The Story (37 page)

Arthur leapt to his feet and wrapped his arms around me, hugging me tightly, something he had not done since our days as reporters together in Washington. “I know it's been rough on you,” he said. I noticed that he did not contradict my assertion that he had approved Keller's note. “I know how stressful it's been,” he added. “But that's all over now. You are not alone.”

We stood together, motionless for a few seconds while I struggled to regain my composure. “I promise you,” Arthur told me. “You will not be alone in this fight, Judy. I will never abandon you again.”

“
Praise
Jesus! Push on through the pain! Do those squats! Feel that pull!
Praise
the
Lor
d
!”

It was late July 2005,
Gospelrobics
time at the Alexandria Detention Center, my home since Judge Hogan had jailed me until I agreed to discuss my confidential sources with a grand jury. Since the only exercise bicycle in Cell Block 2-E was broken, I was having fitness guru Reggie Thornton take me through his paces. I was punching the air to a Christian disco tune on the TV set in our lounge.

Because it was early on a Sunday, most of the twenty-two women in this unit were sleeping. Only a few were sitting on our threadbare couch or playing cards at the Formica tables. A couple were watching Reggie urge us to “give it up for Jesus.”

“He's hot,” declared Ricochet, a fellow inmate, eyes fixed on Reggie's pectorals and abs. “I wouldn't mind a piece of him.”

Soon residents of 2-E would be eating breakfast. Then the unit's large steel door would be unlocked, and many would go next door to Bible class, one of the few places where male and female prisoners were permitted to mingle, which might account for its popularity. I would be able to switch from
Gospelrobics
or our usual BET channel to the Sunday news shows.

The choice of programming in 2-F, the second unit in which I spent time, was by consensus. 2-E, where I spent my first month at ADC, used a rotation system: each day an inmate chose the programming she preferred. Consensus meant there were few votes for Jim Lehrer's
NewsHour
, whereas hardly a day passed without Oprah and, on Sunday, Joel Osteen, the televangelist who filled stadiums throughout the country. We started our day with the TV serial
Charmed
, about a group of modern benign witches. Once a week at night, it was
Prison Break.

It took fewer than twenty-four hours to go from being Judith Miller, investigative reporter, to Inmate 45570083 at ADC, a nondescript, eight-story brick building in Alexandria, Virginia.

On July 6, 2005, I was taken from a cell at the courtroom in which I had been sentenced, and “processed” through the system in record time (the prison director told me). I was photographed, fingerprinted, and given an olive green uniform with
Prisoner
embossed in faded white letters on the back of the jacket, along with two sets of underwear, one pair of sports shorts and a bra, two worn T-shirts, a sleeping gown, a beige plastic cup, one towel, two coarse brown sheets, a paper-thin mat and matching pillow, and one blanket. A see-through plastic bag held all my other worldly possessions: a comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, and soap.

I was not permitted to wear the gold stud earrings I had worn since my ears were pierced as a teenager. I could not keep any jewelry except my wedding ring, since it contained no precious stones. The goal was to separate inmates from their own world. Even wristwatches were banned. “Deputies,” as we were told to call guards, had effectively abolished time.

My two-story cell block had six tiny cells per floor, which opened onto a large balcony on the top floor and a lounge on the lower level, the unit's only common space. Lit all day and dimmed only at night, the harsh fluorescent lights were not good for sustained reading. Fortunately, I am a sound sleeper, as I discovered in Iraq.

I learned gradually to estimate the time based on the amount and angle of light that shone through a slit in my cell's concrete wall, its only “window.” The seventy-square-foot rectangular cell had no furniture—just
an open toilet and sink that two women shared, plus a mirror made of polished metal that could not be shattered or used to slash a wrist or murder a cell mate.

Occasionally I had the cell to myself. But on busy summer weekends, I often had two cell mates, usually Hispanic illegal immigrants who spoke little English and were picked up in raids. The US Marshals Service rented space for them and other federal prisoners in this state facility.

