Jennifer thought that she might just scream, break and run, even though the barred doors visibly truncated the long hallway ahead of her. She had to do something. She had to get through to Tom. He and Donald couldn’t have known that this place was such a madhouse. Even one more day would be too long for her to keep her sanity. If Observation wasn’t enough to make her want to kill herself, another meal like this would be.
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
Walter Savage Landor
Gwen Harding tightened the sash of her bathrobe, retied the bow, and studied the papers spread before her. In her office at Jennings she was kept busy from moment to moment simply trying to deal with the administrative load, employee problems, staffing, and management. Now for the first time she looked at the JRU International information package and the charts spread out on her dining table. JRU had completed their proposal to the state and Warden Harding, along with half a dozen other state correction professionals, was being asked to write up her opinion of their plan.
She took a preliminary look at the proposal. ‘Fact: The private sector consistently saves government money. In the past decade, at least fourteen separate independent studies have compared the costs of operating private and public institutions. Twelve of those studies demonstrated that the cost of privately managed prisons is from two to twenty-nine percent less than that of government-managed facilities.’ Gwen wondered how they managed to cut costs. Perhaps by firing outdated wardens.
She rose from her chair and passed the counter that was the only demarcation of where the dining room ended and the kitchen began. The kitchen was spotless. She crossed the blue and white tile floor to the stove, where a kettle – the only cooking implement she ever used in this kitchen anymore – sat on the one burner that she ever turned on. She took a mug from the cabinet. It had been a gift from a social-worker friend years ago. It was one of those ready-made but unpainted objects that children and women with time on their hands paint in shops set up expressly for that purpose. On it, Gwen’s friend Lisa Anderson had painted BECAUSE I’M THE WARDEN, THAT’S WHY.
When she was given the gift, she and Lisa laughed over the reactions the mug stirred up among the other women at the shop where Lisa had painted it. Now Gwen filled it with hot water and dunked a tea bag into it. She was actually longing for a glass of gin, and the olives in the refrigerator seemed to be calling out to her, but she knew she had to keep a clear head. JRU was waiting and JRU came first. She crossed to the sink holding the steaming mug, opened the under-cabinet and dropped the wet tea bag into the empty trash bag. She didn’t even make trash anymore. Gwen sighed. There was a different time and a different place where she used to cook and give dinner parties on a regular basis. And she’d been good – everyone praised her coq au vin. ‘Jesus,’ she thought, walking back to the dining table, ‘do people even make coq au vin nowadays?’ She hadn’t seen it on a menu or at a dinner party in years. But then … she tried to think of the last dinner party she had attended and couldn’t remember one. That couldn’t be! She stood still, one hand resting on the back of a dining chair, the other clenched around her mug. There was the dinner at the restaurant at the close of the Eastern States Correction Officers Association. And of course, there was always the rubber chicken at local civic functions. But actual dinner parties – just social time at someone’s home, seemed to be a bit thin on the ground.
Gwen took a sip of tea and wondered where her friend Lisa Anderson was now. She smiled. They had had a lot of fun together. Gwen had been divorced and Lisa had been in the process of separating from her husband. The two of them went out at least once a week, but that was … Gwen put down the mug and tried to think whether it was six or seven years ago. Could it be that long? She tried to think it out. It had to be. It was just after she got the job at Jennings.
At Jennings Gwen was too busy to see old friends or to make new ones, at least in the beginning. Then, when she had settled in, it seemed as if there were no friends to be made. Certainly she couldn’t count any of the Jennings staff as friends. Perhaps her initial conscious distancing had put people off, but she’d only done it because she’d been frightened and overly sensitive about her new position and its required authority. She supposed that by the time she felt secure and was ready to unbend a little, no one else seemed to be so inclined. Well, that was understandable. She took another sip of tea and reminded herself that she’d never been a natural extrovert.
Gwen sat down at the shining waxed dining table, only sullied by the JRU report. She wouldn’t think about anything else right now. Thinking about the emptiness of her life would surely drive her to the olives and she had to begin her response to this proposal. She looked at the inscription once again and smiled ruefully. When she first began working in the Department of Corrections it seemed to her that wardens had enormous power. Perhaps she’d been wrong or had exaggerated what she’d seen, but the position’s power had certainly eroded since then. A warden’s powers today were so limited, while her accountability was so vast, that Gwen often felt as trussed as a turkey before being shoved into the oven. And now this move to privatize prisons was sure to usurp whatever power she had remaining.
Privatization was a bastard trend that had been born – mothered – by Wall Street out of the incredible need for more prisons and taxpayers yelping at the costs of incarceration. If an aging population voted against school-board bond issues and preferred not to spend its tax dollars on educating their own grandchildren, Gwen knew all too well how they felt about spending public funds on strangers in the ‘criminal population’. And yet, that population continued to grow. The only solution most agencies saw was building more places to incarcerate offenders. The ineffectual ‘war on drugs’, mandatory sentences, and a judiciary frightened that they might be perceived as ‘soft on crime’ had all contributed to a huge increase in prisoners in general, and an even larger increase in female prison statistics.
In fact, Gwen knew that women were the fastest growing sector of the prison population. Since 1980, the female inmate population nationwide had increased by more than five hundred percent. And this was not because women were involved in more violent crimes. It was because, nationwide, people were being imprisoned much more frequently for nonviolent crimes. In 1979, women convicted of nonviolent crimes were sent to prison roughly forty-nine percent of the time. By 1999, they were being sent to prison for nonviolent crimes nearly eighty percent of the time.
So privatization seemed a neat and simple answer to all these problems. Big business claimed it was ready to step in, take the risk, bear the expense, and turn prisons into moneymaking operations. Gwen of course knew that there were two major private prison corporations in the U.S. One of them, Wackenhut Corrections, owned fifty-two prisons ‘employing’ more than twenty-six thousand prisoners. The other, CCA – Corrections Corporation of America – had control over almost three times as many prisoners in eightyone prisons. At the last conference for prison wardens that Gwen had attended, there had been a heated discussion over the privatization of prisons. Someone pointed out how large corporations had the incentive and the political clout to encourage the creation of a larger and larger prison population – a larger and larger cheap labor pool. This meant increased sentences and the increasing incarceration of men and women (usually from communities of color). Gwen wondered if this would turn into a new form of slavery.
She shook her head, turned another page of the proposal, and wondered what JRU International stood for. Justice Regulatory Underwriters? Jesus Really Understands? Jails ‘R’ Us? Jammed Rats Unlimited? Why not be honest and call it PFP: Prisons for Profit? She turned another page of the proposal before her and began to take notes in her small, neat handwriting.
There was no way this plan was going to work! Gwen looked down at the dozen