Tornado Season

A long time ago I lived in Oklahoma. One night about 10pm, I was polishing my dining room floor when I saw on t.v. a storm warning, saying nothing about a tornado. I remembered that a window upstairs was open so I went up to close it. I was standing against the window trying to push it down (stuck double-hung). It was pitch dark. Suddenly I saw the sky turn a sickly green and heard what sounded exactly like a train coming right toward me, RIGHT toward me. Before I could even move, the house started shaking apart. The floor buckled, something crashed through the wall next to me, the ceiling cracked. I fell to the floor, knowing it was a tornado, though I'd never been in one before, and crawled down the stairs while the house shook like crazy. By the time I got to the front door it had stopped. I got the front door open. The front porch was totally demolished and a huge healthy maple tree (3 and 1/2 feet in diameter) that had been growing on my easement was torn out of the ground like a little weed and sent straight through the house like a javelin. The neighbors couldn't believe I was alive. They said I was blessed. I thought it was a warning.

I have come back to Kansas to face my preliminary hearing in two days. Last night, I sat on the porch watching an enormous electrical and rain storm approach from the west, lightning charging over the whole sky. The news gave a tornado warning for the town over which it was. It told the people there to go to shelter. I stopped watching the news, since there is no cellar in this house, the friend I am staying with is gone for a few days and I know no one else in town nor where a shelter is. Besides, there might not be a warning once it hit here. And it hit here, at least the storm did, all night. It came over and then moved away and then came back. Directly overhead, I heard a lightning bolt hit the ground somewhere down the street. It was like the storm itself was circling this town. I heard a wild cat crying in the distance.

Extradition

After 27 days in county lock-up in California, at 6am a voice bellowed through the intercom, "Price, get up. Gather up everything you have. You're leaving the county." I bolted off my bunk, threw together everything including my court papers, which I had already put into a long plastic envelope, having been warned that if you don't plan ahead to have your court papers ready to stick down your shirt, the guards will make sure you lose them. I folded up the thin, plastic mattress I'd been sleeping on, rolled up my bedding and stuffed both into the big plastic bucket we each had been issued, threw on my clothes and pushed the request-to-unlock button. A loud snap opened my door and I carried my bucket along the mezzanine walkway and down the metal stairs as my fellow inmates slept. They move people early so the others don't get too upset and start something. So people just disappear from time to time. No one mentions it. It's like that person was never there. As I reached the door that exited C Block, it snapped open. A guard yelled to put the mattress one place, the bucket in the stack of buckets. She pointed toward a garbage can and said to throw my bedding in it, as if it had vermin or lice. After all, you never know in a place like that where the inmates tell you to always wear your flip flops in the shower and if you get the slightest infection, demand a major round of antibiotics. Just two days before we heard that one of the other three facilities had been closed - no entering or exiting - because of an outbreak of meningitis. I threw my bedding in the garbage can. She pointed to the long plastic envelope sticking out of my shirt and asked what it was. When I said my court papers, she smiled knowingly. Good call.

The chain around my waist, the padlock, the handcuffs, the male guard, down the yellow line, into the elevator, out back onto the yellow line, a door was opened and I was told to go in and it was shut and locked behind me. No one was inside. There was a shower that didn't work, a sink that didn't work, a toilet that did. A curtain was pulled across a thick pane of glass above a counter that had an open slot below it. No voice through an intercom, no person looking through the glass to tell me what to do. I paced, I stared at the disgusting toilet, I sat on the bench. I waited. Long time. Then a woman guard yanked back the curtain and stuffed a brown paper bag through the slot, then pulled the curtain back closed. Without a word. I opened the bag and there were my clothes, the clothes I had been arrested in, booked in. I was surprised to see them, to see what it was I had worn a month before, totally forgotten. I put them on, figured I was to stuff the jail clothes through the slot. Paced, stared at the toilet, sat on the bench, waited. Long time. The door opened, the male guard was a bit more cordial, didn't order me in a mean voice, just told me to walk ahead of him. The guards and processors behind the desk seemed less uptight with me there. One of them said to sit down in a chair against the wall. To my right were the huge automatic doors that the sheriffs arrived through, that inmates were taken through to buses to go to court. I'd been through it three times. So I sat and watched guards come and go. They all ignored me. It was so nice to be ignored and to wear my own clothes and feel the breeze coming in through that huge wide open door. Did I think about bolting through it and taking my chances? I'll never tell.

