After two weeks I was getting much better at cleaning, as inspections took place twice a week and there was considerable social pressure not to fuck up-the winners of inspection got to eat first, and certain extra-tidy “honor cubes” were first among the first. It was amazing how many uses sanitary napkins had-they were our primary cleaning tools.
There was tension in Room 6 over who cleaned and who did not. Miss Luz, who was in her seventies and sick with cancer, was not expected to clean. The Puerto Rican woman in one of the top bunks spoke no English, but she would silently help me and Annette dust and scrub. The bigoted Polish woman who occupied the bunk below me refused to clean, much to Annette’s fury. My tattooed A &O pal pitched in halfheartedly-until she discovered she was pregnant and was quickly moved to a bottom bunk in another room. The BOP doesn’t like lawsuits.
The new girl who took her place in Room 6 was a big Spanish girl. At first I used the politically correct term “ Latina,” as I had learned to do at Smith, but everyone, regardless of color, looked at me as if I were insane. Finally I was firmly corrected by a Dominican woman: “We call ourselves Spanish around here, honey, Spanish mamis.”
This new young Spanish mami sat on the naked mattress of the top bunk, looking dazed. It was my turn to show someone else the ropes.
“What’s your name?”
“Maria Carbon.”
“Where are you from?”
“ Lowell.”
“In Massachusetts? I’m from there, I grew up in Boston. How much time do you have?” She looked at me blankly. “That means, how long is your sentence?”
“I don’t know.”
That stopped me cold. How could you not know your own sentence? I didn’t think this was a language problem-her English was unaccented. I got worried. She looked like she was in shock. “Listen, Maria, it’s going to be okay. We’ll help you. You need to fill out your paperwork, and people will give you the stuff you need right away. Who’s your counselor?”
Maria just looked at me helplessly, and finally I retreated to enlist one of the other Spanish mamis to assist with the new arrival.
ONE EVENING the PA system boomed “ Kerman!” and I scurried to Mr. Butorsky’s office. “You’re moving down into B Dorm!” he barked, “Cube Eighteen! Miss Malcolm will be your bunkie!”
I hadn’t been down into the Dorms (which were “out of bounds” for A &Os). In my imagination they were murky caves populated with seasoned convicts. “He likes you,” said Nina, my expert on all things prison, who was still waiting to get back into her A Dorm cube with Pop. “That’s why he put you with Miss Malcolm. She’s been down a long time. Plus you’ll always be honor cube.” I had no idea who Miss Malcolm was, but I had learned that in prison “Miss” was an honorific conferred only on the elderly or on those who were highly respected.
I gathered my few belongings and nervously advanced down the stairs to B Dorm, aka “The Ghetto,” clutching my pillow and laundry bag stuffed with uniforms. I would have to retrieve my pile of books on a second trip. The Dorms turned out to be large, semisubterranean basement rooms that were a maze of beige cubicles, each housing two prisoners, a bunk bed, two metal lockers, and a stepladder. Cube 18 turned out to be next to the bathroom, on the sole wall with narrow windows. Miss Malcolm was waiting for me in her cube, a petite dark-skinned middle-aged woman with a heavy Caribbean accent. She was all business.
“That’s your locker.” She indicated the empty one, “and these are your hooks. Those hooks are mine, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.” Her clothes were neatly hung, with her checkered cook’s pants and burgundy smock. She worked in the kitchen. “I don’t care if you’re gay or what, but I don’t want no foolishness in the bunk. I clean on Sunday nights. You have to help clean.”
“Of course, Miss Malcolm,” I agreed.
“Call me Natalie. I’ll make your bed.”
Suddenly a blond head popped up over the cubicle wall. “Hi, new neighbor!” It was the tall, baby-faced white girl who washed dishes in the dining hall. “I’m Colleen!” Colleen looked at my new bunkie cautiously. “How are you, Miss Natalie?”
“Hello, Colleen.” Natalie’s tone expressed tolerance for silly girls, but tolerance with limits. It wasn’t unfriendly or mean, just a bit stern.
“What’s your name, neighbor?”