The ADC was a maximum-security jail intended to house inmates awaiting trial or those sentenced to less than a year. Some had been here longer. Others were repeat offenders: men and women, even generations of families, who had spent much of their lives circulating in and out of this jail. For them, the deputies, counselors, and administrators were a second family.

Unlike prisons intended for longer-term confinement, ADC wasn't required to provide courtyards for exercise or access to fresh air. I envied Martha Stewart as I read about her jogs on the footpath that linked inmates' cottages and the afternoon volleyball games at minimum-security Camp Alderson, in West Virginia, known as “Camp Cupcake.” Martha called the prison “Yale.” Because males greatly outnumbered females at ADC, women were permitted on the basketball court, the jail's sole common recreational area, only at odd hours when our male counterparts weren't there. Sometimes an empathetic deputy would unlock a side door to the gym that opened onto an alcove with a wire-mesh roof, a giant birdcage. You could breathe fresh air there. In my eighty-five days at ADC, I had access to the alcove and fresh air five times.

The worst part of jail was not sleeping on a paper-thin yoga mat on the cold concrete ledges that had replaced more expensive cots; nor the vile food—mystery meats drenched in thick brown sauce that a fellow inmate dubbed “sloppy no's,” accompanied by starches and carbohydrates in shades of brown and gray. Nor was it the constant din. (My jail notes are filled with unanswered requests for earplugs.) What unnerved me most was the unpredictability and loss of control. The jail had a theoretical schedule: cell doors were unlocked electronically on a buzzer system and an ear-shattering clang each morning between six thirty and seven, and slammed
shut again sometime after eleven thirty at night. Though lockdowns in our claustrophobic cells were supposed to coincide with daily staff shifts, they were irregular. We were locked down during national security alerts or storm warnings, during the jail's frequent power failures, when a fight broke out among inmates anywhere in the jail, or sometimes to punish an entire unit when a few inmates became unruly or suicidal, the latter being the deputies' constant concern. There had never been a suicide at ADC, and the jail's staff intended to keep it that way.

“We are in control here,” Mondre Kornegay, the jail's director of inmate services, told me soon after my admission. I would have an easier time when I accepted that.

I devised a plan to keep busy. I would consider jail a reporting assignment. The device would give me a mission beyond protecting my sources and restore some sense of control, however slender.

Jail was boring. It was also insanely bureaucratic. Run out of dental floss? Fill out a form. Want a new pair of socks? Sign a form, in triplicate. Need two aspirins for a splitting headache? Complete the form. I would eventually get the aspirin—if not the socks or dental floss—but days later, long after the headache. ADC often ran out of the forms.

The worst night was my first, July 7, in the jail's central booking facility. I had barely recovered from being surrounded by burly marshals and yanked out of the DC courtroom where Judge Hogan had ruled against me. I had just enough time to wave good-bye to Jason and hear my lawyers' protests. Judge Hogan had said that I would remain in jail until I agreed to testify, or at least until the end of the grand jury on October 28.

I was bundled out of the courtroom into an adjacent room and put in a holding cell just behind the judge's bench. The contrast was stark between the order and decorum of the proceedings (justice) and the lack of either on the other side of the door (punishment). After what seemed like an hour—my watch had been taken away—marshals slapped handcuffs on my wrists that were shackled to my ankles. I shuffled to a van that took me across the Potomac River to ADC.

During that first night in the cramped, airless holding cell in the booking area, one of the other three newcomers kept screaming. A wisdom
tooth was killing her. She needed her Percocet. She wanted to see a doctor, a lawyer, her mother, a guard,
a-n-y-o-n-e!
There was a common toilet in the dank cell, which smelled of urine, sweat, and stale food, but there was no toilet paper. She wanted that, too.

Sometime in the early morning of that terrible first night, I was awakened by the distinctive wailing of British police car sirens; the sound of World War II movies. Disoriented by the incarceration and the blaring of British horns, I stepped over the other two sleeping women and inched toward the small, elevated rectangular window. Standing on tiptoes, I saw marshals huddled around a TV set.

