Orange Is the New Black

the Camp, the bus ride was exhilarating. We rode around to the back of the FCI and were deposited amid an assembly of low buildings. These were the CMS shops—garage, plumbing, safety, construction, carpentry, grounds, and electric, each housed in its own building.
    Janet and I entered the electric shop, blinking in the suddendimness we found there. The room had a cement floor half-filled with chairs, many broken; a desk with a television sitting on it; and blackboards where someone was keeping a large hand-drawn monthly calendar, crossing off the days. There was a refrigerator and a microwave and a feeble-looking potted plant. One alcove was caged off and brightly lit, filled with enough tools to stock a small hardware store. An enclosed office had a door plastered with union stickers. My fellow prisoners grabbed all the functional seats. I sat on the desk next to the TV.
    The door banged open. “Good morning.” A tall, bearded man with buggy eyes and a trucker hat strode through to the office. Joyce, who was friendly with Janet, said, “That’s Mr. DeSimon.”
    About ten minutes later DeSimon emerged from the office and took roll call. He sized up each of us as he read out our names. “The clerk will explain the tool room rules,” he said. “Break the rules, you’re going to the SHU.” He went back into the office.
    We looked at Joyce. “Are we going to do any work?”
    She shrugged. “Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It just depends on his mood.”
    “Kerman!” I jumped. I looked at Joyce.
    She widened her eyes at me. “Go in there!” she hissed.
    I cautiously approached the office door.
    “Can you read, Kerman?”
    “Yes, Mr. DeSimon, I can read.”
    “Good for you. Read this.” He dropped a primer on his desk. “And get your convict buddies who are new to read it too. You’ll be tested on it.”
    I backed out of the office. The packet was a basic course in electrics: power generation, electrical current, and basic circuitry. I thought for a moment about the safety requirements of the job and looked around at my coworkers with some concern. There were a couple of old hands like Joyce, who was Filipina and sarcastic as hell. Everyone else was new like me: in addition to Little Janet, there was Shirley, an extremely nervous Italian who seemed to think she was going to be shanked at any moment; Yvette, a sweet Puerto Ricanwho was halfway through a fourteen-year sentence and yet still had (at most) seventeen words of English at her command; and Levy, a tiny French-Moroccan Jew who claimed to have been educated at the Sorbonne.
    For all her preening about her Sorbonne education, Levy was totally useless at our electrical studies. We spent a couple of weeks studying those primers (well, some of us did), at which point we were given a test. Everyone cheated, sharing the answers. I was pretty sure there would be no repercussions to either flunking the test or being caught cheating. It all seemed absurd to me—no one was going to get fired for incompetence. However, simple self-preservation demanded that I read and remember the explanations of how to control electric current without frying myself. This was not how it was all going to end for me, sprawled in polyester khaki on linoleum, with a tool belt strapped to my waist.
    O NE SNOWY day just a week later we reported to the electric shop after lunch to find DeSimon jingling the keys to the big white electric shop van. “Kerman… Riales… Levy. Get in the van.”
    We trundled out and climbed in after him. The van sped down a hill, past a building that housed a day care for the children of COs, and through a cluster of about a dozen little white government houses where some COs lived. We often spent our workdays changing exterior light bulbs or checking the electric panels in these buildings, but today DeSimon didn’t stop. Instead he pulled off of prison property and onto the main thoroughfare that skirted the institution. Little Janet and Levy and Ilooked at each other in astonishment. Where on earth was he taking us?
    About a quarter mile from the prison grounds, the van pulled up next to a small concrete building in a residential neighborhood. We followed DeSimon up to the building, which he unlocked. A mechanical din came from inside.
    “What ees this place, Mr. DeSimon?” asked Levy.
    “Pump house. Controls water to the facility,” he replied. He looked around the interior, and then locked the door again. “Stay here.” And