A man in a uniform walked past me up to the counter, which was about fifteen feet from me. I didn't notice at first that he was any different from any of the other guards. I was looking back and forth at the coming and going. Then I heard him say, "Hey!" I turned and looked at him. He was facing the counter and the booking guards but his head was turned facing me. I just looked at him; didn't say a word. Cautious. Don't talk unless you know what is happening and I didn't. "Don't you remember me?" he said with a big wide grin. Was this some kind of odd trick? "No..." I said warily. "You don't remember me?" he said, kind of hurt and a bit astonished. I was more astonished. It was only then I realized his shirt was light blue whereas all the other guards' shirts were black. Then I saw on his shoulder a patch that said, "Elk County", which meant Kansas. This was the guy that had come to extradite me. But why was he saying this? I didn't know what the right answer was. I said, "I blanked it out." He said, surprised, "You blanked it out?" I said, "I've blanked a lot of stuff out," and looked around wishing this wasn't happening. Too confusing after 27 days of hell. Then he said, "We had a long conversation once. You don't remember that? I used to own the hardware store/pizza parlor in Longton." I could see the faces of the guards in black behind and around him. They were all biting their lips or looking away with painful watery eyes, dying to burst out laughing. For sure they did later. Yes, this is Kansas. Just exactly what they thought he'd be like. Like the inmates had asked me many times, "When are you going back to Mayberry?" It was a shock of fresh air for me. I was afraid to actually grin but I said far more cheerfully, "I remember the hardware store/pizza parlor. I remember the long conversation. That was you?" "Yeah!" he said happily. Then one of the guards in black handed him his paperwork and he walked over to me. "Stand up," he said. He put handcuffs on my wrists and shackles too tight on my bare ankles. "Ok," he said, happily. "Let's go." A woman joined us. She was wearing two hearing aids. She spoke with that slight slur of the deaf. She helped me into the truck from Kansas they had driven 1800 miles in to pick me up. She was very gentle. She helped me climb up into the high truck seat. I said, "Are you deaf?" having forgotten manners completely. But she seemed ok with it. "Yes," she said gently. I was born deaf so I told her that, which interested her. I told her they had operated on my ears when I was three so I can hear not perfectly but ok. She liked that. Kindred spirits. It helped the drive.

The deputy explained. When a woman is the inmate to be obtained, a woman guard must accompany a male guard so since back in Elk County they didn't employ a woman guard, they sent Dan, this deputy and his wife, Kathy. Made sense. They had been planning to go over to see the Golden Gate Bridge before they picked me up but they got delayed in a blizzard in Wyoming so they just drove through Napa Valley. They could appreciate the vineyards since they were crops, at any rate, being from Kansas. They called the sheriff in Kansas from the truck and told him about it. Dan said Napa Valley was so very beautiful.

Kathy was navigating with a map and the sheriff had lent Dan his personal GPS, which seemed to be on the blink as it suddenly ordered us to make a sharp left while we were flying down 5 in the fast lane and later told us to turn left and then right in a town, ending us up in a bank parking lot. Dan and Kathy therefore bickered, as her directions by the map tended to disagree with Carmen, which is what they called the GPS. They'd been married a long time. They were skilled at bickering and then coming to easy compromises and fall back into happy moods. A good marriage.

Dan said for all the meals but dinner that night he was going to go through drive-throughs so as not to embarrass me in my cuffs and shackles, which was decent of him. I told them how the inmates had told me rumors, that there were three ways an inmate could be extradited. One inmate had experienced one of the ways - a sub-contractor in a Durango had picked her up in Vegas and driven her to our jail. She said there were these Durangos running all over this country, unmarked, moving prisoners here and there. Or I could have been flown. A deputy from Kansas could have flown out, picked me up and taken me back on a commercial airline. I would have had to wear an inmate pokadot dress, cuffs and shackles. That's the one I feared the most since I couldn't imagine how humiliating it would be to have to walk past airline personnel and passengers, to have to enter the plane like that. I didn't think I could handle it and I thought about it a lot. I had decided that if that was the way it was going to go, if I couldn't bear the humiliation, when I entered the plane I was going to yell out, "Free Northern Ireland!" I figured it being San Francisco and me looking (and being partly) Irish, a political prisoner would be looked at with far more sympathy than a typical criminal. But it didn't go that way, luckily. Too complicated, Dan said, these days. You wouldn't believe how complicated it is to get cuffs and shackles through airport metal detectors and security.

