Orange Is the New Black

make prison as miserable as possible by threatening, withholding, or abusing at every opportunity. In my experience, these creatures weren’t the sleazeballs who’d act sexually toward prisoners; in fact, they would never fraternize with lower life-forms like us, and they reserved their most withering scorn for their colleagues who treated us humanely.
    Richards, also an enormous man, was a permanent shade of florid pink and kept his shaved head shiny. He looked like Mr. Clean’s evil twin.
    “Yeah. There is.” Richards leaned forward. “I don’t know what the hell has been going on up there, but we all know that the Campis off the chain. Well, you go back up there and you tell your friends that I’m headed up there this new quarter, and things are going to be completely different. You make sure you pass the word.” He leaned back in his chair, satisfied.
    All eight of us got the same speech—of course we compared notes. My punishment was ten hours of extra duty.
    I volunteered to work on the special overnight kitchen crew that was needed to produce Thanksgiving dinner. That way I would get all ten hours over in one fell swoop. Pop and the prison foreman she worked for, a well-liked guy whose office was full of plants, took holiday meals seriously. An extra-large team of women prepared turkey, sweet potatoes, collard greens, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, plus Natalie’s pies. I was on pots detail, clad in a rubber apron, giant rubber gloves, and a hairnet. We played the radio, I got a few tastes as we went, and everything was finished despite Pop’s nervousness. (She had only done it for ten years in a row.)
    We worked all night until the sun came up, and I felt pleasantly exhausted. This was the best way to be penitent, to pour my energy into the communal meal that we would all be sharing soon, even though most of us would rather be someplace else. Thanksgiving Day I slept, had a visit with Larry and our friend David, and then ate my fill with Toni and Rosemarie—it was easily the best meal of the year. The feast was somewhat marred when the quiet Spanish mami sitting next to me burst into tears in the middle of dinner and proved inconsolable.
    I ALWAYS thought I was an Episcopalian. I didn’t realize it, but I had really been raised to follow the ethos of Stoicism—the Greco-Roman answer to Zen. Many people on the outside (especially men) had admired my stoicism when I was on my way to prison. According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like this:
    In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires.
    Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. But how to reconcile it with one’s insatiable need for other people? Surely my desire for connection, for intimacy, for human touch was not “mundane”? The very worst punishment that we can come up with short of death is total isolation from other humans, the Supermax, Seg, solitary, the Hole, the SHU.
    The truth is, I was having trouble being a good stoic. I couldn’t resist life’s emotional flow and pulse, or the imperfect people I found so vital. I kept on throwing myself into the current, although once in I could usually stay calm and keep my head above water.
    Still I had to wonder, why had my need to transgress taken me so far, to a prison camp? Perhaps I was just dense, unable to understand these things from a distance but instead intent on scorching myself face to the fire, burning off my eyelashes. Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world? The vilest thing I had located, within myself and within the system that held me prisoner, was an indifference to the suffering of others. And when I understood how rotten I had been, what would I do with myself, now that I was revealed as wretched, not just in private but in public, in a court of law?
    If there was one thing that I had learned in the Camp, it