Piper Kerman - Wall of Sound

 

For sale at the commissary at the Federal Correctional Institution for Women in Danbury, Connecticut. You can get shampoo, deodorant, soap, toothpaste. You can get pens and paper, envelopes and stamps, your lifeline to the outside world. You can get packets of tuna and hot sauce and candy and razors. And if you’re lucky, if you got it like that, you can get sneakers, vitamins, luxuries, the most coveted item of all, a radio. I went to prison in 2004. I went behind a drug offense from 1993, when I was fresh out of Smith College. I fell into a relationship with a mysterious older woman. And she was a narcotics trafficker. And she asked me to carry a bag stuffed with money from Chicago to Brussels and I did.

 

The things that we do, the consequences of the things we do, they come back to us in one way or another. And for me, more than a decade later, I found myself walking through prison gates in the biggest, most vicious-looking razor wire fence I’d ever seen in my life. And on that day, when I surrendered at that prison, I found myself stripped naked in a cold tile room, commanded to squat and cough for the first of what would be hundreds and hundreds of strip searches. And I was transformed head-spinningly quickly into prisoner number 11187-424. That place and the people who ran it never let you forget that to them, you were nothing but that number. 

 

So, I was put in the unit where I would live for the next year. And I immediately saw that I was one of hundreds and hundreds of prisoners. I was surrounded by women of every size, shape, color, accent, and I knew none of them. I was desperately trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, and women began to approach me, and I was scared. And they said things to me, they came at me, and they said things like, "Do you need a toothbrush, some shower shoes, some instant coffee?" This was the phenomenon known as “The Welcome Wagon.” And you need to get everything that you need from the welcome wagon, because you’re not going to get it from the prison. The only things that the prison gives you during your stay are toilet paper, tampons, and once a month, a small ration of laundry powder. So, everything you need comes from the commissary. Even the things on offer from the institution, like green meat and government cheese and moldy pudding, are ironically in short supply. The portions-- the food is lousy, and the portions are too small. [audience laughter]

 

And so that commissary is very important. If you have money in your commissary account, you can get a banana, some ibuprofen, even some eyeshadow in hummingbird colors. And these tiny comforts, they make you feel human there. And they also make you feel just a little bit more in control of your prison life, which is why commissary is one of the first privileges you might lose if you’re punished there. So, I was very fortunate. Unlike most of the women that I was doing time with, I could count on folks from the outside world to put money into my commissary account. So, in theory, I would want for nothing. But there was one thing that I wanted from that commissary very, very badly, and I couldn’t get it, and that was a radio. Just a cheap little transistor radio about the size of a deck of cards with a headset, and it would have cost about $6 out here on the street. And in prison, it costs $42.90. And at 14 cents an hour, that represents about 300 hours of prison labor. So, those radios are very, very dear. 

 

And despite that, once a woman has her basics taken care of, her hygiene’s, her stamps, that radio is going to be one of the first things that she gets if she can scrape together the racehorses. And here’s why? Prison, especially in this country, is crowded, and because of that, it’s noisy. Imagine the sound of hundreds and hundreds of people bouncing off of cinderblock walls and metal all day, every day. And prison is lonely. The last thing my lawyer said to me before I was about to go in was, "Piper, don’t make any friends." And something you hear again and again when you’re locked up is "You walk in here alone and you walk out alone," and prison is stultifyingly intimate, meaning that all of your moments of every day, your most private moments, are lived, stacked on top of one another in a place where no one wants to be. This is not the kind of intimacy that one craves. So that radio was like the silver bullet that could at least alleviate those conditions a little bit, just a little bit, but I couldn’t get one, and that’s because every week when I went to the commissary on Tuesdays, the prison guard who ran the place, he was the one who would throw every grocery item at you after he scanned it. Would say, "No radios, Kerman. No radios, Kerman." They were out of stock, out of stock of the radios. 

 

Now, folks wanted those radios for practical reasons. You had to have the radio in order to watch television. So, if you’d gone into any of the many, many TV rooms in the prison, you would have been surprised by the silence. And what you would have seen was dozens of women sitting there, headphones on, turned to the same frequency so they could hear the program. But I didn’t want the radio to watch the Today show or Fear Factor. I wanted it so that I could go to the movies on Saturday night. 

