Daily Prison Life
With a strike count of 2 ½, they gave me the worse job in the plate factory. The work in was horrendous. Unbearably hot, with heavy, repetitive, exhausting labor, tremendously tedious to the point of being mind numbing. I was a “press girl." You placed the proper letters and numbers in the die, placed a blank plate in, then had to manually pull the press up and drop it to make the imprint on the plate. It would then go to the next station for hand-painting, a much more desirable job.
Fifty “problem" inmates, ½ strike away from max were assigned as press girls for 12 hours a day. Another 75 inmates with only 1 or 1 ½ strikes were assigned as plate painters for 10 hours daily.
Pilar “Girlfight" Ortiz was assigned to the station across from me, and also slept in the bunk below me in X dorm. It was horrible every minute of every day, but we did the only thing we could…..keep our noses clean to stay out of max.
In X dorm our day started an hour earlier than the rest of the cons, at 4 am, when the bell sounded. We had to put on ugly orange-stripped prison “exercise uniforms" (sweat pants and sweat shirts) and had to do an hour of intense calisthenics led by a female guard who was a former Marine drill instructor.
Then it was breakfast in the “mess room" attached to our dorm. We had 15 minutes to eat in silence, and the food was always the same…whole wheat hot cereal we called “gruel" (pretty nasty stuff), a piece of dried, or very occasionally fresh fruit and a 6 oz glass of milk.
It was off to our hellacious day in the plate factory at 5:30. We worked for six straight hours, then got a 10 minute lunch break. Since we press girls were ½ strike away from max, we had to eat the same thing for lunch the max inmates had to eat for three meals a day. It was a hard baked loaf of homogenized meat, potatoes and peas called “Nutra-loaf," and a 12 oz cup of water.
