Before she left, the intern asked if I was ready to post bail. It was hard to say no, but I wanted to get a look at the clothes shop. I said I’d give it one more week before throwing in the towel.

I was pretty sure at least one CO was going into rooms on our wing after lights out—it was the only explanation I could think of for the banging doors and cries that sometimes woke me in the night. But none of the women ever said anything. There were several pregnancies in the prison, I noticed, among women who had been inside for over a year—in one case six years.

When I asked about it during my letter–writing sessions, the women clammed up. One of them whispered to me in line at dinner later that someone named Cynthia spent a year in solitary for filing a report on a CO who raped her. The prison said she made up the charge to try to shorten her time. After that, people were more afraid than ever to complain. Usually, too, if they got you pregnant they gave you drugs. “They say, oh, your cycle out of balance, you take these. Then you sick for three days, a week, and you lose the baby.”

Chemically induced abortions, in a country that banned RU–486. How enterprising of the Department of Corrections. I wondered who made the diagnosis and who dispensed the drugs, but we had gotten our trays and my informant scuttled across the floor to join her friends.

If Polsen decided to come into my cell after lights–out, what would I do? The thought made me lie tense in bed that night and for some nights after.

Chapter 39: An Audience with Miss Ruby

39 An Audience with Miss Ruby

At the start of my third week I was assigned to a kitchen shift, a miserable job, especially in summer. We lugged fifty–pound pots of food between stove and steam table, carried out mounds of refuse, slipped in grease on the filthy floor, got covered with burns from careless cooks flinging hot food around. The work paid sixty cents an hour. My coworkers were sullen and sloppy and made it harder to keep from getting injured.

The only job action available to Coolis workers was refusal to work. This led to a ticket, and enough tickets sent you to solitary confinement, but usually after your stint in segregation you got a new work assignment. Turnover was high in the kitchen, but I couldn’t afford time in segregation, so I grimly kept at my post.

“This isn’t a vacation resort,” the CO in charge would say if a woman complained of a burn or a sore back. “You should have thought of that before you thought a life of crime was fun. You’re not here for your health, but to learn a lesson.”