Dan said the one meal, dinner that night, they were taking me to a nice restaurant because he knew that I hadn't had a decent meal in a long time. So when evening came, he drove into a truck stop, gassed up and parked by the restaurant with only two cars rather than the one with a lot of cars. I had to wear the cuffs and shackles into the restaurant and already they were hurting. They felt like they were cutting into my ankles. I could only take very short steps. Dan walked ahead and Kathy walked behind me. There were only two men there eating, together. They were Mexican and as I passed them in my shackles their dropped their faces practically down into their plates, their heads were so low. I thought, yeah, this could be you. Don't be so obvious that you're illegal. "Normal" people stared right at me. Such a contrast in behavior; like they say, these two guys "acted guilty". But Dan didn't seem to even notice them or maybe he just ignored them. He wanted me to have a good dinner, after all. He let me order anything I wanted. Such a decent man. Kathy kept assuring me in her soft, sweet voice, that everything was going to be ok. This is the best of Kansas. The funny thing was, Dan really is exactly like Andy Griffith in Mayberry. Wish they all were like that. Maybe an inmate or two would feel guilty about their crimes. Being treated like you're guilty makes you feel innocent because no matter what you've done, it's too harsh to be treated like a rabid animal. So no one repents.

We drove straight through. They changed drivers but although each of them tried to sleep in the back neither one ever could sleep. So they got tired. And they started bickering again. I offered to drive a few times but Dan just laughed. I replied to his laugh, "You speak Spanish, don't you?" or "You like Canada, right?" I just watched the view, the desert and fields during the day and the stars at night, all so beautiful after so much time in a cement and metal cell.

When we stopped and they had to take me to the bathroom, whether in rest stops or truck stops or service stations, the same routine was followed. They walked slowly helping me as I hobbled along, the shackles progressively painful as my ankles and feet were swelling around them. At the ladies' room door, Kathy would go in and count how many women were inside, then come out and tell Dan. Dan would block anyone new's entrance. When every woman had left the bathroom, Dan uncuffed me, leaving on the shackles and Kathy helped me walk inside and into the stall. She'd wait for me by the sinks. Dan would block anybody from entering until I came out. When I got out, usually there was an irritated line behind him but when they saw me their irritation turned to curiosity as he re-cuffed me. Most people were polite, looked away, looked askance. Until we got to a big quick stop somewhere between Oklahoma City and the Kansas border on 35. It started out as usual except by then I could hardly walk it was so badly painful. Every step felt like the shackles were cutting again and again into my skin. We got up to the door of the ladies' room, Kathy went inside and counted. Dan took off my cuffs, Kathy and I went in and then came out. Dan had his back to all the people who were all standing around staring at us. It was strange; no one seemed embarrassed at all to be staring directly at me. Camera phones were snapping pictures of me. Dan said quietly that it would just take a moment. He was keenly aware of how humiliating it was. Suddenly a young woman rushed up behind him. She said to me, "I just want you to know that I love you." I figured she meant that Jesus loves me, it being Oklahoma and Sunday. Maybe in the past I would have thought such a statement was corny but not now. Not after 27 days of being treated so badly and then this terrible humiliation. I said sincerely back, "Thank you." Then she said, "Can I give you a hug?" and started to sort of reach over Dan's shoulder to touch me. Dan wasn't expecting this, his back being to her, but the moment he realized she had started to reach, he shot his left arm out straight to push her back and his right arm forward to push me forward, suddenly and effectively getting me a distance from her. He yelled at her, "Stand back!" and at me, "Move to the truck!" Strangely, very strangely, she tried to come forward again to reach out to me. He yelled louder and more menacingly to her, "I said stand back!" and he motioned to Kathy to rush me to the truck. He kept saying to me to move faster but the shackles were hurting so much I could barely walk. They got me to the truck and up into it and locked the door. Kathy jumped in the back and I saw when Dan got in and started up the truck that his hands were shaking. I said, "What happened? Why did you do that?" He said there are weirdos out there, that she could have had a razor in her hand, she could have cut my throat with one swipe. I knew that he also meant that she could have cut his throat, with his back to her like that. It was strange that she tried that second time but I'll never know. She could well have been a compassionate Christian on a Sunday feeling sympathetically for me. He was angry and shaking as he drove, Kathy was silent. I turned towards the window and started to cry. Nobody said anything for a good long time. I just watched Oklahoma disappear into Kansas and then the terrain turn familiar as we got closer and closer to the place I had lived with my alcoholic husband. Back into his arena. Back into his vengeful mother's influential circle. Every mile closer to another jail, to a future possibly that included prison. I memorized all the rivers' courses, noted where the tree lines were, in case, in case, in case somehow I was able to escape. I imagined how I would follow the rivers back into Oklahoma, how I would run along the tree lines, how I would hide in the trees at night and walk in the water to avoid the K-9's trailing me. And other ideas that I won't tell. You never know. I might need them to be secret some day.

