Orange Is the New Black

There’s Angela’s parents—he always drops her mom off before he parks, she’s got a bad hip.”
    Visitors had to fill out a form stating that they had no firearms or narcotics on their person. The CO would then check the inmate’s list to be sure that the visitor’s name was on it. You had to hope that the list was up to date, something that was completely dependent on the inmate’s counselor. Did he do his paperwork? Had he bothered to turn it in? If not, tough shit. It didn’t matter who your visitor was or how far they had come to see you—they were not getting in. Larry told me how painful it was to watch every visitor—old or young, street punk or fancy yuppie—have to suck it up and kiss the prison guard’s ass in the hope of culling some sort of favor. The power games that fueled so much of the prisoner-guard experience extended to the visiting room.
    Larry came to see me every week, and I lived for those visits—they were the highlight of my life in Danbury, a chest-filling affirmation of how much I loved him. My mother drove six hours round-trip until I begged her to come every other week. I saw more of her during the eleven months I was at Danbury than I had in all my previous adult years.
    Yoga Janet and Sister Platte always had lots of visitors, aging counterculture hipsters and rosy-cheeked lefties in homespun Guatemalan cottons, respectively. Sister Platte was frustrated by the BOP’s effective censorship of her visiting list—international peace figures had tried to gain permission to visit her and had been denied.
    Some women never got visits because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody. Some of them were halfway around the world from home, and some of them didn’t have a home. Some women stated flatly that they did not want their people to see them in a place like this. In general, the longer you were down, the fewer and farther between were your visits. I worried about my bunkie, Natalie, finishing her eight-year bid; she spoke to her young son on the phone every night and received many letters but didn’t have a single visit in the year we lived together. I observed the unspoken privacy wall we erected between us in our seven-by-ten-foot space, and never asked.
    A LTHOUGH EACH day often seemed endless, now each week came to an end before I expected it, hastened by visiting hours. I was remarkably lucky to have a visit from someone on Thursday or Friday, and also on Saturday or Sunday. This was a function of Larry and my mother’s commitment, plus that of a large stock of friends in New York who were eager to come see me. Larry juggled my complex visiting schedule with cruise-director aplomb.
    When my counselor Butorsky suddenly left, I feared another bureaucratic nightmare. He reportedly preferred early retirement to submitting to the will of Warden Deboo, a much youngernon-“northern” female, and he was replaced with another “lifer,” Mr. Finn, who was also nearing the twenty-year mark at the prison. Finn immediately made enemies among the Camp prisoners and staff by demanding a private office and harassing the orderlies about the quality of their floor-waxing. When he moved into his fancy private office, he placed a brass nameplate on the door. Of course, the damn thing disappeared immediately, which resulted in an army of COs coming in to shake down the Camp. They would not rest until Officer Finn’s nameplate was found!
    “You out of the frying pan and into the fire, bunkie,” said Natalie, who knew Finn from previous years down the hill. “That man is nothing nice. At least Butorsky did his paperwork. Finn hates paperwork.”
    This stressed me out, given the extensive visiting-list-juggling I was trying to perform. But my blond hair and blue eyes stood me in good stead, just as they had with Butorsky. Mr. Finn was automatically inclined to like me, and when I approached with a new visitor’s form and a timid request that maybe he would grant a special visit or shift my list around as Mr. Butorsky had done, he snorted.
    “Gimme that. I don’t give a shit how many people you have on your visiting list. I’ll put ’em all on.”
    “You will?”
    “Sure.” Finn looked me up and down. “What the fuck are you doing in here? We don’t see women like you much.”
    “Ten-year-old drug offense, Mr. Finn.”
    “What a waste. It’s a waste for half of you people up in this Camp. Most of you drug