I introduced myself, and she bounced out of the top bunk and around to the opening of the cube I now shared with Miss Malcolm. I was pelted with questions about my cool weird name, how much time I had, and where I was from, and I tried to answer them one at a time. Colleen was the resident Camp artist, specializing in flowers, fairy princesses, and fancy lettering, and she said, “Oh shit, neighbor, I gotta make your name tag! Write down the spelling for me.” Colleen illustrated cubicle name tags for all new B Dorm arrivals in feminine script with sparkle details on each one-except for the people who had spent time down the hill in the FCI, and thus already had official-looking black plastic ones with white lettering, like Natalie’s.
I had won the bunkie lottery. Natalie, a woman near the end of an eight-year sentence, was a reserve of quiet dignity and good counsel. Because of her heavy accent, it took careful listening on my part to understand everything she said, but she never said anything unnecessary. She was the head baker in the kitchen. She rose at four A.M. to begin her shift and kept largely to herself with a few select friends among the West Indian women and her kitchen coworkers. She spent quiet time reading, walking the track, and writing letters, and went to bed early, at eight P.M. We spoke very little about our lives outside of prison, but she could answer just about any question I had about life at Danbury. She never said what had landed her there, and I never asked.
How Natalie got to sleep at eight P.M. was a complete mystery to me, because it was LOUD down in B Dorm. My first evening there I was quiet as a mouse in my top bunk, trying to follow the hooting and hollering that took place across the big room filled with women. I was worried that I would never get any sleep, and that I would lose my marbles in the cacophony. When the main lights were shut off, though, it quieted down pretty quickly, and I could fall asleep, lulled by the breathing of forty-seven other people.
The next morning something woke me before dawn. Groggy and confused, I sat up in my bed, the room still dark, the collective slumber of its residents blanketing everything. Something was going on. I could hear someone, not shouting exactly, but angry. I looked below me-Natalie was already gone, at work. I leaned forward very slowly, very cautiously, and peeped out of my cubicle.
Two cubes away I could see a Spanish woman who’d been particularly loud the night before. She was not happy. What was pissing her off, I could not figure out. Suddenly she squatted for a few moments, then stood up and stalked off, leaving behind a puddle in front of my neighbor’s cubicle.
I rubbed my eyes. Did I just see what I thought I saw? About a minute later a black woman emerged from the cubicle.
“Lili! Cabrales! Lili Cabrales! Get back here this minute and clean this up! LILIIIIIIIIIIII!!!” People were not happy to be awakened this way, and a smattering of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” broke out across the big room. I ducked my head back out of sight-I didn’t want either woman to know that I had seen the whole thing. I could hear someone cursing quietly. I cautiously stole a glance: the black woman quickly cleaned up the puddle with an enormous wad of toilet paper. She caught me peeking and seemed sheepish. I flopped back down on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. I had fallen down the rabbit hole.
The next day was Valentine’s Day, my first holiday in prison. Upon arrival in Danbury, I was struck by the fact that there did not seem to be any lesbian activity. The Rooms, so close by the guard’s station, were bastions of propriety. There was no cuddling or kissing or any obvious sexual activity on display in any of the common rooms, and while someone had told me a story about a former inmate who had made the gym her own personal love shack, it was always empty when I went there.
Given that, I was taken aback by the explosion of sentiment around me on Valentine’s Day morning in B Dorm. Handmade cards and candy were exchanged, and I was reminded of the giddy intrigue of a fifth-grade classroom. Some of the “Be Mines” that were stuck on the outside of cubicles were clearly platonic. But the amount of effort that had gone into some of the Valentines, carefully constructed from magazine clippings and scavenged materials, suggested real ardor to me.
I had decided from the beginning to reveal nothing about my sapphic past to any other inmate. If I had told even one person, eventually the whole Camp would know, and no good could come of it. So I talked a lot about my darling fiancé, Larry, and it was known in the Camp that I was not “that way,” but I was not at all freaked out by women who were “that way.” Frankly, most of these women were not even close to being “real lesbians” in my mind. They were, as Officer Scott put it, “gay for the stay,” the prison version of “lesbian until graduation.”
It was hard to see how a person could conduct an intimate relationship in such an intensely overcrowded environment, let alone an illicit relationship. On a practical level, where on earth could you be alone in the Camp without getting caught? A lot of the romantic relationships I observed were more like schoolgirl crushes, and it was rare for a couple to last more than a month or two. It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention, and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different Dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn’t actually a lesbian.
