Written by Tracie Bernardi during my time inside.

Normally an inmate laundry worker is allowed to leave her cell door propped open with a shoe or a book, allowing her to enter and exit her cell freely to switch loads as the machines complete their cycles. Recently, however, a new deputy warden posted memos prohibiting the propping open of doors at any time for any reason. As a tier worker myself, this means I have to remain out of my cell to perform my laundry duties or else ask to be let out of the locked cell whenever the dryer buzzer sounds.

While locked in my cell on a Monday during an institutional head count, I heard the washing machine stop. When the guard on duty approached my door to do a half-hour cell check, I made a polite request. “Sir, Could you please let me out so that I can tend to the laundry?”

He responded with a cold “No.”

“You’re nice*,” I said, smiling.

He smiled back.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” I added.

His smile vanished and he continued on his way.

As far as I was concerned, the matter was a done deal. He had exerted his power and I had snatched it away from him by inferring that he was an asshole without having to call him one. What was he going to do? Write me a disciplinary ticket that stated, “Inmate Bernardi said I was nice”?

 

*Today the word “nice” is used as an innocuous compliment, but the word derived from an insult. To call someone nice was to say that person was ignorant, foolish, or effeminate. I had made it up because if I said what I really wanted he could have written me a disciplinary ticket for insulting language, which might have sent me to solitary confinement or to lose my mail, visits, phone or commissary privileges.”

 

Later -When the cell doors opened routinely at one o’clock for rec break, I swapped out the loads and began folding the dried set when I noticed that same guard trudging up the tier steps.

He was wearing blue latex gloves and carrying a large clear plastic bag–the obvious sign that a shakedown was at hand. Dread overtook me as he headed directly to my cell, entered it, and propped open the heavy steel door so that, outside the cell, I could bear witness to the vengeance he was about to unleash.

He ripped my calendar from the bulletin board and deposited it in his trick-or-treat bag. Okay, fair enough. The calendar had been affixed with tape, which is considered contraband. He stepped over to the shelf above the toilet and confiscated my Styrofoam coffee cups. Then he went through my art supply box, confiscating every pen I owned, including the ones I had rightfully purchased on commissary. He peeled my plastic mirror off the wall (another tape infraction) and dropped it in his goodie bag, then moved on to my paperwork: personal writing, school assignments, institutional communication. Wrinkling and crumpling it, he scattered it every which way, under the guise of a security search. All of my clothing was dumped in a pile in the middle of the floor. My sheets and blankets went flying onto the pile of property at the center of the cell.

In all, he must have spent a good 30 minutes tornadoing through my belongings before he got down to odds and ends and then left the cell. During his rampage, he had not touched one item of my cellmate’s property. Sashaying toward the stairs with his bag of spoils, he suddenly stopped at the table where I was seated with the clean, folded laundry. Leaning in until he was at eye level, he smiled and said, “Don’t worry about the shakedown, Miss Bernardi. I was nice.”

Touché, you bastard. Touché. He had wreaked havoc to teach me not to fuck with him. His tactic had been juvenile but effective. What could I do but admit that he had reclaimed the upper hand.

Or had he?

Later, on the phone in the common room complaining to my mom about what this good-for-nothing goon had done, I caught a glimpse of that plastic bag filled with my stuff, on the floor next to the guards’ station. A few hours later, I watched out the narrow window in my cell door as he exchanged keys with his shift replacement, picked up the bag, and carried it out of the unit.

Hurrying to the cell window to the outside, I watched him make his way toward the trash receptacles, hoist my bag up,  and drop it into one of the bins. As I watched, I treated my cellmate to the play-by-play, telling her which of the three bins contained my belongings.

Later that evening, while I was at school, my bunky volunteered to help the common area worker take out the trash which she often did.

Wearing latex gloves, she pulled the bag out of the garbage bin, tore it open, and retrieved all my stuff that that “nice” guard had gone to the trouble to confiscate. Concealing it on her person, she smuggled it back in the building and into our cell. When I returned from school, there on the bed lay all of my possessions as if they had never been taken.

The following day when the guard made his rounds, I smiled sweetly at him and said, “Sir, I will never try to outsmart you again.”

“That’s all I ask,” he said, smiling back. He seemed satisfied that he had taught me a valuable lesson.

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