Orange Is the New Black

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 allabout 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 meinstant 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. Unicormanufactures a wide range of products that are then sold within the government