What Jail is Like in California, Part II

On a good day, a voice yells through your intercom at 6:30am to get dressed and come down to the door, that you're going to court. You leap from the bunk, jump into your stripes, socks and sandals and stand at your door, listening for the big click that opens your door automatically. You hurry down the walkway and the metal stairs to the door that lets you out of your block into the guards' hallway. That door then opens, the unlock done by someone you can't see who is watching your movements from the tinted glass room that seems to hang suspended from the ceiling above the guards' desk. It is so nice just to step out into that hallway, an infinitesimal step closer to freedom, though only symbolically. A guard from the desk orders you to go over to the far side and face the wall. From different blocks, two other inmates join you. No explanation is ever made about what is going to happen next. You just wait and you don't know for how long you are going to wait. When they feel like it, they give you only the next instruction. A guard walks up and spits, "Lift your arms," and they feel all over your body for who knows what; at this point a search is ludicrous but they do it anyway. Then they wrap a chain around your waist and lock it with a locker padlock at your back. They put handcuffs on each wrist and lock each one to the chain so you can barely lift your hands from your side. Once each inmate is locked like this, a male guard comes through a door and indicating with a point or a movement of his head, says without looking at you, "Follow the yellow line." As all three of you walk down the line through a hallway, there are random yells behind you to stop and when you stop to face the wall. An elevator opens. You're told to go in. Guards enter with you and exit with you and again it's down the yellow line. Then a door is opened and you are shunted in where other inmates are already waiting. It's the holding cell for court. That is, if you are going to court in that building. You can't talk or laugh in the holding cell with the other inmates; you have to whisper. If you talk, a guard opens the door and angrily warns you how the judge hates to hear inmates talking in their holding cells and if you don't shut up, he'll take you back to the cell and you'll be considered by the court to have failed to appear and a new warrant will be issued for a new charge. Everybody shuts up except the one or two incorrigible inmates who don't give a shit. They keep talking, causing the other inmates to get more and more stressed out and then angry but the incorrigibles won't stop so the stress turns to fear and potential fighting. Mercifully, your name is finally called to come out and you're told to stand against yet another cement wall. Suddenly the door next to you opens and you feel yourself shoved through it up to a podium that is just an inch or two on the other side of the door and just on the other side of it is the beautiful, wood-paneled court room with a judge and lawyers and an audience all in the middle of their typical day. It is an astonishing reality switch after so many days in lock-up. The judge formally announces to your scared heart the charges against you and then asks if you want a court-appointed attorney. I was so shaken I didn't know what to reply. I felt like everything was disjointed and I just looked around the room saying nothing. I saw my brother sitting in the audience with his best friend John and both of them were looking at me with terribly upset expressions. I felt so humiliated and ashamed standing there in prison clothes wearing the chain and lock around my waist and handcuffs on my wrists. Later the other inmates told me that my judge, the one who so coldly had announced the charges against me, herself was wearing an ankle bracelet, having have been convicted of doing meth with a minor boy. "Who the hell does she think she is, judging us?" the inmates all kept repeating. But in that courtroom when I didn't instantly reply, an attorney or clerk or something stepped quickly up next to me and whispered, "Say yes," so I looked back at the judge and said, "Yes," weakly. The door opened again behind me and I was pulled backwards by the chain and the door slammed in front of my face and once again I was in the metal and cement hallway and then again in the holding cell, as if the lovely, civilized court room was just a momentary hallucination of the old real world of free, decent people. Hearing charges read against you is a powerful thing; it's so cold and odd and real and you want to yell out, I'm not like this, this is not where I belong, I haven't done this thing you said, but no one is listening and no one would believe you, anyhow. Except the other inmates because they are the only ones that can tell innocence from guilt when they listen to each other tell their stories. And it's the other inmates who tell you flatly how long you can expect to be there, what the stages and steps are. And they talk about their boyfriends, who all sound like absolute losers who have polluted their lives and yet they always say how much they love them and how great these guys have treated them, even when they tell how it was that guy who turned them in or turned State's evidence against them or got them hooked on the drug or beat them up. They share their romantic stories in voices just like they are girls in a pink, flowered bedroom at a slumber party; their usually hard, angry voices become young-sounding again, hopeful, silly, light-hearted. Until the guard opens the door again and tells you again you'd better shut up. Finally he comes and you all are ushered out, down the yellow line, up the elevator, back to the guards' hallway, the chains removed, the cuffs removed, the bodiless voices ordering you back into your block. The other inmates, if they are in "unlock", which is the hour and a half twice a day where they all mingle in a common area that holds the showers, the three collect call phones, the t.v. in a cage and metal tables and benches riveted to the floor, ask you questions about what happened and tell you what will happen next most likely. If they are back in their cells they yell the nickname they have for you - mine was ironically "Kansas" - and tell you to lie down near the vent and everyone lying on their bellies on the cool cement floors of their cells exchange information for a long time through the vents. It's the easiest-going time of the day because nobody gets mad and one by one the voices go silent as everyone falls asleep until the next unlock. And the routine goes back to what it was for the weeks you will now wait again until you go back to court.

