Insiders

I just laughed and backed off. Havin’ a conversation with Theresa was like talkin’ to a refrigerator door loaded with sayings. I respected that girl. The goin’ never got so tough that Theresa didn’t get up and go. ‘People say I’m an optimist,’ she’d say, lookin’ all serious and stuff. ‘But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And do you wanna know why? I’m gonna tell you why. Because – you know what they say about pessimism and optimism, don’t you?’

Theresa never really wanted you to answer her questions, ‘cause she had all the answers herself.

‘They say the pessimist says the glass is half empty, but the optimist says it’s half full. Well, you know what I say to that? I don’t say that glass is half anything, I say you’re using the wrong damn glass. It’s obviously too big. That’s what I say.’ Then old Theresa always waited a little and let it all sink in before she’d wind up for her big finale. ‘And you know what that makes me?’ she’d ask. ‘That makes me a pragmatist! That is someone who has a practical, matter-of-fact way of solving problems. That’s a pragmatist and that’s what I am – a practical, matter-of-fact problem solver. If you got a problem with how much is in your glass, well then maybe you’re just using the wrong glass. You understand what I’m saying here? It just doesn’t matter if you think it’s half empty or half full, what matters is what you do about it. Get off your ass and get yourself a different glass is what I say. Always remember this: Answer is also a verb. You understand what I’m saying here? The door to success is labeled PUSH! You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time if you’re not wearin’ work boots.’

I don’t know why, but I could listen to Theresa talk for hours. I loved those speeches.

‘Get up off your butt, Cher, and grab that plastic strainer for me,’ Theresa told Cher, and Cher did it. ‘Hold it over the bowl.’

Cher was laughing as Theresa strained her pasta and let the water go down the john. ‘You think there’s any symbolism here with your cookin’ right next to the toilet?’ Cher teased.

Theresa’s specialty is her pasta. That’s somethin’ the canteen don’t carry, but Theresa’s sister sends her a lot of it. That’s another thing about who you pick for crew. You want the girls who get lots of packages from the Outside. Theresa gets pasta and salamis and Italian shit like that. And you can’t get better packages than Cher gets. Theft runs in her family, so they’re always sendin’ her stuff. Lots of it is contraband and gets taken out and sent back, but the boxes always have hand creams and shampoos and stuff like that. And now and then she’ll get a big ol’ canned ham with some spices. The chips and dips and stuff come in on a regular basis. Both girls are real good about sharin’ with the crew.

Suki never gets a damned thing. She ain’t got a family. Her little girl is in foster care. I don’t care, though – we had to take her in. But if we have to take in this Spencer bitch, then that girl better be prepared to do her part.

Dinner was almost ready. Besides the pasta we were having some lettuce and some bananas for dessert. ‘All the ice is gone,’ Theresa said, ‘and there won’t be any more until tomorrow afternoon, so get prepared to eat. I don’t want anything to go to waste.’

‘Speakin’ of waste,’ I said. ‘I hear Miss Spencer had herself quite a night in Observation.’

‘Did Karl Byrd give her any trouble?’ Theresa asked, all concerned.

‘Karl can do better than get a piece of that sorry ass,’ Cher snarled.

‘That’s not very nice,’ Suki piped up. ‘I think she seems kind of nice. She’s my bunkmate. But she says she’s not gonna be here very long.’

Cher was laughing. ‘Oh, let me guess,’ she said. ‘She’s just another innocent victim, put in the slammer by mistake.’

‘That’s what she says,’ Suki told us, all sincere. Suki doesn’t get irony – you might say she has an irony deficiency. ‘Jennifer says her boyfriend is coming to get her out.’

‘Yeah, just like my knight in shining armor is comin’ for me,’ Cher snorted.