There was a charred red double-decker bus on its side, scenes of evacuated tube stations, and video of the dazed victims stumbling through the streets. I had seen these images of carnage, chaos, and fear in Beirut and, twice, unforgettably, in New York. But this was London! More than thirty people were dead, the announcer said, a hundred more injured. Al Qaeda, I assumed, had struck again.

The women's units were clean and well run. There were some pleasant surprises—some of my fellow inmates, for instance. On my first night in Unit 2-E, a tall, attractive woman introduced—or, rather, reintroduced—herself to me. We had met before, she told me. She looked familiar, I replied hesitantly.

“We met in 1988 at the White House Correspondents' Dinner,” Phyllis, I'll call her, reminded me. She had worked on Capitol Hill for Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman elected to the Senate. She was a senior executive at the Black Caucus when we had met at the dinner.

She smiled at my obvious confusion. Though inmates were instructed not to discuss their cases, Phyllis gradually disclosed the details of hers. After working on Capitol Hill for several years, she had opened a boutique PR firm in Alexandria. One of her clients had paid with a large bad check. She had written checks to her suppliers that bounced. In Virginia, writing a bad check for over $200 is a felony. When creditors complained, she had tried to make restitution, borrowing money from relatives and friends. But
“they still got me,” she said. Claiming her prosecution was political, she had been fighting her conviction ever since.

How much of this saga was true, I did not know. I liked Phyllis, and so did other inmates, who tended to defer to her. Her survival tips were invaluable. I would be okay in jail, she predicted, because the other women knew I was in jail for refusing to snitch.

Apply to work in the laundry, Phyllis advised me. Although it paid only seven dollars a week, it would enable me to wash my clothes. She also urged me to volunteer to be a “trustee” who cleaned common areas, helped serve food, and did chores. Trustees were permitted to stay in the lounge during some lockdowns. They qualified for a contact visit with their spouse after working at a jail job for forty-five days. I would no longer be in jail by then, I told her. Phyllis smiled. “I know prosecutors,” she said. “They are ambitious, vindictive SOBs. You'll be here.” And so I was.

Ebony, a young black woman who hadn't gone to college, was a whiz at crossword puzzles. She knew the names of the presidents and vice presidents, the capitals of every state, their state birds, flowers, and songs. Her seventh-grade teacher had made her memorize them to music. This was her fourth time in ADC. Her mother and father had also been in jail. She had won a scholarship to Boston University. I read a few of her short stories. She was a natural writer.

The Hispanics were among the most heartbreaking. The few who spoke some English told horrific stories about their struggle to get to America. Two had been raped; some robbed. Unable to make bail, they were caught between the “coyotes” who threatened to kill their families back home if they talked, and immigration officials who vowed to keep them in jail forever if they didn't say who had smuggled them into the country.

Wanda haunts me still. A repeat inmate at ADC, she was in her early forties but looked older. Heavyset, with short, curly hair and coffee-colored skin, she had a low-pitched chuckle and a quick tongue. She talked nonstop about the things she was going to do when her six-month shoplifting sentence ended. As that day approached, she grew quiet. She told fewer funny stories about life “outside”: about her favorite fried chicken restaurant and the local bar in DC where she used to hang out, smoking marijuana
and nursing a beer while cheering the Redskins. The night before her release, she seemed despondent. There had been no reply at the number she had been calling for weeks, which supposedly belonged to a grandfather she barely knew. Her mother had died long ago. Wanda seemed to have no close relatives or friends willing to take her in for even a few days. She had nowhere to go.

The morning of her release, we gave Wanda the traditional round of applause before she distributed her few possessions. She barely spoke. She left jail with bus fare to get across the river to DC and almost no chance of finding the father of the father who had abandoned her. With no high school diploma and a repeat prison record, she had no job prospects. It seemed clear to us all that she would soon be back in jail, her only clean, safe, dependable home—a “safe place to detox and warm place to piss,” as she had put it.

Several women in the two cell blocks where I spent eighty-five days never got a single telephone call, or letter, or visitor. They had no money to order from the canteen. Some of their public defenders had not shown up for their court dates. For some of these women, like Wanda, ADC was a step up in life. It was humbling.