If you aren't going to court in that building, it means you are going to court in another town. I was arrested in another town so the second time I went I had to go to court there. Instead of being put into a holding cell, I was escorted down to the entry door, the door I came in when I was first brought there, and told to get into a bus that is divided up in the inside into separate cubicles all with metal mesh walls between them, to keep the inmates apart from each other. Groups of men were all already sitting in there and I was told to go in a small area with three seats, two of which were already taken by two women inmates. It looks exactly like a cattle car. But it was a very very good day because we had to drive from one town to another and it was foggy that day and had been raining so the countryside between the towns was so verdant green and the fog so lovely and I just ignored the other criminals and kept watching through the tiny spaces between the mesh Nature in its incredible beauty outside the bus. Once at the other town, it was basically the same in that jail/courthouse; variations on a theme, if you will. None of that mattered; it was the trip back and forth that day between those two towns. I held on to the beauty of that experience for many days afterward in my cell.

Why Princess-ville

The reason I call my blog Princess-ville is because when I was in jail in California, one of the female guards oddly perceived me as a bit different from the usual inmate (I'm not sure what it was that I said or did to have her think this) and the way she interpreted that difference was interesting. If I asked for something, however minor, however commonly asked for, she would reply, "This isn't the Ritz," or "This isn't Princess-ville." So, from now on I will always think of the world outside jail as this wonderful place called Princess-ville. One day, when I just had to ask for something (it was a request to move me to another cell so that the brain-damaged drug addict who hated me whom I shared a cell with wouldn't kill me), I said to her sincerely, "Listen, I know this isn't the Ritz or Princess-ville but can't I please be moved?" Her reply was to threaten to put me in A Block, followed by a graphic description of A Block, where they put the insane inmates, padded walls, locked up 24/7, video surveillance (which actually is simply a description of jail in Kansas!). So I dropped the request. At any rate, this is Princess-ville.

The Indus Valley Script

I am a professional palaeographer. My specialty is undeciphered scripts of the Bronze Age from the Aegean to South Asia. I worked on the Linear A script from Crete with a world authority on the related script, Linear B, Professor J.T. Killen of the Classics Faculty of Cambridge University in England from 1996-2000. We created a methodology for representing language mathematically. The Finnish decipherer, Dr. Asko Parpola, told people in London and Helsinki about it and the British archaeologist Bridget Allchin told Dr. Greg Possehl at the University of Pennsylvania about it, who at the time was the head of the Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology. So, when I transferred to Penn, starting a M.A. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, specializing in ancient scripts of South Asia, Dr. Possehl contacted me and happily convinced me to take all the Ph.D. core courses in Archaeology and several honors courses with him, where we started to work on the Indus Valley Script. The faculty in my own department also were interested in my applying the linguistic techniques they were teaching me as well as my own methods on the Indus Valley Script, so throughout my M.A. I worked on the Indus Valley Script, including the thesis for the M.A. After this, it was only natural to propose a Ph.D. dissertation on the Indus Valley Script, which I did and I was very happily accepted to a research institute that is housed in the Sorbonne in Paris, which is called l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section IV: historiques et philologique, under the supervision of the Tocharian specialist, Prof. Georges-Jean Pinault. I finished the dissertation and submitted it last November 2008. Prof. Pinault is picking the committee for the oral defense right now. The title of the dissertation is Une Description Morphologique de l'Ecriture Harappeen. As the title suggests, it is a comprehensive morphological description of the script, which means that I analyzed where and why each sign in the script appears in every word in which it appears, which is why it took me five years! It was 1900 pages long and Prof. Pinault wisely asked me to edit it down to 700 pages, which I did. Still, it's utterly unreadable though I hope it will soon earn me a Ph.D. The date for the oral defense is not yet set. I remember in what now seems like the distant past having feared the oral defense but now, after 46 terrifying days in jail, I very much look forward to discussing for three hours with four experts in my field my favorite subject! It now seems like the most wonderful thing to do in the world. It's like the punch line to that old joke, "it's too soon to tell" (if events are good or bad). Jail is horrible but man it makes you love life if you somehow are released.