Havin’ Cher as a cellmate helps the time pass. When she first hit Jennings, I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever survive being locked up with a wild white woman. But she can be so damned funny. And she’s honest – for a thief. She never pretends to be nobody ‘ceptin’ who she is. For her, everything she sees is just ripe for the pickin’. She always has her eyes wide open and on the lookout for the next chance to take what she wants. And not just for herself, either. Soon as she got here she stole me a Sony Walkman and a feather pillow, and damn it – that hillbilly girl just stole my heart. I never understood how it happened, but I was glad that it did. I love Cher. Now it isn’t like we’re lesbians. No one in my crew is a lesbian. I know lots of women couple up for a little sex and comfort while they’re here, but nothin’ like that goes on between me and Cher. But we do love each other. When I think of how I felt for Earl I almost laugh. My feelings for him were pretty shallow and pathetic when I compare ‘em with the love I feel for Cher. And even for Theresa and Suki.

About the only action I get from men is from that mother Byrd. He would jump a ladybug or a polliwog as long as they were unwilling. That’s what gives ‘em the thrill. I keep ‘em way off me by never showin’ any fear and askin’ him if he’s got a hard three inches ready for me. Once I made the redneck bastard blush. Made my day, I tell ya’.

I just sat there on my bunk and looked at my crew. Maybe we could take Spencer in. But the thought of it made me feel like I was somehow cheatin’ on Cher. Cher was gonna get paroled soon, if she kept her nose clean and didn’t get caught stealin’ from Intake. Even if she did, Cher had herself a good lawyer on the Outside.

It all made me feel sorta sad and cold. I didn’t really resent Cher leavin’ Jennings. It’s just that it was gonna be a damned lonely and borin’ place once she was gone. Maybe we needed to take another woman in.

10 Jennifer Spencer

Windows on buildings and vehicles were smashed one day after all the women in the dining room had been ‘searched’ for tacos as they left the cafeteria. Later the women referred to the incident as ‘The Great Taco Shake’.

Kathryn Watterson, Women in Prison

‘Mealtime,’ the officer announced from the control room. ‘Stay in single file and follow the brown line.’

Jennifer had absolutely no interest in eating dinner in the cafeteria, but Suki pointed in the direction that she should go and Jennifer had no choice but to follow the others. She had to admit that she was starving, but God only knew what kind of food was being served. She turned to ask Suki if she might know, but Suki seemed to have someplace else to go. Jennifer turned back and followed the woman in front of her.

As the line moved down the corridor it approached a door that was being held open by yet another officer. ‘Single file, ladies, single file. Something good today. Officer Summit says it’s Reubens since we had ham salad for lunch today.’

‘It’s about time,’ spoke one inmate.

‘Now you’re talking,’ said another.

Off to the side, a woman was having a loud argument with a doorpost. ‘You no good, muthafukka,’ she yelled, then paused. ‘You got no right,’ she answered the mute doorway. No one seemed to notice or mind.

As Jennifer finally stepped inside the cafeteria, what she saw was worse than what she had imagined. Yellow-painted concrete blocks, horrible fluorescent lights hung high from metal rafters, cold air blowing from the air-conditioning unit, and a floor that was a solid slab of poured concrete that angled down in the middle with a covered water drain grate at the center. It reminded her of the old meat market her mother used to take her to in her old neighborhood. It was like a slaughterhouse.

Jennifer mechanically imitated the inmate in front of her so that she would be sure not to mess up in mess hall. There were three drink machines: one with grape something or other, one with orange something or other, and then a much less desirable lemonade mixture that was certain to taste more like water than lemon. She took a metal cup from the inverted stack, selected the orange drink, then stepped down the line a little further only to be presented with a plastic tray covered in a clear plastic lid.

‘Hey, where’s the Reuben?’ an inmate asked.

‘Yeah, I thought someone said we were having Reubens,’ another inmate intoned.

‘Well, Officer Summit must have been misinformed,’ the officer at the head of the line said.

Oh man, was there going to be a riot over what was served? Jennifer had been through enough already and she couldn’t take any more disruption. She’d never felt so out of control in a controlled environment in her life. She took her tray and followed the woman in front of her to the table.

Jennifer stared down at her tray. She watched the other woman at the table dismantle the lid, carefully slide it under the bottom tray, and then unwrap a utensil from a napkin and let it fall in her hand. It was an abbreviated spoon – a shortened bowl with three equally short prongs extending briefly from the center. She stared at the micro landscape of food in front of her. There was a hill of instant potatoes, a wide river of grease, a dying forest of cabbage greens beside a toxic dump of gristle and gray meat. A week ago, Jennifer would have scraped something like this off her shoe in disgust. She was hungry, but eating this would be a challenge, even without the bizarre implement.

