“I’m kinda’ settling into the swing of things here. It’s been less than a month, but it feels longer. I can’t really get on a schedule because they change my work times constantly. The first week it was 5am to 10am, then it was 2am to 6am for a few days, then it went to midnight to 6am, and now they have switched me to 10pm to 4am. To quote dad-‘bureaucracy 1, me 0’. Again.”
“…if you don’t have a high school diploma/GED, your whip (that’s what they call your paycheck) maxes out at $.50 an hour. But what’s crazy is that less than 15 girls on a yard of over 200 have a diploma! And this is what they call the ‘princess yard’. It’s the nicest and smallest yard and if you get even a minor ticket you get sent to another yard.”
“Almost every day we see the ambulances going over (to the Rosa yard), sometimes twice a day. Last week we heard there was a girl who got killed because…she brought a load of laundry to the wrong beds by accident and one of the girls said her new socks were missing. The girls here aren’t like that. It’s tame and you don’t have to watch who is walking behind you…”
“My friends are going to put together a little birthday party for me…(they) are getting together and ordering the ingredients for a cheesecake that they make with coffee creamer, lemon juice and melted strawberry starbursts. The level of creativity in this place would literally astound you!”