1

The horn sounds before dawn when you’re paroled, as it does every morning. You stand at the bars for prisoner count and when the hundred bolts on your block fire back you step out of your cell and walk in silent two-by-two down a concrete corridor to the same breakfast you’ve eaten for the last year, two years, twenty years, however long you’ve been resident. But it’s not like any other morning, you see that on the face of every inmate you meet. You don’t belong any more. You’re not one of them. You’re out. Some touch you for luck when the officers aren’t watching. Some whisper, See you back here soon, bitch.

The previous day you reported to work detail. On parole day, they shunt you aside with one or two others getting out the same time. You settle your account at the canteen. They give you a box with the clothes you wore into the joint or something your family – if you have any – brought for you to wear on the day of your release. You remove the prison overalls and put on your street clothes. You sign papers. Even five years out of style you start to feel the blood flow through your veins. If you haven’t been rehabilitated to walking death, you feel a little like you again. Over a scarred counter they hand out whatever money you saved working at twenty-five cents an hour. You sign more papers. They fingerprint you one last time and check your prints against the prints on file to make sure they’re releasing the right inmate. At every step in the process you stop before steel bars and wait for the buzz and thunk of the lock springing back. It’s a sound you know like your own cough in the night. Last of all they cut the prisoner identification number from your wrist. The number is embedded in a thin plastic bracelet and it goes into a file reserved for your return. Through the last set of steel bars and down sunlit stairs an exit sign flickers green above an open door. You’re out.

I was the first inmate released from California Institute for Women that morning. The San Gabriel mountains rimmed the northern horizon, snow-dusted peaks glinting white and gold under a sun that rolled like a bright yellow marble up the blue bowl of winter sky. Across the road Bandini Mountain steamed under the first rays of sun. Though I hadn’t seen it for five years, I hadn’t forgotten the sight or smell. No inmate could. Six days a week, blue overalled workers shovelled its perpetually expanding base into a fertilizer factory. Bandini Mountain measured over a mile in length and rose so high snow might have capped the peak if not for the heat generated by the horse, cow and human faeces that formed its mass. The stench penetrated concrete, steel and the deepest dreams. Behind the razor wire, everything smelled like shit: the air, the food, the inmates, the officers – even the warden, a well-meaning soul imprisoned as much as anyone by the smell, could never completely wash the odour of excrement from her hair.

The Sergeant-at-Arms opened the rear door of the police cruiser that was to take me to the bus station twelve miles down the road. I crawled into the caged compartment and shut the door behind me. I didn’t fool myself into thinking I was free. The wire mesh that screened me from the driver was just another set of bars. Nobody released on parole is free. The chain might be longer but the State still owned me. The Sergeant-at-Arms started the engine and accelerated past Bandini Mountain. I moved my lips in a voiceless goodbye to five years of doing the same thing every day the same way. Five years of a concrete and steel room with a squat toilet in the corner. Five years of never being alone, not to shower, to urinate, or defecate. Five years of lock-ups and head-counts six times a day. Five years of being watched everywhere, always. Five years of no dogs, no cats, no birds, no children, no men. Five years of no touching. Five years of imposed silences and arbitrary punishments. Five years of a flashlight beamed up my rectum and vagina. Five years of humiliation, five years of fear. Fear of solitary, fear of emptiness, fear of time. Five years leaking into my veins like formaldehyde to a walking corpse.

I ceased being the responsibility of the California Institute for Women the moment my foot hit the bottom step of the Greyhound bus. The driver took a long look at me as I leaped on board. He’d been driving a bus so long his butt sagged over the edges of the seat.

He said, ‘Welcome back to the free world, honey.’