The lady at the halfway house said, Sonia, why don’t you work in a prison? I worked in a prison, she said, state penitentiary — good pay, better than a cop, just think of it. You take some tests — you have to get a certain percentage. The session’s only four or five hours long, she said, and if you pass, you can get a job as a correctional officer.

I thought, Sounds good to me. Maybe one day this sucker will walk through the prison doors and there I’ll be. I’ll say, What took you so long?

WITH THE MEN

Two prisons called me for an interview — Jasper City, a women’s prison, and Onakona State Penitentiary, with the men.

At Jasper City, the warden asked me questions at a long table in a big room. She said she’d let me know. Then, at Onakona, they hired me on the spot. I did the drug test, piss test, blood test. I went to their academy where a lot of information was given. I got my certificate and went to work.

I’d respond to codes, take down my fair share. I’d get right in the middle of a knife fight. I done it. I did all right. I was fit and strong. Sometimes I could get more done, being a woman.

Not many females working at a maximum, so the inmates — you can’t blame them. Sexual misconduct, flashing their dicks. You write them up, you ignore it. I’d worked at the racetrack all those years. I was used to it.

I had to watch them in the showers, stark ass naked. I didn’t gloat in it. They put you there. You did what you had to do.

I didn’t get embarrassed, or if I did, I didn’t show it.

LA VEDETTE

You see some really tough stuff. You see all kinds of nonhuman behavior. After a while it makes you a different person. It makes you kind of cold.

There was a lot of dirty staff — harder than the inmates. There were officers who did sadistic things to their wives and kids. There were prisoners serving twenty years for a marijuana cigarette, yet officers would smoke dope in the parking lot on their lunch break.

You see the prisoners who get preyed on continuously — the little guys, the ones with mental problems. The officers don’t care if they take their meds or not. They like to let them go around paranoid, scared to death. You see the inmates try to hang themselves. Some did hang themselves.

Somebody gets raped on a stairwell or strong-armed out of the money his family sent him — no one cares. Everything’s a hustle, a hustle, a hustle. You see a lot, and some of it stays with you.