Colleen and her bunkie next door got lots of Valentines from other prisoners. I got none, but that evening’s mail call yielded plenty of evidence that I was loved. Best of all was a little book of Neruda poems from Larry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I resolved to read a poem every day.
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
While the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin between my hands.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that is always turned to at twilight
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.
I WAS finally able to shop commissary on February 17, when I bought:
XL sweatpants, $24.70, given to me in error and which they would not let me return
A stick of cocoa butter, $4.30
Packets of tuna, sardines, and mackerel, each about $1
Ramen noodles, $0.25
Squeeze cheese, $2.80
Pickled jalapeños, $1.90
Hot sauce, $1.40
Legal pads, pens, envelopes, and stamps, priceless.
I desperately wanted to buy a cheap little portable headset radio for $42.90. The radio would have cost about $7 on the street. At the base pay for federal prisoners, which is $0.14 an hour, that radio could represent more than three hundred hours of labor. I needed the radio to hear the weekend movie or anything on television, and to use down in the gym, but the officer who ran the commissary brusquely told me they were out of radios. No mas, Kerman.
Because I could count on money from the outside world, I could buy items to return to each person who had helped me upon my arrival-soap, toothpaste, shampoo, shower shoes, packets of instant coffee. Some women tried to wave them away, “Don’t worry about it, Kerman,” but I insisted. “Please, forget it!” said Annette, who had loaned me so many things in my first several weeks. “You’re like my daughter! Hey, did you get any new books today?”
The books continued to pour in at mail call. It had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed, and also it made me nervous; it was a clear demonstration that I “had it like that” on the outside, a network of people who had both a concern for me and the time and money to buy me books. So far no one had threatened me with anything more intimidating than a scowl or a harsh word, and no other prisoner had asked anything of me. Still, I was guarded against getting played, used, or targeted. I saw that some of the women had little or no resources from the outside to help make their prison life livable, and many of my fellow prisoners were seasoned hustlers.
One day right after I moved into B Dorm, a woman I didn’t know popped her head into my cube. Miss Natalie was absent, and I was putting still more books away in my small footlocker, which was threatening to overflow. I looked at this woman-black, middle-aged, ordinary, yet unfamiliar. My guard went up.
“Hey there, new bunkie. Where’s Miss Natalie?”
“Um, she’s in the kitchen, I think.”
“What’s your name? I’m Rochelle.”
“Piper. Kerman.”
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me Piper.” What did she want from me? I felt trapped in my cube. I was sure she was sniffing around.
“Oh, you’re the one with the books… you got all them books!” In fact, I had a book in my hand and a pile of them on top of the locker. By now I was scared as to what this woman wanted from me and what she was going to do to me.
“D-do you want a book?” I was always happy to lend a book, but only a few people took me up on it, checking my haul at every mail call.
“Okay-whatcha got?” I scanned the selection. The collected works of Jane Austen. A biography of John Adams. Middlesex. Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t want to assume that she wouldn’t want any of these books, but how could I know what she liked?
“What kind of stuff do you like? You can borrow any of them, take your pick.” She looked through the titles uncertainly. It was a long, slow, squirmy moment for both of us.
“How about this one? It’s really, really fantastic.” I seized up a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I felt racist on every level of my being by picking “the black book” from the stack for Rochelle, but there was a good shot that she might like it, might take it, and might leave me alone, at least for the moment.
“Looks good, looks good. Thanks, Pipe!” And she disappeared from my cube.
About a week later Rochelle came back around. She was returning the book.
“It seems good, but I couldn’t really get into it,” she said. “You got The Coldest Winter Ever? Sister Souljah?” I did not, and she wandered away. When I thought about how terrified I had been of Rochelle, and why, I felt like a complete jackass. I had gone to school with, lived with, dated, and worked with middle-class black people my whole life, but when faced by a black woman who hadn’t “been where I’ve been,” I felt threatened, absolutely certain she was going to take something from me. In truth, Rochelle was one of the most mild-mannered and pleasant people around, with a deep love for church and trashy novels. Ashamed, I resolved not to be a jackass again.
