Orange Is the New Black

her birthday in the Camp. But Pom-Pom still drew on a deep reserve of good humor, which she’dneeded to survive her life so far. She sent me a list of people she wanted me to give her good wishes—her bunkie, Jae, the remaining garage girls—and a heartfelt pep talk on how to make it to my own release. She closed, “Love always, Pom-Pom.”
    It was the strangest feeling ever, but I wished that Pom-Pom was back with us in prison. I was scared for her out there. At least in the BOP ghetto the perimeter guards were the only ones armed with guns, and they never got out of their trucks.
    “Piper?” Amy peeked around my cube doorway. I didn’t usually allow company up in my cube, preferring to do my visiting out in the common areas.
    “What’s up, Monster?” I had started calling Amy “the little monster” back when we worked together in electric. It was a deserved nickname, as she was foul-mouthed and foul-tempered and disrespected just about everyone and everything. But I loved Amy in spite of myself, and she made me laugh. She wanted to be so tough, and she was in a street-urchin way, but I thought of her as a spitting, hissing kitten that you could hold at arm’s length by the scruff of its neck. Still, kittens have sharp claws and teeth.
    Now Amy rushed to the side of my bunk and scrambled up on my footstool. I could see she was upset. She was supposed to go home before me, to upstate New York. I knew there was uncertainty waiting for her at home too, though not as dire as Pom-Pom’s situation. For several weeks she had been trying to sort out her living and work arrangements over the phone, and she was stressed out. She was trying to get hold of her father with increasing desperation, and having trouble with the phone system. As she explained her frustration, the words spilled out faster and faster, until she choked on them, hiccupping.
    “Come up here, Amy.” I made room on my bed, and she scrambled up. “I’m sorry things are uncertain right now. It’s going to be okay, you’re going to be home soon.” I put my arm around her while she cried.
    She buried her head in my lap. “I want my daddy!”
    I shushed her and patted the blond curls she was so proud of, andinside I grieved angrily over the insanity of locking up children, and then returning them to neighborhoods that were more desperate and dangerous than jails.
    I SAW on the callout that I was scheduled to spend my afternoon in a mandatory prerelease class on housing, and my blood pressure started to rise. All federal prisoners are required to go through a series of prerelease classes before they reenter society. This made perfect sense. Many of the women in Danbury had been cloistered away in prison for years, and despite the harshness of being institutionalized, it was also infantilizing. The idea that they were going to hit the ground running and be able to cope with the day-to-day requirements of life “on the outs” was ridiculous.
    I had been pretty curious about what the reentry classes would convey to us. The first one I was required to attend was on health. I showed up in the visiting room at the appointed time; chairs had been set out for twenty women, and a CO who worked in food services down in the FCI was there to lead it. I leaned over and asked Sheena, seated next to me, why he was teaching.
    “He used to play professional baseball,” she replied by way of explanation.
    I thought about that for a minute, as if there were any sense to it. “But why is someone from Danbury teaching this class—and why not someone from health services?” Sheena rolled her eyes at me. “Are all the classes taught by the prison staff? They don’t work on the outside, with ex-offenders. They spend all their time here. What do they know about reentry?”
    “Pipes, you’re looking for logic in all the wrong places.”
    The guy from food services was very nice and very funny. We liked him a lot. He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn’t tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn’t tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn’t recommend any solutions forbehavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn’t say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by