Orange Is the New Black

its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.
    So I became obsessed with the almost daily departures and found myself asking
Who’s going home this week?
I kept a running tally in my mind, and if I liked the person, I would head up to the front door of the visiting room after breakfast to wave them off, a ritual observed by a gaggle of prisoners for every departure. It was bittersweet to watch them leave, because I would have given anything to be going with them. People planned their going-home outfit, which someone from the outside would ship to Receiving and Discharge (R&D) for them; their friends would prepare a special meal; and they would start to give away all their stuff—commissary clothing and “good” uniformsand blankets and other things of value that they had accumulated while doing their time. I fantasized about giving all my stuff away.
    Watching people arrive was less pleasant but also interesting. I certainly felt bad for them, but my regard was tinged with a funny little sense of superiority, because at least I knew more about the workings of the Camp than they did and thus had a leg up. This impulse was often proved wrong when someone turned out to be returning to Danbury after violating the terms of their probation—they would often march right into the counselors’ office and ask for their old bunkie and job assignment back. I knew that as many as two-thirds of all released prisoners are locked up again, a fact that mystified me at first—there was no way they would get me back in prison. Ever. And yet… no one ever seemed surprised to see a familiar face return to Danbury.
    “Self-surrenders” who came to the Camp were easy to spot. They were usually white and middle-class and looked totally overwhelmed and scared to death. I would ask myself,
Did I look that wigged out?
and then I’d go get them some of the extra shower shoes and toothpaste I now kept stashed in my locker for such occasions.
    But most new arrivals had been in custody for a while, sometimes since their initial arrest if they had not been granted bail or couldn’t make the bail payment, and they were coming from county jails or from federal jails, called MCCs or MDCs—metropolitan correctional centers or metropolitan detention centers. The county jails were described to me as universally nasty, full of drunks, prostitutes, and junkies—not up to the standards of us
federales.
No shock then that the women arriving at Danbury from county usually looked fried. They seemed happy to get to Danbury because the conditions were better—that depressed me.
    Also intriguing were the women like Morena who had “earned” their way up the hill from the high-security FCI to the minimum-security Camp—in theory, the really hardened and potentially dangerous criminals. They were always very composed in terms of physical appearance—hair done and uniforms just so, with their own name andreg number embossed on the shirt pocket. (Campers didn’t get that.) They never looked scared. But they were often freaked out because they were unaccustomed to as much “freedom” as we were afforded, and they reported that there was far less to do in the Camp in the way of programs and recreation. In fact many of them were miserable in the Camp and wanted to go back to max lockup. One woman, Coco, marched right into the counselors’ office and explained that she couldn’t handle the freedom, and would they please send her back down the hill, because she didn’t want to lose her good time due to an escape attempt. I heard that the truth was she couldn’t stand to be apart from her girlfriend, who was still down in the FCI. Coco was sent back the next day.
    S PRING WAS coming slowly to the Connecticut hills, and we were starting to shake off the cold. Being cooped up with so many “wackos” was affecting my worldview, and I feared that I would return to the outside world a bit cracked too. But I was learning something every day, resolving some new subtlety or mystery through observation or instruction.
    The track by the field house gym was now mush, but I slogged determinedly