Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

I wasn’t allowed to be a dog trainer, but surely the right job for me was here somewhere? Danbury had a distinct labor hierarchy, and I was at the bottom of it. I wanted to teach in the GED program, which was overseen by a staff teacher and augmented by prisoners who were “tutors.”

The handful of middle-class, educated prisoners with whom I often ate meals warned me against it. Although the program’s female staffer was well liked, they said the combination of a bad program with captive and often surly students made for a crappy work environment. “Not a pleasant experience!” “Cluster fuck.” “I copped out after a month.” It sounded like my friend Ed’s job teaching public high school in New York City. Nevertheless I requested the job, and Mr. Butorsky, who controlled assignments, said that should work out just fine. As it turned out, he was not as good as his word.

One morning my A &O pal Little Janet found me and said, “We have jobs!” We were assigned to the electric shop, in Construction and Maintenance Services. I was disappointed. What about teaching-feeding the hungry minds of the downtrodden, which were waiting to break free?

The mandatory GED program had been temporarily shut down. The two classrooms had been overrun with a virulent toxic killer mold that crawled over textbooks, walls, and furniture and made many people sick. The inmate teachers had reportedly sneaked samples of the mold to a sympathetic outsider for analysis and filed a grievance. The staff teacher had sided with the prisoners, to the fury of prison management. The students were gleeful about the shutdown, most of them not wanting to be there in the first place. So it was voltage for me instead.

The next day Little Janet and I followed the other CMS workers out into the March chill to a big white school bus parked behind the chow hall. After more than a month of being trapped in the confines of the Camp, the bus ride was exhilarating. We rode around to the back of the FCI and were deposited amid an assembly of low buildings. These were the CMS shops-garage, plumbing, safety, construction, carpentry, grounds, and electric, each housed in its own building.

Janet and I entered the electric shop, blinking in the sudden dimness we found there. The room had a cement floor half-filled with chairs, many broken; a desk with a television sitting on it; and blackboards where someone was keeping a large hand-drawn monthly calendar, crossing off the days. There was a refrigerator and a microwave and a feeble-looking potted plant. One alcove was caged off and brightly lit, filled with enough tools to stock a small hardware store. An enclosed office had a door plastered with union stickers. My fellow prisoners grabbed all the functional seats. I sat on the desk next to the TV.

The door banged open. “Good morning.” A tall, bearded man with buggy eyes and a trucker hat strode through to the office. Joyce, who was friendly with Janet, said, “That’s Mr. DeSimon.”

About ten minutes later DeSimon emerged from the office and took roll call. He sized up each of us as he read out our names. “The clerk will explain the tool room rules,” he said. “Break the rules, you’re going to the SHU.” He went back into the office.

We looked at Joyce. “Are we going to do any work?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It just depends on his mood.”

“ Kerman!” I jumped. I looked at Joyce.

She widened her eyes at me. “Go in there!” she hissed.

I cautiously approached the office door.

“Can you read, Kerman?”

“Yes, Mr. DeSimon, I can read.”

“Good for you. Read this.” He dropped a primer on his desk. “And get your convict buddies who are new to read it too. You’ll be tested on it.”

I backed out of the office. The packet was a basic course in electrics: power generation, electrical current, and basic circuitry. I thought for a moment about the safety requirements of the job and looked around at my coworkers with some concern. There were a couple of old hands like Joyce, who was Filipina and sarcastic as hell. Everyone else was new like me: in addition to Little Janet, there was Shirley, an extremely nervous Italian who seemed to think she was going to be shanked at any moment; Yvette, a sweet Puerto Rican who was halfway through a fourteen-year sentence and yet still had (at most) seventeen words of English at her command; and Levy, a tiny French-Moroccan Jew who claimed to have been educated at the Sorbonne.

For all her preening about her Sorbonne education, Levy was totally useless at our electrical studies. We spent a couple of weeks studying those primers (well, some of us did), at which point we were given a test. Everyone cheated, sharing the answers. I was pretty sure there would be no repercussions to either flunking the test or being caught cheating. It all seemed absurd to me-no one was going to get fired for incompetence. However, simple self-preservation demanded that I read and remember the explanations of how to control electric current without frying myself. This was not how it was all going to end for me, sprawled in polyester khaki on linoleum, with a tool belt strapped to my waist.

ONE SNOWY day just a week later we reported to the electric shop after lunch to find DeSimon jingling the keys to the big white electric shop van. “ Kerman… Riales… Levy. Get in the van.”

We trundled out and climbed in after him. The van sped down a hill, past a building that housed a day care for the children of COs, and through a cluster of about a dozen little white government houses where some COs lived. We often spent our workdays changing exterior light bulbs or checking the electric panels in these buildings, but today DeSimon didn’t stop. Instead he pulled off of prison property and onto the main thoroughfare that skirted the institution. Little Janet and Levy and I looked at each other in astonishment. Where on earth was he taking us?

About a quarter mile from the prison grounds, the van pulled up next to a small concrete building in a residential neighborhood. We followed DeSimon up to the building, which he unlocked. A mechanical din came from inside.

“What ees this place, Mr. DeSimon?” asked Levy.

“Pump house. Controls water to the facility,” he replied. He looked around the interior, and then locked the door again. “Stay here.” And with that he climbed into the van and drove away.

Little Janet, Levy, and I stood there outside the building with our mouths open. Was I hallucinating? Had he really just left us here in the outside world? Three uniformed prisoners, out and about-was this some sort of sick test? Little Janet, who before Danbury had been locked up for over two years in extremely poor conditions, looked like she was in shock.

Levy was agitated. “What ees he sinking? What eef people see us? Zey will know we are prisoners!”

“There is no way that this is not against the rules,” I said.

“We’re gonna get in trouble!” Little Janet wailed.

I wondered what would happen if we left. Obviously we would be in massive trouble and be sent to the SHU and probably catch a new charge for “escape,” but how long would it take them to nab us?

“Look at zeez houses! Oh my god… a school bus! Aieee! I mees my children!” Levy started to cry.

I felt terrible for anyone who was separated from her children by prison, but I also knew that Levy’s kids lived nearby and that she would not allow them to come visit her because she didn’t want them to see her in prison. I thought this was horrible and that for a kid the unpleasantness of the prison setting would be more than offset by the eyewitness reassurance that their mother was okay. Anyway, I wanted Levy to stop crying.