The Educated Inmate
That is one eye catching title. From Harvard t I Handcuffs is another. Five been accepted as a contributor on Quora.com, a site featuring people who write about stuff they know, often in response to questions. What I have learned from the stats is that people are not looking for me to uplift them. People have no faith in my knowledge about relationships. People are only mildly interested in my experiences with addiction. But thousands are very much interested in my time in the women’s jail and prison in Honolulu. This incarceration setting is ethnically diverse with different types of Asians and Polynesians. Whites are a minority, blacks an even smaller minority. Almost everyone was in drugs. People were in for having drugs or trying to get drugs usually by shoplifting, stealing credit cards and checks, burglarizing houses, stealing cars. There were a couple of women who had killed their boyfriends, one had been abusive, the other had made the ill fated decision to tell her he was going with another woman. There were three women who had killed their babies. One had had post partum psychosis and cut the infant’s throat. One had kicked her step daughter took hard in the stomach. One particularly pretty and arrogant woman had done nothing the state could prove but the bruised toddler had died and as the mother she should have known why–that is