A large woman of indeterminate race with light skin, freckles, and kinky red hair pulled back into a knot at the top of her head sat down opposite and gave Jennifer a smile that lacked intelligence and the left bicuspid. ‘I’m Big Red,’ she said, then lowered her voice. ‘You want some brew, you call Big Red.’

‘What do you call this?’ Jennifer asked her dinner companion, holding up her utensil.

‘A spork,’ Big Red told her, as if Jennifer was the stupid one. ‘You never seen no spork before? Used to get them all the time at Kentucky Fried.’

‘Are all the forks and spoons gone?’ Jennifer asked.

‘Get outta here, girl,’ Big Red said. ‘They don’t give us no knives, no forks, no nothing. Don’t want us to make weapons out of ‘em.’

Jennifer used the spork to scoop up a little potato and gravy, but the gravy ran through the space between the two tines. ‘Couldn’t they give us just a spoon?’ she asked in exasperation. ‘You can’t hurt someone with a spoon.’

‘Oh, say what?’ Big Red spoke up. ‘Lottie J. took out Sabrina’s eye with a spoon.’ She was sporking up her food with the kind of relish Jennifer had rarely seen at three star restaurants. ‘Lottie J. faked being sick and went to the dispensary and she got herself a spoon there and sharpened it and then when she came back and that Sabrina be botherin’ her again, she just scooped out her eye like a melon ball.’

Jennifer put her spork down. The greasy taste of the gravy sat on her tongue like oil on a driveway. Her hunger turned to nausea. The glutinous gray-brown mass that passed as meat couldn’t possibly be cut by the spork. ‘You finished with that?’ Big Red asked, eyeing Jennifer’s tray.

Jennifer picked up a plastic cup of pudding and nodded. Before she could get her arm out of the way Big Red grabbed the tray and pulled it over to her, placing it on top of her first tray. She dug in and Jennifer realized that the niceties of cutting the meat were not an issue here; Big Red sporked the entire piece into her mouth and Jennifer watched as she masticated in a bovine manner for a lot longer than it took Jennifer to down the watery tapioca. This was definitely not the Four Seasons and there was no cotton candy cake with sugared violets and a candle on top for dessert.

To help calm her nausea, Jennifer tried to see what the other women were doing to get through their meals. Most of them were talking amongst themselves; some were even laughing. Then, to her absolute horror, Jennifer saw a grown woman trying to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich using a spork. It would’ve been easier if she’d just used her fingers.

This was humiliation, not rehabilitation! Jennifer couldn’t get beyond it no matter how she tried. She wondered if the population was really so dangerous that they couldn’t be trusted with real eating utensils. She looked at Big Red, now mopping up the last of the food, and wondered if the story about the spoon was even true. Maybe it was one of those things they told a newcomer to scare her, like the camp story of the parked couple and the bloody hook hanging off the door of their car.

Then, even as she put the thought away, two women began screeching. In less than a second, Big Red jumped up and stood on the table, narrowly missing Jennifer’s hand. ‘Kill the bitch!’ Big Red screamed. Jennifer wasn’t sure that even in her exalted position Red could see anything. The imbroglio seemed to be on the floor, on the other side of the table, near the wall. Correction officers were on the two fighting women in an instant, and, although Jennifer didn’t want to look, she couldn’t help but see one of the officers – she thought it was Byrd – throw a vicious kick at an inmate who was rolling on the floor.

Just then, louder noise and movement broke out to the right. Jennifer looked over, but before she could see what was going on, she noticed a pay phone out in the corridor. This is it, she thought.

As the two women continued to shout, and as several officers rushed their table, Jennifer calmly started to walk backward to the exit. She’d walked against a crowd that way many times in New York’s movie theaters when she wanted to get in to a popular show. As she made her way out, she watched the activity in front of her, but also glanced behind her to make sure she didn’t disturb anyone by bumping into them. The last thing she needed was to be in a jailhouse brawl. Though she was known as the ‘Warrior of Words’ at Hudson, Van Schaank, the one thing she didn’t know how to do was fight physically. Her path was clear – only another twelve steps before she’d be at the phone! It seemed that no one had noticed her, but her heart was thumping so loudly that she was certain that everyone could hear it, even over the ruckus.

