Our watches had been taken away, presumably because we could hide drugs in them or use them to kill ourselves or escape. As we sat under florescent lights in that concrete cell, it seemed I had been there for days. The monotony was broken only by the addition of new women shoved into the cell, strung-out and frantic, sometimes angry, sometimes in the green scrubs that showed they had been in jail for over a day. I learned more from those women than most of my professors. Some of them knew the cops' names and personalities.
Prison is a study in race and class in America.
As Mumia Abdul-Jamal says from death row, prison is the privilege of the poor. A few were in business school at night. Most had been in jail before, and they gave each other advice on charges and consequences. The system does an unbelievable job of keeping these women in the cycle of addiction, poverty, and arrest. The room we were in after processing had a telephone, and the calls they made broke my heart.