While I was meeting all these new players in my life, I made an extra effort to hang out with Annette. When I was moved down to B Dorm, she had sighed, resigned. “Now I’m never going to see you anymore.”
“Annette, that’s ridiculous. I’m literally yards away from you.”
“I’ve seen it before… once girls get moved down to Dorms, they don’t have time for me anymore.” Annette was trapped in the Rooms because of her medical problems, so I made a point of going around to Room 6 to say hi and play cards in the recreation room. But I was officially bored with Rummy 500 and less inclined to spend time with a small handful of often-cranky middle-aged white women than I once had been. Perhaps I would learn Spades. Those players looked like they were having more fun.
NATALIE HAD the respect of everyone in B Dorm, and as I was clearly not going to give her any trouble, she seemed to take to me too. Despite her reserve and discretion, she had a dry but lively sense of humor and treated me to her sharp, sidelong observations on our daily life in B Dorm: “You in the Ghetto now, bunkie!” Ginger Solomon, her best friend who was also Jamaican, was like the yang to Natalie’s yin: antic, combustible, and loud. Miss Solomon was also a fantastic cook, and once she and Natalie had decided that I was all right, she would make me a plate of her special Saturday night dinner, usually a knockout curry prepared with kitchen contraband. On special occasions, Natalie would magically make roti appear.
Extracurricular prison cooking happened primarily in two communal microwaves that were placed in kitchenette areas between the Dorms; their use was a privilege the staff constantly (and with great enjoyment) threatened to revoke. Remarkable concoctions came out of those microwaves, especially from homesick Spanish and West Indian women. This impressed me deeply, given the limited resources these cooks were working with-junk food and poly-bagged chicken, packets of mackerel and tuna, and whatever fresh vegetable one could steal from the kitchen. Corn chips could be reconstituted into mash with water and transformed into delectable “chilaquiles,” my new prison favorite. Contraband onions were at a particular premium, and the chefs had to keep an eye peeled for guards with quivering nostrils. No matter what they were cooking, it smelled like food prepared with love and care.
Unfortunately Miss Solomon only cooked on Saturdays. I had lost ten pounds in a month, thanks to the prison diet-all the liver, lima beans, and iceberg lettuce you want! The day I walked into prison I looked all of my thirty-four years, if not worse. In the months before my surrender I’d drowned my sorrows in wine and New York comfort food; now my greatest comforts were time alone on the icy track and lifting weights in the gym. It was the only place in the Camp where freedom and control seemed in my grasp.
ONE OF the good things about living in B Dorm was that you had your choice of two bathrooms. Both were equipped with six showers, five sinks, and six toilet stalls. That’s where their similarities ended. Natalie and I lived next to the bathroom that I liked to call the Hell-mouth. The tiles and Formica were various shades of gray, the shower curtain rods were rusted, the plastic shower curtains were practically in ribbons, and not all of the stall door locks worked. None of this was what made the C Dorm bathroom a Hell-mouth, though. It was the infestations that made the place unacceptable for anything but a quick pee or toothbrushing. During the warmer months when the ground was not frozen, little black maggots would periodically appear in the shower area, squirming on the tiles. Nothing could make them disappear, although the bathroom orderlies did not have much of an arsenal-the cleaning supplies were stingily doled out. Eventually the maggots would hatch into evil little flies. They were the sign that the bathroom had been built over a direct route to Hell.
I showered instead in the bathroom on the other side of B Dorm, which connected to A Dorm. It was spalike by comparison and had been recently refurbished in shades of beige. The fixtures were new. The light was better. The mood was brighter, even if the shower curtains were just as ratty.
Showers were a complex ritual. It was necessary to schlep all your hygiene products to the bathroom-shampoo, soap, razor, washcloth, and whatever else you might need. This required either great minimalism or some sort of shower caddy. Some women had illegal crocheted bags to carry their stuff; some had mesh nylon bags from commissary; and one woman had a large pink plastic shower caddy, an actual shower caddy. I wasn’t about to ask, knowing that it had either come from some long-ago and distant commissary or was contraband. Morning and evening were peak shower hours, with gradually diminishing stores of hot water. If you showered in the afternoon or early evening, you would have less competition. We were not supposed to be in the showers after lights out at ten P.M., to discourage people from having sex in them.
