People also fought over clothes. You got a replacement bundle only every five years in prison, so a torn shirt or lost button mattered terribly. Women paired off as lovers and had lovers’ quarrels. Various street gangs besides the Iscariots marked territory and tried to control such things as the flow of drugs.

After my fight in the shower room, my roommate became more nervous around me than ever. At least fear made her cut down on her smoking and made her halfheartedly clean out our sink every few days, but I learned she had begged for a transfer, terrified that I would jump her in the night.

Her attitude changed dramatically on my second Thursday, when I returned from my workout to find her bunched up in bed howling with misery.

“Caseworker is trying something with my children,” she screamed when I asked what was wrong. “Moving them to foster care, saying I’m unfit; even if I get out of here I can’t keep them. I love those children. No one can say they ever went to school without socks and shoes. And that caseworker, did she ever come watch me cooking dinner for them? They eat a hot meal every night of the week.”

“You don’t have a mother or sister who could take them in?”

“They’re worse off than me. My mother, she’s been high since the year I start first grade, and my sister, she’s got eight children, she don’t know where they’re at from one end of the week to the next. My aunt down in Alabama, she’d take them if I send them, but the caseworker won’t listen to me about my aunt. And who will give me money for my children’s bus fare if the caseworker’s against me?”

I leaned against the wall—of course we didn’t have a chair. “You could write again, showing that you have a proper home for them to go to and pledging your willingness to go into rehab as part of a plea bargain.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “What do you know about plea bargains and rehab? And how can someone like me who can’t afford a lawyer, how can I get into a rehab program? You think they grow on trees for poor people? The only rehab for someone like me is doing time.”