What Jail is Like in California, Part I

Brought into the back door of the jail in handcuffs, interviewed by a bald, fat guy in a shiny disco shirt and a gold pendant, sitting up high behind a long desk (presumably so the criminal cannot lunge across to attack him), he asked personal statistics, color of eyes, weight, etc. When he got to, "What is your sexual preference?" having never been asked that before by such a person, I was confused and replied, "Tall, dark and handsome." He got mad and yelled, "Are you gay?" "Oh," I said. "Do I have a better time in the cell if I say yes?" Yanked away moments later by a dark-haired woman stuffed into her black guard uniform, I was shoved into a cement-lined room and told to strip off all my clothes. Jail clothes (grey-black stripes, for real) were shoved through a slot and I was told to put them on. In one of many rooms over the next 27 days I would be left in for indeterminate amounts of time, I put on the clothes then sat down to wait, then stood staring disgusted at the toilet and sink, then paced, then waited, then sat down. She came back. "Follow the yellow line," she yelled, a prison version of the yellow brick road, except this one is to hell rather than Oz. Each time we paused, she'd yell, "Face the wall." Into an elevator with three guards, all as if they have permanent sneers plastered on their faces. Into a wide reception area with a metal staircase, a guard desk, a tinted glass guard post looming above and several "blocks" of cells with different names, the names being A, B, C and D. I was in black-grey stripes which matched D, which was also called Classification, where they put you when they don't know what to do with you yet. Each command to do something is in the form of an angry yell. "Pick up that bucket!" "Pick up that roll of bedding." "Take your shit up to that door." "Open the door. I said, open the door." You enter D Block. Sometimes other inmates are roaming around the main room, sometimes they're in their cells; depends on what time it is, which you never get to know, no matter how many times you ask, no matter how you ask and there are no clocks in view. Then you hear the commands bodiless, yelled through a bad intercom. It yells which cell you are to go to, by number. You walk up the stairs with your bucket and bedding and thin plastic mattress. A loud metallic click goes off and your door opens. If you're lucky, when you enter, no one else is in there. But nine times out of ten somebody is in there and they're in the bottom bunk, that being the best one, and they're staring at you and you don't know who they are or what they've been accused of doing and they don't know you from Adam, either. So wary glances and hellos are exchanged and you try to put your stuff down as unobtrusively as possible and try to make your bed above them with them right there at knee level and you try to not step on any of their stuff as you climb up to your bunk since the only way to get up there is to stand on the desk.

The cell is longish, relatively speaking since it's small. Cement walls painted beige. A long florescent ceiling light, always on at some level, 24 hrs/day. What is there is made of metal, a metal toilet attached to a metal sink, one cleverly designed, ugly as hell unit. A metal desk riveted to the wall, a metal stool riveted to the floor. The beds metal riveted to the walls. One window made of a thick opaque, textured glass with the majority covered by a metal panel. One of the commands is often, "Get that shit out of the window." Since the only shelf is the window ledge for the top bunk, you tend to put things there but it's considered such a bad thing to do as if you may be tunneling through the opaque glass. The small slice of glass above the metal panel is a godsend because it makes you know if it's day or night although you can't actually see anything but a bit of light. Part of that light, though, appears as moving, long diamond shapes and they are what you can see of the sheriffs' cars coming in and out of the jail so you can tell if they're coming or going by if the diamonds are white or red. That makes the reality of the fact that there must still be something outside stronger. It's helpful. Sometimes a train goes by and you can hear it. When that would happen I would put my hand on the cool glass and this was a treat for me; I made it a daily thing to look forward to and always do; a ritual. The train whistle and the coolness of the glass against my hand, a single pleasure during the day and night.