Jennifer looked behind her again; in two more steps she reached the phone. She picked up the receiver and started to dial. She could hear the tones of the numbers in her ears and they drowned out the increasing noise from the room behind her. She dialed collect, and when the automated operator’s voice asked for it she gave her name. At the other end of the line, in another world altogether, she heard the phone ring. She imagined Tom’s apartment in Battery Park City overlooking New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She’d looked out at the view a hundred times. She heard the phone ring again. Women were screaming and shouting from every corner of the room. It was worse than a snake pit. Jennifer couldn’t help it: She instinctively put her hands over her ears, but still the noise penetrated despite her resolution. A tear began to drip from the corner of her right eye along her nose and down to her nostril. But she couldn’t take her hands off her ears to wipe it away because the noise was so overwhelming.

Suddenly a squadron of guards surrounding someone was coming her way. Jennifer was bumped into by another woman who was struggling against three officers. ‘Lockdown!’ she heard an officer shout from the far side of the cafeteria. But Jennifer stayed where she was, listening to the distant ringing. Answer, damnit!

A shuffling line of women approached the exit, and one woman stood directly in front of Jennifer and smiled. She was almost certain that this was the creature she had seen tending the marigolds on her way into Jennings. The black face split into a skeletal grin. ‘Trying to escape this place?’ the old woman asked.

At that same moment, a hand reached over and yanked the receiver away from Jennifer. ‘You can’t use the phone now,’ a woman officer said, obviously agitated. ‘Damn freshman!’ She grabbed Jennifer and pushed her into line. ‘Face forward!’ the officer snapped. ‘You too, Springtime. Step lively! Go to your houses,’ the officer shouted.

Jennifer thought that she might just scream, break and run, even though the barred doors visibly truncated the long hallway ahead of her. She had to do something. She had to get through to Tom. He and Donald couldn’t have known that this place was such a madhouse. Even one more day would be too long for her to keep her sanity. If Observation wasn’t enough to make her want to kill herself, another meal like this would be.

11 Gwen Harding

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

Walter Savage Landor

Gwen Harding tightened the sash of her bathrobe, retied the bow, and studied the papers spread before her. In her office at Jennings she was kept busy from moment to moment simply trying to deal with the administrative load, employee problems, staffing, and management. Now for the first time she looked at the JRU International information package and the charts spread out on her dining table. JRU had completed their proposal to the state and Warden Harding, along with half a dozen other state correction professionals, was being asked to write up her opinion of their plan.

She took a preliminary look at the proposal. ‘Fact: The private sector consistently saves government money. In the past decade, at least fourteen separate independent studies have compared the costs of operating private and public institutions. Twelve of those studies demonstrated that the cost of privately managed prisons is from two to twenty-nine percent less than that of government-managed facilities.’ Gwen wondered how they managed to cut costs. Perhaps by firing outdated wardens.

She rose from her chair and passed the counter that was the only demarcation of where the dining room ended and the kitchen began. The kitchen was spotless. She crossed the blue and white tile floor to the stove, where a kettle – the only cooking implement she ever used in this kitchen anymore – sat on the one burner that she ever turned on. She took a mug from the cabinet. It had been a gift from a social-worker friend years ago. It was one of those ready-made but unpainted objects that children and women with time on their hands paint in shops set up expressly for that purpose. On it, Gwen’s friend Lisa Anderson had painted BECAUSE I’M THE WARDEN, THAT’S WHY.

