Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

At one point, I overheard a couple of guards chatting about a woman in the Special Housing Unit. We usually called it SHU or “The Place”—our coded language for solitary confinement. They didn’t say why she was there or for how long. But by their account, she’d taken a shit on a tray and pushed the whole smelly mess out the food slot into the hallway. In response, the guards had turned off the water to her cell. One of the officers standing there talking about it started wondering aloud what she was going to drink: “Wouldn’t she get dehydrated?” “She can drink out of the toilet,” the other said. “If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for her.” My head snapped up in shock, and that is when I realized: Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do. But when it matters, no one is watching. I should have figured this out in jail—and after they cut off my hair I learned they could do whatever they wanted there. But that jail was so small that all the petty injustices seemed anecdotal, a series of errant actions not representative of the bigger picture. Prison was the bigger picture. There were hundreds of women and hundreds of guards, and all the same problems, but on a larger scale. All the futility, the small cruelties, the refusal to see us as fully human—it was not a flaw in the system. It was the system.