Female and male guards, all professionals which translates as cold and mean or at best formal and maybe a sympathetic heart? One hoped to be able to detect that. Wasn't common. A large number of them, however, clearly sadistic personalities who had found employment that suited their psychoses very well. Enjoyed torturing the tortured, so palpably true. Always in at least two's and oddly superstitious. Like they wouldn't let the smiling woman who had allegedly murdered her entire family even out of her cell for a single stretch though she had no way of defending herself much less attacking considering they are all heavily armed and in at least twos with the guard tower of tinted glass looking over. Like they believed evil was catching, though a lot of the time they were so very much more evil than the typical inmate. The typical inmate, at least in the women's jail, being sad, lost drug addicts, in there for a drug charge, a violation of their probation because they didn't pass a drug test, or in for a crime like robbery because they needed drugs. They said that 85% of all women in America's prisons are in for drugs or related to drugs charges. I don't know if that's true. I'd say the percentage was far higher than that in our jail. I'd say it neared 99%. Imagine if drugs were legalized. Imagine if instead of jail these women automatically went to rehab. Imagine if they got counseling, job training. Imagine all the money taxpayers spend on overcrowded jails totally relieved. Imagine drug traffic taken out of the hands of the truly criminal element. Imagine all the taxes that could be levied like is done on cigarettes. But we've all heard this all before. Still, when you're there, it hits home. Once in a while I'd notice an inmate that did seem evil, did seem dangerous but mostly that wasn't the feeling they'd exude. So I asked one of my cellmates about it. She said yeah, in there you know there's two types, the criminal is one and the other is "women who've gotten in trouble". Like I said, it seemed to me that by far the most were the second type. So why is all the cruelty necessary? Why do they have to sit all day every day doing nothing but hoping they can get out? Why is ricitivism ok in this country?

I remember the day I lost it. I was alone in the cell and for the third week in a row the commissary forgot my order so that I didn't have paper, ink, or stamps, which is a big deal when you have no other contact with the outside world. And when I begged them to find it, they laughed at me and I started shaking the door and screaming. And then I couldn't breathe and then I started screaming worse and the emergency buttons, which nobody is supposed to push, started being pushed by every inmate on my floor. Didn't know I could scream that loud or long. Only one deputy came running. I could hear her weapons jangling. She opened my door with a key rather than the machine unlock. By then I was heaving into my ugly toilet. On my knees, my face down and swollen, I told her my story. This hardened woman in a guard's black uniform started crying. She said she thought a lot about if something happened that ended her up in there, how she couldn't handle it. She knew she wouldn't be able to. The next morning I warily walked down the stairs during unlock to the rest of the inmates, worried what reaction they were going to have to my screaming the night before. The woman who allegedly stabbed to death nine times that drug dealer a few years ago, came up to me and hugged me hard. She said in my ear how they all knew how I felt; that it was ok, that I was going to be ok. Later others told me ways of coping. "When you get out, you tell them all you were at a fantastic health spa," one said, and strutted across the floor in her stripes as if she were a movie star and everyone laughed. I think it was then that I had "earned my stripes" (I realize the irony of this statement); they let me be the one to do the crossword completely in a couple of minutes and bragged to new inmates to leave me alone because I was that smart. They shared their commissary orders with me, which was incredibly generous. I can't tell you how generous that was. It was generous like tears come to your eyes. One gave me a small bag of chips, so amazing. One gave me her envelope. One gave me the insert of her pen (we weren't allowed the whole pen since it can be used as a weapon). Humanity at its grandest in the form of cheap little gifts. People can be so lovely.

That was by the time I was in C Block, in green stripes. I wasn't in D Block, nobody is, long, being Classification. But when I was in there I met one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. Her name was Anna and she came in for attacking a woman in a department store for saying something bad about her mama. She was in for felony assault. She was terrified, a very short, portly woman with sleep apnea who snored like a hydraulic lift. She was too afraid to go outside the cell, which meant she never bathed or got trays of food. I gave her my food since I couldn't eat I was so scared. I hadn't eaten in a long time. She started telling me I had to eat. I wouldn't. She tried all kinds of ways, rationally, angrily, sympathetically, I wouldn't. She wouldn't give up. One day she said, sadly, "Just eat this orange." I reluctantly ate part of the rind. After that I could eat again. She told me funny stories. About the butt party her brother held where he took pictures of everyone's butts (before the party) and blew them up like posters and hung them all over the party room and gave $300 to the person who could identify the most butts. All the men at the party got mad because none of their wives or girlfriends could identify their butts. Anna nailed both her boyfriend's and her brother's butts so she won the money. She told me about her dog who could talk and carried a small pink purse in its mouth when they went for a walk. I cried and held Anna tightly the day they took her out for not bathing and made her move to another facility. I told them I didn't care that she stunk; to please let her stay. Then they really wanted to take her out. "You aren't supposed to be FRIENDS," one guard said as mean as she could muster. What do you think your response to that would be? Believe me, if you're smart you say it silently.

