Orange Is the New Black

your long-term prison home, the first thing they’ll want to do is assess your psychiatric state… and prescribe you some drugs. The twice-daily pill line in Danbury was always long, snaking out of the medical office into the hall. Some women were helped enormously by the medication they took, but some of them seemed zombified, doped to the gills. Those women scared me; what would happen when they hit the streets and no longer could go to pill line?
    When I walked through the terrifying gates of the FCI seven months before, I certainly didn’t look like a gangster, but I had agangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs. My overwhelming regret over my actions was because of the trauma I had caused my loved ones and the consequences I was facing. Even when my clothes were taken away and replaced by prison khakis, I would have scoffed at the idea that the “War on Drugs” was anything but a joke. I would have argued that the government’s drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.
    But now, when I looked in dismay at Allie, who was champing at the bit to get back to her oblivion; when I thought about whether Pennsatucky would be able to keep it together and prove herself the good mom that she aspired to be; when I worried about my many friends at Danbury whose health was crushed by hepatitis and HIV; and when I saw in the visiting room how addiction had torn apart the bonds between mothers and their children, I finally understood the true consequences of my own actions. I had helped these terrible things happen.
    What made me finally recognize the indifferent cruelty of my own past wasn’t the constraints put on me by the U.S. government, nor the debt I had amassed for legal fees, nor the fact that I could not be with the man I loved. It was sitting and talking and working with and knowing the people who suffered because of what people like me had done. None of these women rebuked me—most of them had been intimately involved in the drug business themselves. Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suffering. I was the accomplice to their addiction.
    A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to getthere on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.
    V ANESSA ROBINSON was a male-to-female transsexual who had started her bid down the hill in the FCI. Within the confines of the Danbury plantation, her presence was notorious; the COs insisted on calling her “Richard,” her birth name. One day the Camp was abuzz. “The he-she is coming up!!!”
    There was great anticipation of Miss Robinson’s arrival. Some women swore that they would not speak to her; others professed fascination. The West Indian women and some of the Spanish mamis expressed disgust; the born-agains made outraged noises; and the middle-class white women looked bemused or nervous. The old-timers were blasé. “Ah, we used to have a bunch of girls that were trying to go the other way. They were protesters,” said Mrs. Jones.
    “The other way?” I asked.
    “Go from a girl to a boy, always bitching about their medication and bullshit,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.
    I soon got my first glimpse of Vanessa—all six feet, four inches of blond, coffee-colored, balloon-breasted almost-all-woman that she was. An admiring crowd of young women had gathered around her, and she lapped up the attention. This was no unassuming “shim” unfortunately incarcerated and trying to get along; Vanessa was a full-blown diva. It was as if someone had shot Mariah Carey through a matter-disrupter and plunked her down in our midst.
    Diva though she was, Vanessa had the intelligence and maturity to handle her new