Orange Is the New Black

pensions kicked in, although some staffers daydreamed loudly of transferring to other federal agencies, like Forestry. No one quite knew how to take the dramatic Officer Scott development, but when we learned that Cormorant would not be coming back from the SHU, the prisoners who had been around for a long time were not surprised. The BOP had changed her security level, and she’d be down in the high-security FCI for the rest of her sentence.
    Pop said she had seen much worse. “Down on the compound I had a friend, very pretty girl, she was with an officer. So one night he’s on duty, he comes to get her, he takes her in the staff bathroom, he’s doing her. Something happens, he’s gotta rush out, he locks her in the bathroom. She’s in there, and another officer walks in, so she starts to scream.”
    They kept her in the SHU for months during the internal investigation. They shot her full of psych drugs—she blew up like a balloon. When they finally let her out, she was a zombie. “It took a long time for her to get back to herself,” Pop said. “They do not play here.”
    T HE RIGHTS of a prisoner are so few, so unprotected, and so unenforced that a small minority of prisoners have an urgent need to fight for them at every opportunity. Or they see a way to make some commissary as a jailhouse lawyer. One way or the other. There were only a couple self-appointed legal experts in the Camp. But one was a totally untrustworthy wacko, and the other just wasn’t thatbright, and they both charged for their services. When other prisoners approached me for help writing legal documents, it made me uneasy.
    I flat-out refused to help anyone with anything but a letter. I wasn’t interested in learning how to draft a motion or a writ of habeas corpus or other common jailhouse documents. And I wasn’t going to charge for my help. Very often the people who were seeking some remedy around their sentences were serving the most time, and to me their prospects seemed dismal without a real lawyer. Plus, the stories behind these efforts were often heartbreakingly awful—full of abuse and violence and personal failure.
    When Pennsatucky came to me to ask for help writing a letter to her judge, I was relieved. She had a relatively short sentence of a couple of years but was trying to get an earlier release based on assistance she’d given to the prosecutor. Pennsatucky, like most of the Eminemlettes, always seemed to be looking for a fight. But she was like a lost girl. She talked about her baby’s daddy and her boyfriend but not her family. She had shown me a picture of her sister, but I’d never heard a word about parents. Pennsatucky’s boyfriend visited a couple of times, and her child’s father brought the toddler to see her twice. I wondered what awaited her in the outside world. Pennsatucky drove me crazier than Amy, but I worried about her more.
    She was one of the only people I knew who’d gotten anything positive out of her prison stay: new teeth. When she first showed up from county jail, her front teeth bore the hallmark of crack addiction—they were brown and damaged, and she rarely smiled. But recently, after several sessions with the cheerful little dentist (the only prison medic I liked and thought was competent) and Linda Vega, prisoner hygienist par excellence, she had undergone an amazing transformation. Usually they pulled teeth, but not this time. With sparkling white choppers, Pennsatucky was a very pretty girl, and her Jessica Simpson imitation was even better now that she would plaster a giant fake smile on while she was doing it.
    Pennsatucky and I met in the converted closet that served as theCamp law library, where there was an old beat-up typewriter. “Tell me again what you think this letter needs to say, Pennsatucky?” I asked. She explained the facts of her cooperation, and then said, “And throw some other stuff in there, about how I’ve learned my lesson and shit. You know what to say, Piper!”
    So I wrote about the cooperation, and then I wrote about how she had used the two years she had been incarcerated to think seriously about the consequences of her actions, and how much she regretted them; I wrote about her love for her daughter and what her hopes and dreams were for being a better mother, a good mother; I wrote about how hard she had been working to be a better person; and I wrote about how cocaine had taken away all the things that were most important to her, had hurt her