.