When she was given the gift, she and Lisa laughed over the reactions the mug stirred up among the other women at the shop where Lisa had painted it. Now Gwen filled it with hot water and dunked a tea bag into it. She was actually longing for a glass of gin, and the olives in the refrigerator seemed to be calling out to her, but she knew she had to keep a clear head. JRU was waiting and JRU came first. She crossed to the sink holding the steaming mug, opened the under-cabinet and dropped the wet tea bag into the empty trash bag. She didn’t even make trash anymore. Gwen sighed. There was a different time and a different place where she used to cook and give dinner parties on a regular basis. And she’d been good – everyone praised her coq au vin. ‘Jesus,’ she thought, walking back to the dining table, ‘do people even make coq au vin nowadays?’ She hadn’t seen it on a menu or at a dinner party in years. But then … she tried to think of the last dinner party she had attended and couldn’t remember one. That couldn’t be! She stood still, one hand resting on the back of a dining chair, the other clenched around her mug. There was the dinner at the restaurant at the close of the Eastern States Correction Officers Association. And of course, there was always the rubber chicken at local civic functions. But actual dinner parties – just social time at someone’s home, seemed to be a bit thin on the ground.

Gwen took a sip of tea and wondered where her friend Lisa Anderson was now. She smiled. They had had a lot of fun together. Gwen had been divorced and Lisa had been in the process of separating from her husband. The two of them went out at least once a week, but that was … Gwen put down the mug and tried to think whether it was six or seven years ago. Could it be that long? She tried to think it out. It had to be. It was just after she got the job at Jennings.

At Jennings Gwen was too busy to see old friends or to make new ones, at least in the beginning. Then, when she had settled in, it seemed as if there were no friends to be made. Certainly she couldn’t count any of the Jennings staff as friends. Perhaps her initial conscious distancing had put people off, but she’d only done it because she’d been frightened and overly sensitive about her new position and its required authority. She supposed that by the time she felt secure and was ready to unbend a little, no one else seemed to be so inclined. Well, that was understandable. She took another sip of tea and reminded herself that she’d never been a natural extrovert.

Gwen sat down at the shining waxed dining table, only sullied by the JRU report. She wouldn’t think about anything else right now. Thinking about the emptiness of her life would surely drive her to the olives and she had to begin her response to this proposal. She looked at the inscription once again and smiled ruefully. When she first began working in the Department of Corrections it seemed to her that wardens had enormous power. Perhaps she’d been wrong or had exaggerated what she’d seen, but the position’s power had certainly eroded since then. A warden’s powers today were so limited, while her accountability was so vast, that Gwen often felt as trussed as a turkey before being shoved into the oven. And now this move to privatize prisons was sure to usurp whatever power she had remaining.

Privatization was a bastard trend that had been born – mothered – by Wall Street out of the incredible need for more prisons and taxpayers yelping at the costs of incarceration. If an aging population voted against school-board bond issues and preferred not to spend its tax dollars on educating their own grandchildren, Gwen knew all too well how they felt about spending public funds on strangers in the ‘criminal population’. And yet, that population continued to grow. The only solution most agencies saw was building more places to incarcerate offenders. The ineffectual ‘war on drugs’, mandatory sentences, and a judiciary frightened that they might be perceived as ‘soft on crime’ had all contributed to a huge increase in prisoners in general, and an even larger increase in female prison statistics.

In fact, Gwen knew that women were the fastest growing sector of the prison population. Since 1980, the female inmate population nationwide had increased by more than five hundred percent. And this was not because women were involved in more violent crimes. It was because, nationwide, people were being imprisoned much more frequently for nonviolent crimes. In 1979, women convicted of nonviolent crimes were sent to prison roughly forty-nine percent of the time. By 1999, they were being sent to prison for nonviolent crimes nearly eighty percent of the time.

So privatization seemed a neat and simple answer to all these problems. Big business claimed it was ready to step in, take the risk, bear the expense, and turn prisons into moneymaking operations. Gwen of course knew that there were two major private prison corporations in the U.S. One of them, Wackenhut Corrections, owned fifty-two prisons ‘employing’ more than twenty-six thousand prisoners. The other, CCA – Corrections Corporation of America – had control over almost three times as many prisoners in eightyone prisons. At the last conference for prison wardens that Gwen had attended, there had been a heated discussion over the privatization of prisons. Someone pointed out how large corporations had the incentive and the political clout to encourage the creation of a larger and larger prison population – a larger and larger cheap labor pool. This meant increased sentences and the increasing incarceration of men and women (usually from communities of color). Gwen wondered if this would turn into a new form of slavery.