Platinum: A Singer Visits a Women’s Prison

Thao Nguyen | Radio Silence | October 2014 | 6 minutes (1500 words) Read more…

Thao Nguyen | Radio Silence | October 2014 | 6 minutes (1500 words) Read more…
The incredible story of former CIA agent John T. Downey, who was captured during the Korean War and imprisoned in China for more than twenty years.

—Larry Smith, husband of Piper Kerman, writing in Medium about the other true story behind “Orange Is The New Black”—his own life.
Photo: PEN American Center, Flickr
Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show.

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.
What if your dad had been doing time for murder for as long as you’d known him?
She was a leader like her father, Amanda’s relatives told her. She’d inherited his forceful personality and his stubborn streak. She took gymnastics classes and sang in the school chorus — a natural performer, just like her father.
She took pride in the comments, but they wore on her, comparisons to a man she had never really met. As her 13th birthday approached, she resolved to see her father again. She told her mother, making it clear she didn’t believe the stories about him serving overseas.
Conceded Minerva: “Your father is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“Why is he there if he didn’t do it?”
In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his jail—complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.
With negotiations underway in the spring of 1991, Escobar began hunting for the perfect piece of land upon which to construct his prison. He took along his brother, Roberto, who was the cartel’s accountant. Escobar had scouted much of the vacant land surrounding Medellín but found the lush mountainside of Mont Catedral particularly ideal. “This is the place, brother,” Escobar said during a site visit. “Do you realize that after six in the evening it fogs over and is foggy at dawn, too?” Escobar also appreciated the steep topography that would make it nearly impossible for the military or rival cartels to mount an air attack on the compound. And so, prior to formally surrendering, Escobar began construction on The Cathedral.
The High Desert State Prison was supposed to save Susanville, CA, bringing jobs and money to the ailing town. And it did. But the costs were devastating.
It is March 1999. I’ve come home because the new High Desert State Prison needs teachers, and I need a job. At 8 a.m., I stop at the BP for the weekly paper: the first thing I notice is the place is full of prison guards. They’re buying cigarettes and gas, stirring whitener into coffee. Each is decked out in full uniform, army green suit and parka with the California Department of Corrections gold patch, shiny black boots, belt hung with batons and pepper spray. Most are young and beefy; all have the soldier hairdo, trim mustache, crisp creases—these guys would pass any inspection.
Two more walk in. I should feel safe, but I don’t. These uniforms are about keeping people in line. It feels more like a Central American border crossing than a gas station convenience store in rural America. The young man with the ponytail apparently doesn’t like the scene either; he walks in, then pivots coolly right back out.
A visit to the “longest continuously running prison rodeo in America”:
To run their maximum-security prison at near capacity, warden Burl Cain and his staff have to be able to inspire hope and put a measure of trust in their charges. Begun as a source of in-house amusement in 1964 and opened for public consumption in ’67, the rodeo is crucial to that effort. The revenue it brings in supplies and maintains on-site trade schools and re-entry programs, pays inmate teachers and funds improvements to Angola’s infrastructure—and the opportunity to rub shoulders with people outside their usual social circle is something inmates look forward to year round.
An excerpt from Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything on the current state of the shipping industry, which often gets underreported despite it driving our global economy:
“Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route. Look at the backside of boats and you will see home ports of Panama City and Monrovia, not Le Havre or Hamburg, but neither crew nor ship will have ever been to Liberia or Mongolia, a landlocked country that nonetheless has a shipping fleet. For the International Chamber of Shipping, which thinks ‘flags of convenience’ too pejorative a term (it prefers the sanitized ‘open registries’), there is ‘nothing inherently wrong’ with this system. A former U.S. Coast Guard commander preferred to call it ‘managed anarchy.'”
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