I finished my own breakfast and mentally reviewed everything I knew about pretrial criminal procedure. I’d never actually been employed by the Innocence Project, of course, but I’d put in enough volunteer hours there to pick up a working knowledge of criminal law. Enough hours that the local office director was willing to let me claim it as employment on my résumé. Anyway, you didn’t need to know the answers to be a good lawyer; you only needed to know which questions to ask. I had this.

It hit me then. I didn’t have to pretend to be a warrior to survive here in Valhalla. Because a lawyer was a warrior.

A BELL CLANGED at the end of breakfast, and the inmates filed off to their assigned jobs in the kitchen or the laundry or the workshop. A guard stood at the door scanning the crowd. Not a guard, I reminded myself, a CO. His eyes landed on me, and he crooked a finger. “You,” he shouted. “Come with me.”

He was a white man with a scrawny neck and an Adam’s apple that protruded like a tumescent organ. I got up and followed him uneasily. He took me by the elbow, bony fingers digging in, and led me out of Pod C and down a long corridor. He stopped at an unmarked door. A broom closet? I wondered, and I wondered next if this would be my introduction to prison rape. I looked him up and down. I was pretty sure I could take him in a fight.

He opened the door. It wasn’t a darkened broom closet; it was a small office under the glare of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Three women in street clothes sat at three of the four metal desks. One of them was on the phone and the other two were peering at the screens of their last-generation computers. Against one wall was a bank of gray metal filing cabinets.

“Here she is,” the CO announced.

The woman on the phone clapped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you type?”

“Yes,” I said, startled.

“Then sit there.” She pointed to the empty desk.

The CO left, and I sat down. It seemed that my work assignment was to assist these clerical employees with typing and filing and photocopying. While the other inmates did the dirty work of the jail, I would spend my days here, in a comfortable chair, in a clean office, with the thermostat set to a balmy seventy-two degrees. My white-woman privilege might have been useless when it came to raising bail, but I knew it was the only reason I’d landed this plum work assignment.

It turned out that jail was a business, with business records to process. It issued purchase orders and received invoices and maintained inventories of supplies just like any other business. And because the jail workshops made products for sale, there were also finished-goods inventories and shipping documents and records of the payments remitted to the county. There was the prisoner payroll, too, such as it was, at an average wage of forty-five cents an hour. My own wages were set at sixty-two cents an hour, a nod to my superior skill set. It meant almost five dollars would be credited to my commissary account at the end of the day: enough, I hoped, to buy a toothbrush. The next day might even earn me a comb.