by Piper Kerman
When she entered the Camp, an entourage traveling before and behind her, the noise in the hall was deafening, and people were calling out, “Where’s Miss Malcolm?” She was immediately enveloped by people hugging and congratulating her. As she made slow progress up the hall, Natalie laughed and smiled and looked overwhelmed.
Down near the CO’s office, someone was waving her test results in the air. “Natalie, you did it!”
I suddenly thought I was going to lose it and start crying right there, and I was not a crier. The release of so much collective happiness in that miserable place was almost too much for me. It was like hot and cold air colliding, creating a tornado right inside the hall. I took a deep breath, stepped back, and watched my bunkie be enveloped by well-wishers. When I congratulated her in the relative privacy of our cube, she tried to downplay her triumph, but I could tell that she was deeply satisfied.
THE FACT that I’d become used to life in prison shocked my friends and family, but no one on the outside can really appreciate the galvanizing effect of all the regimented rituals, whether official or informal. It’s the insidious, cruel paradox of lengthy sentences: for women doing seven, twelve, twenty years, the only way to survive was to accept prison as their universe. But how on earth would they survive in the outside world when released? “Institutionalized” was one of the greatest insults one could throw at another prisoner, but when you resisted the systems of control, you suffered swift retribution. Where you fit in and how comfortable you were willing to get depended on the length of your sentence, the amount of contact you had with the outside world, and the quality of your life on the outside. And if you resisted finding a place in prison society, you were desperately lonely and miserable.
Mrs. Jones had been in the Camp longer than any other prisoner but would be going home next year. Her cubicle, a Puppy Program single in the corner of A Dorm next to the outside door, was so cozy we all feared what would happen when it came time for her to leave it. “I like this cube. I get all the fresh air I want, plus I can walk the puppies just like that!” she cackled. During the day I liked to drop by Mrs. Jones’s cube to play with Inky, the Labrador retriever she was training as a service dog. I would sit on the floor and rub Inky’s belly while Mrs. Jones fussed around the cube, showing me photographs of women with whom she had done time or her latest crochet project (she specialized in Christmas stockings), and asking me if I wanted random objects she had squirreled away during her fifteen years in prison.
Mrs. Jones spent a lot of time down on the track walking Inky, and she was impressed by my running. She was concerned that she was overweight, so she resolved to start running too. “You and me, we’re going to compete!” she would crow, poking my shoulder hard. “We’ll see what you’re made of!” But Mrs. Jones was perilously top-heavy, and after wheezing her way around only one lap, she sat on a bench, heaving for breath. I suggested she try speedwalking instead. This she found manageable and would huff and puff around all morning at top speed, obsessively.
One day Mrs. Jones came to see me in my cube. I was writing letters up in my bunk. She peeked around the particleboard like a little girl, which I found disconcerting. “What’s up, Mrs. Jones?”
“Are ya busy?”
“Not too busy for you, OG. Come on in.”
She came closer to the bunk bed and whispered conspiratorially, “I got a favor to ask ya.”
“Shoot.”
“You know I’m in the college class, right?”
The class was a basic business course, taught by a pair of professors who came in from a nearby accredited college. It didn’t mean much in terms of getting one closer to a college degree (for that you needed to pay for correspondence courses), but it did count toward “program” credit with an inmate’s case manager. The case managers were tasked with managing the completion of our sentences, which meant recalculating our “good time” (we were supposed to serve only 85 percent of our sentences if we earned good time), collecting fines from our inmate accounts (if you couldn’t pay fines, you wouldn’t get good time), and assigning our “program” activity, including mandatory reentry classes. The “programs” available to Campers were feeble and few. The college class was one of the only options, but after reading over and helping to revise a number of women’s homework assignments, I was skeptical about the class’s usefulness. Camila’s business plan for a Victoria’s Secret competitor, for example, was entertaining but highly hypothetical and totally unrelated to what she might be doing when she got out of this human warehouse in five years.
“How’s it going, Mrs. Jones?”
She explained that it was not going so well. She had received a bad grade on her business plan. The OG was worried. “I need a tutor. Will ya help me? We have a paper due on a movie we saw. I’ll pay you.”
“Mrs. Jones, you will not pay me anything. Of course I’ll help you. Bring me your stuff, and let’s look at it together.”
When I agreed to help the OG, I had in mind a typical student-tutor relationship; I would talk to her about her assignments, ask thought-provoking questions, and review and correct her work. She came back with her notebook and papers and a book that she put on my bed: Managing in the Next Society by Peter Drucker.
“What’s this?”
“Our textbook. Ya gotta read it.”
“No, Mrs. Jones, you have to read it.”
She looked at me, anguished and pleading. “It gives me a headache.”
I remembered that in addition to being nutty from having been locked up for well over a decade, Mrs. Jones was reputed to have had a few screws knocked loose by her abusive husband.
I frowned. “Let’s take a look at your paper that’s due, the one about the movie.”
This provoked another anguished look. “You need to write it, I can’t do it! They didn’t like my last paper,” she said, pulling out her business plan, embarrassed. She had received a poor grade in big red pen.
I flipped through it. Mrs. Jones’s handwriting was hard to read, but I realized that even if her penmanship had been flawless, the contents of the paper made little sense. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I might be a convicted felon, but as the daughter of teachers, I had a strong aversion to cheating on tests.
“Mrs. Jones, I shouldn’t write your papers for you. And how am I going to write a paper about a movie I didn’t see?”
“I took notes!” She thrust them at me, triumphantly. Oh, great. It appeared that the movie had had something to do with the Industrial Revolution.
Was it better to let Mrs. Jones fail on her own or to help her cheat? I knew I was not going to let her fail. “OG, why don’t I ask you questions about the movie, and I’ll help you do an outline, and then you can try writing the paper?”
Mrs. Jones shook her head, stubbornly. “Piper, look at my business plan. I can’t write it. If ya won’t help me, Joanie in A Dorm said she would do it, but you’re smarter than her.”
Joan Lombardi was hardly a rocket scientist, and I knew she would charge Mrs. Jones for her “tutoring.” Plus my ego was involved.
I sighed. “Let me see your notes.” After extracting a few context-free specifics about the movie from her, I set to work writing an incredibly generic three-page paper about the Industrial Revolution. When I was finished I walked the neatly handwritten paper over to the OG’s cube in A Dorm.
She was ecstatic. “Mrs. Jones, you are going to recopy this paper so it’s in your handwriting, right?”
“Nah, they’ll never notice.”
I wondered what would happen to me if her instructors caught this. I didn’t think I’d be sent to the SHU or get expelled from prison.
“Mrs. Jones, I want you to at least read the paper so you know what it’s about. Do you promise me?”
“I swear, Piper, on my honor.”
Mrs. Jones was beside herself when she got her paper back in class. “An A!! We got an A!” She glowed with pride.
We got an A on the next film summary as well, a
nd she was jubilant. I couldn’t believe that her teachers had no comment or questions about the difference between these papers and her previous one—right down to the different handwriting.
Now she grew serious. “We gotta write the final paper. This is fifty percent of the grade, Piper!”
“What’s the assignment, OG?”
“It needs to be a paper on innovation, and it has to be based on the textbook. And it has to be longer!”
I moaned. I desperately wanted to avoid reading the Peter Drucker book. I had spent my entire educational and professional career avoiding these types of business books, and now they’d caught up to me in prison. I didn’t see any way around reading it if the OG were to pass her class.
“Innovation is a little broad, Mrs. Jones. Any ideas on a more specific topic?”
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.
AMONG 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.
ONE 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 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.