I was exhausted, I was sick to my stomach, my shoulders were sore, but I couldn’t sleep. It terrified me to be locked inside a room, subject to the whims of men—or women—in uniform. All night I lay rigid on a narrow mattress as prayers and shouts hurtled through the corridor. I am strong, and a skilled street fighter, but the misery and madness around me kept swooping toward mob hysteria. Like telephone poles dipping past a train, swooping down, veering away just as you were sure they would hit you. Every now and then I dozed off, but then a cell door would slam, a woman would scream or cry out, my neighbor would mutter in her sleep, and I would jerk awake again. I was almost happy when a corrections officer came around at five to rouse us all for breakfast and the day’s first head count.

Chapter 35: A Little Game on a Small Court

35 A Little Game on a Small Court

All day sunday I tried signing up for phone privileges, but I wasn’t able to get a time slot until Monday afternoon. All day Sunday I fumed uselessly about my incarceration. I was furious at being locked up—as were many of the people around me. The level of rage was so high that the building could have exploded at any time. Everywhere we went guards watched us behind double–thick glass, or behind TV monitors, tracking the furies and the fights before the corridors turned incandescent.

The calmest women were those who’d been in the jail wing for some months, waiting for trial. These were the people who either had been denied bail—or more commonly didn’t have a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars to post it. For half a dozen or so women, this marked the second Independence Day they’d spent in jail. They had gotten used to the routine and were more or less at ease with it, although they worried about their children, their lovers, sick parents, whether they’d still have a place to live if they got off the charge that had brought them here in the first place.

A jail is a place where someone awaits trial. A prison is where you go if you’ve been convicted and sentenced. Coolis was the great experiment in combining the two places for cost–saving reasons. And while the jail was technically separate from the prison, one of the ways Carnifice saved money was by combining as many functions as possible. We jailbirds ate with the prisoners and used the same common room for recreation.