Orange Is the New Black

little in common with me. I could connect—perhaps with anyone.
    Now here, in my third prison, I perceived an odd truth that held for each: no one ran them. Of course, somewhere in those buildings, some person with a nameplate on their desk or door was called the warden and nominally ran the place, and below them in the food chain there were captains and lieutenants. But for all practical purposes, for the prisoners, the people who lived in those prisons day in and day out, the captain’s chair was vacant, and the wheel was spinning while the sails flapped. The institutions putzed along with the absolute minimum of staff presence, and the staff that were there invariably seemed less than interested in their jobs. No one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons. The leadership vacuum was total. No one who worked in “corrections” appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.
    Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?
    I SLUMPED onto a hard plastic chair, watching BET. The video for Jay-Z’s single “99 Problems” was playing. The grim, gritty black-and-white images of Brooklyn and its hood-life citizens made me feel homesick for a place where I had never even lived.
    My last week in prison was the hardest. If I had been shippedback to Danbury, I would have received a boisterous welcome back into the fold and a hasty, tearful send-off into the outside world. In Chicago I felt terribly alone; separated from all the people and the jubilant going-home rituals I had known in Danbury and had assumed I would one day partake in. I wanted to celebrate my own strength and resilience—my survival of a year in prison—around people who understood me. Instead what I felt was the treacherous anger that takes over when you don’t have one bit of control over your life. The MCC still would not confirm that I would be released on March 4.
    Yet even the BOP can’t stop the clock, and when the day arrived, I was up, showered, and ready. I knew that Larry was in Chicago, that he was coming to get me, but no staff in Chicago had acknowledged that I was going to be released; no paperwork had been shown to me. I was deeply hopeful, but also deeply skeptical, about what would happen that day.
    My fellow prisoners watched the early morning news broadcast of Martha Stewart’s midnight release from Alderson Prison Camp, and soon it was business as usual, with BET music videos battling Lifetime at top volume on the two TVs. I sat on one of the hard benches, watching the guard’s every move. Finally at eleven A.M. the phone rang. The guard picked it up, listened, hung up, and barked, “Kerman! Pack out!”
    I leaped up, rushed to my locker, retrieving only a small manila envelope of personal letters, leaving behind toiletries and books. I was intensely aware that the women I shared the cell with were all at the beginning of their prison journey, and I was at the end of mine. There was no way to give them all the things I now carried in my head and my heart.
    “You can have anything in my locker, ladies. I’m going home.”
    T HE FEMALE guard in R&D explained that they had no women’s street clothes, so she gave me the smallest pair of men’s jeans they had, a green polo shirt, a windbreaker, and a cheap pair of fake-suedelace-up shoes with thin plastic soles. They also provided me with what she called “a gratuity”: $28.30. I was ready for the outside world.
    A guard led me and another prisoner, a young Spanish guy, to an elevator. We looked at each other as we rode down.
    He nodded to me. “How much time you do?”
    “Thirteen months. You?”
    “Twenty.”
    When we got to the bottom, we were in the service entrance. The guard opened the door to the street, and we