This last she muttered out of the corner of her mouth in the prison mumble everyone mastered in their first few days. CO Polsen was always looking at women “queer,” when he wasn’t outright touching or threatening to touch us.

Polsen was one of the CO’s that I tried to avoid, but of course the guards had enormous power in our lives. If they took a dislike to you they wrote you up—gave you a ticket, which could result in anything from a loss of commissary privileges to a stint in segregation. Women they liked they brought gifts for, ranging from better cosmetics than you could get in the commissary to drugs. But the women they liked had to pay a price for that attention. Rohde, sleeping with one of the Iscariots, wasn’t the only CO having sex with the inmates.

One of the hardest things to take during my time at Coolis was the constant sexual harassment. It was verbal, it was physical, it was incessant. Many of the CO’s, not just Rohde, put their hands on your ass when you were waiting in line for dinner. When they searched you after you had a visitor, they would linger a long time on your breasts. I had to learn to hold myself very still, very aloof, not act on the impulses of a lifetime to break an arm or separate a rib. If I saw something blatant I tried to photograph it with my wrist–camera, but it was the language as much as the behavior that was demeaning. It was hard to accept the abuse passively, and it fueled both my rage and my fear.

Morrell brought me the wrist–camera from the Unblinking Eye on my second Sunday in Coolis. In the crowd of women and children in the visitors’ room, we managed to exchange my wristwatch for the camera model. I now had a watch that could take pictures, although I hated seeing mine go out the door with Morrell—my father’s mother gave it to him when he graduated from the police academy fifty–five years ago.

The tiny camera had cost over fourteen hundred dollars. Freeman was paying my bills while I was locked up, but I wondered how I’d ever pay him back—my prison time wasn’t a good advertisement to clients.

At least the camera made me feel a modicum of control over the crazy world I was inhabiting. I started taking pictures of some of the worst outrages I saw, but I would have needed the video model I took to Georgia to capture the verbal abuse.

“Looking good, Cream,” CO Polsen said as I came into the rec room a few days later. “Like to see you in shorts. I bet that pussy of yours has seen plenty of action, so I’d fit right in.”