Many women would wait in line three deep for “their” shower to be free. In the good bathroom there was one shower stall that indisputably had the best water pressure. Some big shots, like Pop, would send an emissary to see if that stall was free or else dibs them a place in the waiting line. If you interfered with one of the early-morning risers’ shower ritual by getting into “their” shower, you would be met with an icy stare when you emerged.
Once you had secured your shower stall, you faced a moment of truth. Some women would disappear behind the stall’s plastic curtain still fully clad in their muu-muus, out of modesty; others would whip off their clothes in front of everyone and climb in and out unabashed. A handful would shower with the curtain open, giving everyone a show.
At first I was among the former, but the water was always freezing initially, and I would yelp as it rained down on my naked skin. “What’s going on in there, Kerman?” someone would inevitably joke. “Piper’s getting busy!” After a while I became convinced that the Linda Blair rape scene in Born Innocent was never going to be re-created in the Camp, so I took to starting my shower before I got in, checking to see that it was at least lukewarm before I whipped off my muu-muu and jumped in. This won me a couple of fans, notably my new neighbor Delicious, who shouted with surprise, “P-I Piper! You got some nice titties! You got those TV titties!! They stand up on they own all perky and everything! Damn!”
“Um, thanks, Delicious.”
There was absolutely nothing threatening about Delicious’s attention. In fact, it was mildly flattering that she noticed me at all.
All cleaning in the Camp was highly ritualized, including the all-hands-on-deck Sunday-night scrubdown of our cubicles. One day a week B Dorm’s laundry was done for us (laundress was a prison job, captained by an elderly woman everyone called Grandma), and so the night before, I’d stuff my bag with sweat socks and a packet of laundry soap. Natalie would wake me at five-fifteen before the laundry opened so that I could get mine in before everyone else. Otherwise I’d have been part of the usual stampede of half-asleep women in the still-dark hallway getting in line to drop off their laundry bags. Why the urgency? Unclear. Did I need my laundry back in the early afternoon, as opposed to the evening? No. I found myself participating in the meaningless rituals of avoiding the laundry rush because prison is all about waiting in line. For many women, I realized, this was nothing new. If you had the misfortune of having the government intimately involved with your life, whether via public housing or Medicaid or food stamps, then you’d probably already spent an insane amount of your life in line.
I had twice made the monthly pilgrimage out to the warehouse to collect my eight packets of laundry soap powder from the unsmiling inmate in charge of issuing them. Laundry soap days happened once a month-on one appointed weekday all the “evens” would troop out to the warehouse during the lunch hour to claim their eight packets; the next day the “odds” would go. The prisoners who worked in the warehouse, a secretive bunch, took this enterprise very seriously. They treated soap days as an invasion of their turf and would all sit or stand silently while other prisoners lined up to collect the one handout that the prison gave to prisoners.
I never understood why laundry soap was the one free thing provided to us (other than our toilet paper rations, which were passed out once a week, and the sanitary napkins and tampons stocked in the bathroom). Laundry soap was sold on commissary; some women would buy Tide and give away their eight free soap packets to others who had nothing. Why not soap to clean your body? Why not toothpaste? Somewhere within the monstrous bureaucracy of the Bureau of Prisons, this all made sense to someone.
I CAREFULLY studied long-timers like Natalie. How had she done it? How had she served eight years in this rotten place with her grace, her dignity, her sanity intact? What had she drawn on to make it through, with only nine months until her release to the outside world? The advice I got from many quarters was “do your time, don’t let the time do you.” Like everyone in prison, I was going to have to learn from the masters.
I settled into rituals, which improved the quality of my existence immeasurably. The ritual of coffee-making and drinking was one of the first. The day I arrived a brassy former stockbroker had given me instant coffee in a foil bag and a can of Cremora. Larry, an insufferable coffee snob, was insanely particular about brewing methods, preferring a French press. I wondered what he would do if he was locked up-would he give up coffee entirely, or adapt to Nescafé? I would make my cup in the morning at the temperamental hot water dispenser and carry it down to the chow hall for breakfast.
