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ALDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA—FEDERAL Prison Camp Alderson
During the roaring twenties, there was a shortage of federal prison space for female inmates. Women were either slapped on the wrists or housed alone within all-male prisons; however, many of these woman were sexually abused by prison staff and fellow inmates. Alderson was opened in 1927 as the first federal women’s prison in the United States. The West Virginia area was chosen for this reform movement prison because it was remote enough from major population centers, making escapes less likely.
Every morning, Jillian Thurman, completed a five-mile jog around the Alderson yard at six a.m. followed by breakfast—bran flakes that unapologetically tasted like cardboard, skim milk, and pear cut in half because God forbid an inmate made hooch with the fruit in the prison’s dining hall. Truly a breakfast fueling her to make it through another day, being a stone’s throw away from Dante’s Inferno. She was beginning to look fit, having gotten rid of her stodgy pudginess with which she began her prison term seven years ago. She was in her mid-thirties, tall, five-ten, a natty, sinuous woman, with her black hair in a shoulder-length bob with bangs. Cool and reserved to the point of being frigid with just enough warmth to avoid being referred to as a total bitch, despite how appropriate. Prison had blessed her with a controlled life, calculating in every aspect, forcing her to deal with the petty officers and pointless Bureau of Prisons rules and regulations.
After breakfast and a shower, she reported to her work detail as a GED tutor. She was assigned to tutoring women in their pursuit of passing the GED test. However, many of them slept in class or read gossip magazines, because they didn’t have a teacher, just her as a tutor. But weren’t tutors supposed to reinforce a teacher’s lessons? There was a BOP staffer assigned as the teacher, but he never taught. He was paid handsomely out of the national budget to sit in his office playing games on his computer looking up fantasy sports stats, or filling out irrelevant paperwork to indicate he was doing his job. That was the wasteful habits of many BOP position. Many of which could be eliminated and not disrupt the running of any prison. The teacher was a waste of taxpayers dollar—along with the rest of the education department. He was more babysitter than teachers, and Jillian Thurman wanted to expose him to the public.
What troubled her most was that students were required to attend class—but not do any work—or they risked losing good time release days. She surmised that they had to keep students in class, because no students, meant no need for money from taxpayers. It explained why an inmate could lose telephone, e-mail, and visiting privileges for not making a bed or having a shirt-tail tucked in; but, faced no punishment for sleeping in class. The contrast highlighted that it wasn’t a correctional facility at all. What’d she expected from staff more appropriately suited to work the front-end of Walmart Superstore? And, sadly ordinary citizens had no clue.
Usually after work, Julian Thurman played cards, mostly poker—with wild cards—with other women in the unit’s day room. They played for postage stamps, the convict’s currency. Some women tried to team up against her, but mostly, she won and took their money, because growing up in Atlantic, New Jersey, she was a card counter. Also very smart. So smart she had been the maestro of the loud music being made in Washington, D.C. to have her brought before her sentencing judge and re-sentenced. Not just her, but all men and woman given draconian mandatory sentences for trafficking drugs. Each day was Groundhogs Day for her, and she didn’t quite understand why a Supreme Court judge had to die for people to realize that the national federal average sentence for murder was twenty-three years, and it wasn’t logical for a non-violent drug offender to be handed a LIFE-sentence, forced to languish under the faux correctional system forever, while murderers had a date to roam free.