What Jail is Like in Kansas

This is a partial description of what jail was like here in SE Kansas, where I spent 19 days from February to March, 2009:

It's in a county of only 3000 people. Totally rural. The jail has only 3 cells. Two with two bunks each, one that is called the bull pen where 5 or 6 men were put in together. The cell next to mine held one man. My cell held me and another woman. All the cells were full. The cells are made entirely of metal bolted together, the walls, the ceiling; the door is literally bars. A filthy metal horizontal slot opens to hand plastic trays with food through during meals. The metal of the walls increases all forms of sound extremely, so that all the disgusting and constant bodily function noises of the insanely violent (constant verbal abuse and threats screaming from him) man in the cell directly next to mine were extremely loud.

Once you are put in a cell you never leave at all, not for one moment. There is no access to outside air, sun, sky, natural light at all ever. There is no exercise except for what you can do like walking in place and sit-ups in the tiny confines. In the cell is a metal shower with a thick plastic curtain, a phone that only makes collect calls but doesn't work most of the time and can be turned off and is at will by the dispatchers and deputies. The food is entirely non-nutritious, made only of fat, starch and salt. Two examples are: my breakfast Thursday morning was a bowl of shiny, gelatinous fat called "gravy" with two white biscuits. My lunch Thursday was a huge wad of instant mashed potatoes with that same gravy lumped on, canned corn (uncooked)poured into one of the slots of the tray, two pieces of Wonderbread slabbed with butter and a piece of white cake with thick granulated sugar frosting. One gains weight quickly, even when trying to eat as little as possible and as the nutrition drains from the body, no vitamin D (no sunlight), no vitamin B (incredible stress with no vitamin replacement), no other vitamins because of the food, no exercise, one's ability to deal/cope with the situation quickly diminishes, one's irritability rises, one's depression constantly increases. There is a t.v. in the room and my stupid, selfish, mean-spirited, vindictive cellmate would blast it all night every single night I was there so that I never had a single night's full sleep and every few nights would just sleep the sleep of the totally exhausted. Breakfast is served at 5am just to wake you up with nothing in the day to face.

The "bed" is a thin plastic mat with one slick sheet of polyester, one very bare and worn out white sheet and an army blanket. Prison clothes are given once a week and you are never allowed to not wear them (except in the shower). You must wear them 24/7 for the week including sleeping in them. There is a toilet and sink against the wall in the open so that you have to go to the bathroom not only in front of your cellmate but in front of the video camera that watches everything you do all the time and who is watching is anybody's guess as it is in the front of the sheriff's office and the dispatchers (women) and the deputies (men) all have full view of it. The male deputies sometimes yell "you women decent?" before they walk into the hall where they can see right through the bars at you any time they want but most of them don't bother and just walk in. Several times I was sitting on the toilet when this happened.

Everything I did irritated my cellmate. I would stand for one minute at the bars looking out to the wall of the hall and she would say, "What the hell are you standing there for? That's stupid and irritating. Stop it." All the time, whatever I did. The crazy man in the cell next door regularly screamed at me, "You stupid f--king bitch, if I could get over there I'd slap the shit out of you." Things like that. The men in the bullpen would yell, "I'm going to kill the f--king hag who keeps the t.v. on all night," and my cellmate led them to believe that it was me doing it.

I was not allowed to have a pen or a mechanical pencil; only a regular pencil. I was trying to work on studying for the oral defense that's upcoming for the Ph.D. I've been working on for five years on the Indus Valley Script of South Asia. The nature of my preparation for my oral defense meant writing in the signs of the script I work on into the text so that the pencil was constantly getting too dull. To have it sharpened I would have to write a written request and leave the pencil sitting in the horizontal hole for them to pick up. They might come by once every 2 hours. They might pick it up then or not. They might bring it back 2 hours later or not.

I was allowed 2 visitors for 20 minutes once a week. They stood in the hall and talked to me and I stood in the cell talking through the bars. Everyone, dispatchers, deputies and prisoners had no education at all, far right wing politics and zero interest in any interesting subject at all and a total inability to understand anything I said, so that I was constantly called crazy and stupid and my dissertation was called crazy and "it's just squibbles". There was no relief at all ever from any of this.