Orange Is the New Black

sentence, the amount of contact you had with the outside world, and the quality of your life on the outside. And if you resisted finding a place in prison society, you were desperately lonely and miserable.
    Mrs. Jones had been in the Camp longer than any other prisoner but would be going home next year. Her cubicle, a Puppy Program single in the corner of A Dorm next to the outside door, was so cozy we all feared what would happen when it came time for her to leave it. “I like this cube. I get all the fresh air I want, plus I can walk the puppies just like that!” she cackled. During the day I liked to drop by Mrs. Jones’s cube to play with Inky, the Labrador retriever she was training as a service dog. I would sit on the floor and rub Inky’s belly while Mrs. Jones fussed around the cube, showing me photographs of women with whom she had done time or her latest crochet project (she specialized in Christmas stockings), and asking me if I wanted random objects she had squirreled away during her fifteen years in prison.
    Mrs. Jones spent a lot of time down on the track walking Inky, and she was impressed by my running. She was concerned that she was overweight, so she resolved to start running too. “You and me, we’re going to compete!” she would crow, poking my shoulder hard. “We’ll see what you’re made of!” But Mrs. Jones was perilously top-heavy, and after wheezing her way around only one lap, she sat on a bench, heaving for breath. I suggested she try speedwalking instead. This she found manageable and would huff and puff around all morning at top speed, obsessively.
    One day Mrs. Jones came to see me in my cube. I was writing letters up in my bunk. She peeked around the particleboard like a little girl, which I found disconcerting. “What’s up, Mrs. Jones?”
    “Are ya busy?”
    “Not too busy for you, OG. Come on in.”
    She came closer to the bunk bed and whispered conspiratorially, “I got a favor to ask ya.”
    “Shoot.”
    “You know I’m in the college class, right?”
    The class was a basic business course, taught by a pair of professors who came in from a nearby accredited college. It didn’t mean much in terms of getting one closer to a college degree (for that you needed to pay for correspondence courses), but it did count toward “program” credit with an inmate’s case manager. The case managers were tasked with managing the completion of our sentences, which meant recalculating our “good time” (we were supposed to serve only 85 percent of our sentences if we earned good time), collecting fines from our inmate accounts (if you couldn’t pay fines, you wouldn’t get good time), and assigning our “program” activity, including mandatory reentry classes. The “programs” available to Campers were feeble and few. The college class was one of the only options, but after reading over and helping to revise a number of women’s homework assignments, I was skeptical about the class’s usefulness. Camila’s business plan for a Victoria’s Secret competitor, for example, was entertaining but highly hypothetical and totally unrelated to what she might be doing when she got out of this human warehouse in five years.
    “How’s it going, Mrs. Jones?”
    She explained that it was not going so well. She had received a bad grade on her business plan. The OG was worried. “I need a tutor. Will ya help me? We have a paper due on a movie we saw. I’ll pay you.”
    “Mrs. Jones, you will not pay me anything. Of course I’ll help you. Bring me your stuff, and let’s look at it together.”
    When I agreed to help the OG, I had in mind a typical student-tutor relationship; I would talk to her about her assignments, ask thought-provoking questions, and review and correct her work. She came back with her notebook and papers and a book that she put on my bed:
Managing in the Next Society
by Peter Drucker.
    “What’s this?”
    “Our textbook. Ya gotta read it.”
    “No, Mrs. Jones,
you
have to read it.”
    She looked at me, anguished and pleading. “It gives me a headache.”
    I remembered that in addition to being nutty from having been locked up for well over a decade, Mrs. Jones was reputed to have had a few screws knocked loose by her abusive husband.
    I frowned. “Let’s take a look at your paper that’s due, the one about the movie.”
    This provoked another anguished look. “
You
need to write it, I can’t do it! They didn’t like my last paper,” she said,