 

In the federal prison system, every weekend, they screen a movie, and the movies reliably fall into three categories. You’ve got low comedy, high melodrama, and anything with animal protagonists. [audience laughter] When they screened Hidalgo, the horse dies at the end, and I found myself surrounded by sobbing convicts. Movie night was the collective social event, everybody went. Everybody-- folks would go to the same screenings and sit in the same seats with their friends. And even the biggest loner in the prison would make the scene. And after weeks and then months of trying to follow my lawyer’s advice and keeping to myself all meek and mild, I wanted to make the scene, too. I wanted in on the action. And that radio was the golden ticket to movie night because otherwise, you were just reading lips. But every week, "No radios, Kerman." I wanted that radio for another reason, too. I needed it to escape. 

 

Since I had arrived in February, I had been fleeing out of the unit building where I lived down to a little gravel track that we’re allowed to use. I would go out there in the freezing cold and crunch around in that ice and snow to get away from that noise, to get away from the gossip and the fights and the human stew that I was a part of in that prison. And I wanted that radio to get even further away. I wanted to hear music. I wanted to hear the news. I wanted to hear voices that had nothing to do with that awful place. I wanted to remember that the outside world existed. And still, every week, "No radios, Kerman." 

 

The ice and snow down on that track turned into mud and then dried up in the Spring sunshine and still, week after week, they we were out of radios. I was getting desperate. So, one day I was down in the dorms doing work as an electrician, that was my job. Well, actually, I was hanging up illegal hooks. One of the rules of the prison is that you can have no personal items anywhere in your living quarters except in your locker or hung up. And those hooks were in very, very short supply. But as an electrician, I had access to tools, and I could fashion a makeshift hook that I could install in someone’s area. And the word spread like wildfire that upon request, I would do just that, hang up those hooks. And all of a sudden, women I didn’t know, some women I didn’t like, were coming to me and asking me to hook them up, [audience laughter] and I never said no, I always did it. 

 

And one of my coworkers in the electric shop got frustrated with me one day. She said, "Piper, you don’t have to do this. Why do you bother?" And I said, "No one is looking out for us in this shithole. We have to look out for each other." So, on this particular day, I was in B dorm, my own dorm, hanging up hooks, screwing them into the wall and I spotted Lionel. Now, Lionel, unlike me, was doing serious time, a long sentence. And she was the acknowledged consigliere of the warehouse and the commissary, which was a plum prison job. She was a formidable figure, but she was my neighbor. She was not my friend, but she lived about three feet away from me. And she would say good morning to me. And we found ourselves brushing our teeth side-by-side before lights out, she’d give me a smile every now and then. So, I got up my courage and I approached her and I said, "Lionel, I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’ve got a question." And I explained my radio problem. And Lionel just looked at me, I said, "Lionel, I am going crazy without music. The CO won’t tell me when that shipment is coming in. Do you know?" She just stared at me, not smiling. She said, "Kerman, you know you’re not supposed to ask warehouse folks about the inventory. It’s against the rules." I said, "No, Lionel, I didn’t know that. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sorry." I could have kicked myself. I felt like a jackass. So, I had broken a cardinal rule. Another thing you hear again and again when you’re locked up is "Don’t ask questions in prison." This in response to essentially any question. [audience laughter] 

 

So now, not only did I not have a radio, I had committed a huge prison faux pas. So, I was dejected, to say the least. And the next week, I almost didn’t even put the radio on my commissary list, why bother? Some women who had shopped before me were complaining they were still out. And I just dragged my tail into that commissary building. And so, when a shiny, bright new radio came hurtling into my grocery pile, I just stared at it until the CO began to scream, "What’s wrong with you, Kerman? I guess it’s true what they say about blondes, huh? Keep moving, Kerman. Move, move, move " I began to shove my purchases, including that precious radio into my laundry bag as quickly as I could. And as I did that, I looked past the CO back into the commissary and I could see Lionel back there working. And she would not meet my eye. 

 

I turned around and I walked out of that commissary and I was elated, and not because of what I had in that bag. The idea that Lionel, a prisoner, one of us, could make something happen just like that was thrilling to me. The fact that she had the power to get that radio was stunning to me. And the fact that she had chosen to give it to me was absolutely astounding. I knew in that moment that I had her regard. She saw me for who I was and not just the number that we were supposed to be in that place and that made my heart sing.