But now, when I looked in dismay at Allie, who was champing at the bit to get back to her oblivion; when I thought about whether Pennsatucky would be able to keep it together and prove herself the good mom that she aspired to be; when I worried about my many friends at Danbury whose health was crushed by hepatitis and HIV; and when I saw in the visiting room how addiction had torn apart the bonds between mothers and their children, I finally understood the true consequences of my own actions. I had helped these terrible things happen.

What made me finally recognize the indifferent cruelty of my own past wasn’t the constraints put on me by the U.S. government, nor the debt I had amassed for legal fees, nor the fact that I could not be with the man I loved. It was sitting and talking and working with and knowing the people who suffered because of what people like me had done. None of these women rebuked me-most of them had been intimately involved in the drug business themselves. Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suffering. I was the accomplice to their addiction.

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

VANESSA ROBINSON was a male-to-female transsexual who had started her bid down the hill in the FCI. Within the confines of the Danbury plantation, her presence was notorious; the COs insisted on calling her “Richard,” her birth name. One day the Camp was abuzz. “The he-she is coming up!!!”

There was great anticipation of Miss Robinson’s arrival. Some women swore that they would not speak to her; others professed fascination. The West Indian women and some of the Spanish mamis expressed disgust; the born-agains made outraged noises; and the middle-class white women looked bemused or nervous. The old-timers were blasé. “Ah, we used to have a bunch of girls that were trying to go the other way. They were protesters,” said Mrs. Jones.

“The other way?” I asked.

“Go from a girl to a boy, always bitching about their medication and bullshit,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

I soon got my first glimpse of Vanessa-all six feet, four inches of blond, coffee-colored, balloon-breasted almost-all-woman that she was. An admiring crowd of young women had gathered around her, and she lapped up the attention. This was no unassuming “shim” unfortunately incarcerated and trying to get along; Vanessa was a full-blown diva. It was as if someone had shot Mariah Carey through a matter-disrupter and plunked her down in our midst.

Diva though she was, Vanessa had the intelligence and maturity to handle her new situation with some discretion. She began her time in the Camp almost demurely, with no histrionics. Several other women had come up from the FCI with her, including a startlingly beautiful young woman named Wainwright who was her bosom buddy-they both sang in the church choir. Wainwright was petite, with green cat eyes, an enigmatic smile, and a college education-most of the other black women worshipped her on sight. They were a visually hilarious pair, similar-looking in theory and yet so dramatically different.

For their first several weeks in the Camp they hung together most of the time. Vanessa was friendly if approached but more reserved than her reputation and appearance would suggest. She went to work in the kitchen. “He can’t cook,” scoffed Pop, who fell into the “disgusted” category and was disinclined to be kind, although there was some truth in her culinary assessment. There was a ketchup-in-the-marinara-sauce episode that had the whole Camp up in arms. Pop hissed into my ear who the culprit was, but I kept it to myself.

I liked Vanessa. Which was a good thing, because she moved in next door to me. She and Wainwright managed to finesse the housing assignments they wanted. Wainwright bunked with Lionnel, from the warehouse, who was the voice of reason/discipline when it came to unruly young black women. (“Girl, you better get some act-right, or I’m going to bust your head to the white meat!”) And Vanessa moved in next door to me with Faith, a steel-haired Oxy-dealing granny who was straight out of the New Hampshire woods and had come up from the FCI with Vanessa and Wainwright. They got along great. Vanessa’s arrival in B Dorm evoked some eye-rolling from Miss Natalie, but she was more tolerant than her friend Ginger Solomon, who demanded, “Is that what you want to see in the bathroom, Miss Piper? Well, is it?!” I meekly pointed out that Vanessa was post-op, but no, I wasn’t necessarily looking for a free show.

Free shows were available. As Vanessa settled in, she got more boisterous, and she was thrilled to display her surgical glory at the merest suggestion. Soon half the Camp had seen what she’d got. Her D-cup breasts were her pride and joy, and given our height difference they were often the first things I saw in the morning. She was certainly better looking than many of the prisoners who had been born to our gender, but close quarters revealed some of her more masculine qualities. Her pits were positively bushy-she said that if she couldn’t wax them, then fuck it-and in the hot, close quarters of B Dorm in the summer, she smelled unmistakably like a sweaty man. Vanessa was deprived of her hormones in prison and thus retained several male characteristics that would have been less evident otherwise, most notably her voice. While she spoke in a high, little-girl voice most of the time, she could switch at will to a booming, masculine Richard-voice. She loved to sneak up behind people and scare the crap out of them this way, and she was very effective at quieting a noisy dining hall, roaring, “Y’all hush up!” Best of all were her Richardian encouragements on the softball field, where she was a most sought-after teammate. That bitch could hit.

Vanessa was an entertaining and considerate neighbor, cheerful and drag-queen funny, smart and observant and sensitive to what others were thinking and feeling. She was quick to pull out her scrapbook and share photos and stories of the men whose hearts she had broken, cutting up to make the time pass. (“This is the program from the Miss Gay Black America pageant-I was third runner-up!”) All the born-female aspiring divas (most of whom lived in B Dorm) immediately recognized that here was a master at whose feet they could learn. And Vanessa was a good influence on the young girls who flocked around her. She admonished them gently when they were behaving badly, and exhorted them to educate themselves, get with God, and love themselves.

She had just one ritual that was hard to take. Every evening when she was finished with work in the kitchen, Vanessa would return to her cube, climb up in her bed, and bring out a contraband tape player, obtained somehow through the chapel. Her absolute favorite gospel song, detailing the fact that Jesus was loving, forgiving, and helping us to take every step, would soar over the cube walls, and Vanessa’s voice would soar with it. This was when the need for her hormones really became most apparent-Vanessa simply could not hit the high notes. The first couple of nights she did this, I smiled to myself, entertained; by the tenth, I was burying my head under the pillow. However, considering some of the other songbirds we had in close quarters, I decided to grit my teeth and bear it. One hymn a night wouldn’t kill me.