After our late-afternoon dinner, Nina would often appear, inquiring whether I wanted to “get coffee.” I always did. We would mix up our cups and find seats where the weather allowed, sometimes sitting out behind A Dorm looking south toward New York. We would talk about Brooklyn, her kids, Larry, and books; we’d gossip about other prisoners; I would ask her my endless questions about how to do time. Sometimes Nina wasn’t in the mood to get coffee. I’m sure that my tagalong tendencies got old for her, but when I needed her wisdom, she was always there.
I TORE through every book I received, stayed out of the TV rooms, and watched with envy as people went off to their prison jobs. One could rearrange a footlocker only so many ways. I suspected work would help slaughter time. I tried to figure out who did what, and why some of them got to wear nifty army-green jumpsuits. Some prisoners worked in the Camp’s kitchen; others, working as orderlies, washed floors and cleaned the bathroom and common areas. The benefit of the orderly jobs was that you worked only a few hours a day, usually alone. A handful of prisoners worked as trainers for seeing-eye dogs with whom they lived 24-7, a program tragically known as Puppies Behind Bars. Some women worked in CMS (Construction and Maintenance Services), getting on a bus every morning to do jobs like plumbing and grounds maintenance. An elite crew trooped off to the warehouse, the stopping point for everything that either entered or left the prison, and where the contraband opportunities were rich.
Certain prisoners worked in Unicor, the prison industries company that operates within the federal prison system. Unicor manufactures a wide range of products that are then sold within the government for many millions of dollars. In Danbury the FCI made radio components for the army. Unicor paid significantly more than other prison jobs, over one dollar an hour as opposed to the regular base pay rate of fourteen cents an hour, and the Unicor workers were always dressed in pressed, tidy uniforms. Unicor people would disappear into a large warehouse building that always had semis parked outside. Some girls enjoyed silent flirtation with the truckers, who looked nervous but intrigued.
Rosemarie had secured herself a job in the Puppy Program, which was housed in A Dorm. That meant she lived with a Labrador retriever that was being trained to be a seeing-eye dog or a bomb-sniffer. The dogs were beautiful, the little puppies adorable. A warm, squirming lapful of golden puppy, licking and biting and unabashedly happy, made despair dissolve no matter how hard you were hanging on to it.
I wasn’t eligible for Puppies Behind Bars-my fifteen-month sentence was too short. Initially disappointed, on reflection I decided it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The program attracted some of the most obsessive-compulsive women in the Camp, and their OCD could really come into full flower as they trained the dogs, forming intense bonds with their canine companions and feuding with their human neighbors. Rosemarie quickly became consumed with the training of her dog, Amber. I didn’t mind because she would usually let me play with the puppy, which some of her fellow dog trainers frowned upon.
The doyenne of the Puppy Program was Mrs. Jones, the only person in Camp that anyone called “Mrs.” Mrs. Jones had been in prison for a long time, and it was obvious. A grizzled, steel-haired Irish woman with enormous breasts, she had been down for almost fifteen years on a drug sentence. Her husband was said to have beaten her viciously on the outside and to have died in prison. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Mrs. Jones was a little crazy, but most prisoners and guards gave her more leeway than they might extend to others-after fifteen years, anyone would have gone a little crazy. People liked to sing a few bars of “Me and Mrs. Jones” from time to time. Some of the younger women from the street called her the OG, Original Gangster, and she loved that. “That’s me… the OG! I’m crazy… like a fox!” she would cackle, tapping her temple. She seemed to lack any filter and would say exactly what she thought at any time. Although interacting with Mrs. Jones required patience, I liked her, and her candor too.
I wasn’t allowed to be a dog trainer, but surely the right job for me was here somewhere? Danbury had a distinct labor hierarchy, and I was at the bottom of it. I wanted to teach in the GED program, which was overseen by a staff teacher and augmented by prisoners who were “tutors.”
The handful of middle-class, educated prisoners with whom I often ate meals warned me against it. Although the program’s female staffer was well liked, they said the combination of a bad program with captive and often surly students made for a crappy work environment. “Not a pleasant experience!” “Cluster fuck.” “I copped out after a month.” It sounded like my friend Ed’s job teaching public high school in New York City. Nevertheless I requested the job, and Mr. Butorsky, who controlled assignments, said that should work out just fine. As it turned out, he was not as good as his word.