Chapter One
Internment
“TV’s a big deal in prison. People watch it all the time.”
– Abby Lee Miller
“Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.” The speaker was a statuesque black woman with corn-row hair and a wide smile. She wore a light summer dress which rippled in the wind.
I was standing in a crowd of two hundred women in a large California mountain valley in front of an elevated platform with a wooden lectern. The woman stood in front of it, flanked by two armed guards. We in the audience all wore blue prison uniforms, and ten state troopers armed with pump shotguns stood around us. Not far away stood a large, walled compound. Two other such compounds were supposedly further up the road.
“From this point, you’re going to undergo a complete character change—when you’re
