Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

As we headed into the Loop, I tried to anticipate how best to handle myself at the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center, aka federal jail, where people are typically held before their cases are resolved-unless, like Lil’ Kim, they do all their time there. Jae had been locked up in the Brooklyn MCC for two years before coming to Danbury and had described that situation as far better than what we experienced in Oklahoma City. “Two units in Brooklyn, about two hundred females, and you could have a job and everything, there was stuff to do. In Chicago MCC you’ll be able to fade back, hook up with someone normal, and just lay low, probably even get in a different unit or dorm than your codefendants.”

We were driven into the base of a tall, triangular fortress on a city block in the crowded Chicago Loop. Unloaded from the van, shuffled into an elevator, we were deposited in a filthy, decrepit, and disorganized R &D. The building was disorienting; the floor felt tiny and even more constricting because it was cluttered. It was lined with holding cells, populated by men in orange, most of them brown-skinned. We were quickly locked into an empty holding cell, also filthy.

During the next five hours I paced the cell and tried to ignore the sisters. They were polite and did not say much, seeming to give deference to my coiled, stymied rage. After several hours I was lying prone on a hard narrow bench, practicing nothingness, and Nora cleared her throat.

“Piper?”

“What?”

“Do you even know Jonathan Bibby?”

“NO.”

Several moments passed in silence. “You must be pissed.”

“YEAH.”

A female guard issued us ill-fitting orange men’s jumpsuits. Mine snapped up the front and had short sleeves and weirdly cropped legs, like convict clamdiggers. I had almost made it through the year without lapsing into total cliché but had now missed the mark. Finally, it seemed that they would escort us to our resting place for the night. I was so goddamned tired, I assumed anything would be an improvement over this filthy, uncomfortable cell, especially if it was far away from Nora.

The three of us rode in silence up in the elevator to the twelfth floor. We exited through clanging security gates, until the last gate slid open to reveal the women’s unit.

Psych ward. That was my overwhelming first impression. Dueling televisions blared at opposite sides of the small room. A cacophony of voices vibrated in the close, crowded space. Women, disheveled and stooped, blinked at us like moles. Although there was nothing playful about the place, it had an infantilized, nursery-school vibe. As we entered, everything seemed to stand still, and every eye turned to us. A guard in an ill-fitting uniform, who telegraphed “ineffectual,” approached us. He seemed utterly surprised by our arrival. I turned and looked at Nora and Hester, and then I started to laugh, a disbelieving and desperate laugh. In an instant, the iceberg between me and my codefendants melted. “Oh, hell, no!” And they laughed too, with relief and recognition, and I saw the same look of disbelief mixed with disgust and exhaustion in their eyes. They were in the same boat as me. And right here and now, all of a sudden I knew that they were all I had.

Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey.

We huddled together for a moment while chaos reigned around us, and it occurred to me that they probably knew nothing at all about the last ten years of my life, including the very fact that I was incarcerated. They had both gone to prison before me.

And that’s how we broke the ice. “Is Kentucky like this?” I asked Hester.

“Nope.”

“ Dublin?”

“Hell no. Where are you?”

“ Danbury. And it’s nothing like this freak show.”

The officer reappeared, with housing assignments. We were shown to our respective cells and locked down. My new roommate Virginia weighed 350 pounds and snored like nothing I had ever heard before. It was like there was a wild, rabid animal in the bunk below me. As I tossed and turned on the plastic mattress, trying to cover my head with the pillow, I realized that this was what Pop meant when she said “real prison,” as in “You girls don’t have any idea what real prison is like.” I remembered a college professor who had told me that lack of sleep, or sleep only in short intervals, will eventually bring on hallucinations.

Virginia was an amateur astrologer who rarely showered. She informed me that she was planning on defending herself in court. When I refused to tell her my birth date so she could “do my chart,” she was deeply insulted. I thought of Miss Pat and Miss Philly, two of the more unstable women back in Danbury, and remembered to tread very lightly with crazy people. The next day my initial impression of the unit was confirmed when I realized that a significant percentage of its occupants were under court-ordered psychiatric observation. This was darkly humorous, as the prisoners in Chicago had little to no contact with prison staff or counselors of any stripe-the inmates really seemed to run this asylum.

I also gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status-their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime. This made their lives uncertain on every level, and those who were not already crazy were acting pretty wacko, driven nuts by rage and instability. I had been dropped into a snake pit. Virginia warned me, “See Connie over there?” She indicated a catatonic-looking woman. “She’s gonna ask you for your razor. Promise me you won’t give it to her! She’s only dangerous to herself, don’t worry.” I promised.

None of the accepted rules of prison behavior that I had learned seemed to apply here. There was no welcome wagon with shower shoes and a toothbrush; there was no understanding of inappropriate or verboten questions; there was no sense of solidarity or recognition of the sanity-saving value of personal routine or order or self-respect. Goddammit, you couldn’t even rely on the tribe system-the white women weren’t worth a damn. Most of them were drooling on meds to keep them from killing themselves (or their neighbors).

My de facto tribe was Nora and Hester (who was going by her given name of Anne these days). At least they understood the official and unofficial rules of incarceration. Warily I sat down with them and slowly began to feel out the situation, including what each of us knew about the upcoming trial and exactly why this place was so freaking miserable. They too were staggered by how awful the Chicago MCC was; we agreed that it was hard to believe it was a federal facility. There was enormous ground for the three of us to cover just on the prison front, but that wasn’t really what I was interested in. I wanted Nora to cop to ratting me out and to tell me why she did it.

FINALLY WE met what passed for the Welcome Wagon-Crystal. Crystal was a tall, skinny black woman in her fifties and the de facto mayor of the women’s unit. She appeared to be perfectly sane and was in charge of issuing uniforms and basics to new arrivals. She led us to a jumbled closet, where she began burrowing in boxes for more orange uniforms and some towels. They were short on underpants, and she handed me two pairs. I looked at them. “ Crystal, these are… not clean.”