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me. She rarely catches a glimpse of another inmate or a rescued dog.
    The one hour she is allowed out for recreation she walks in “boring perfect squares” inside a small caged area while a corrections
     officer watches from a chair parked next to a bright yellow ten-gallon cooler. If Kathleen wants a drink of water, a small
     paper cup is pushed through chain link. She’s forgotten the human touch, the brush of fingers against hers or what it’s like
     to be hugged, she says, with a dramatic flair, as if she’s been in Bravo Pod most of her life instead of only two weeks. Being in PC, or protective custody, is the same thing as death row, she says, about the new situation
     she finds herself in.
    She no longer has access to e-mail, she explains, or to other inmates unless they yell cell to cell or stealthily carom folded
     notes called “kites” under the doors, a feat that requires rather remarkable ingenuity and dexterity. She’s allowed to write
     a limited number of letters each day but can’t afford stamps and is very grateful when “busy people like you bother to think
     about people like me and pay a little attention,” she makes a point of saying. When she isn’t reading or writing she watches
     a thirteen-inch TV built of transparent plastic with tamper-resistant screws. It has no internal speakers and the signal is
     weak, the reception very poor in her new confines, the worst ever, and she conjectures it’s because of “all the electromagnetic
     interference in Bravo Pod.”
    “Spying,” she claims. “All these male guards and a chance to see me with my clothes off. Locked up in here all by myself,
     and who’s going to witness what really goes on? I need to move back to where I was.”
    Allowed only three showers per week, she worries about her hygiene. She worries about when she will be allowed to get her
     hair and nails done again by inmates who aren’t the most skilled stylists, and she irritably indicates her overprocessed short
     dyed blond hair. She complains bitterly about the toll incarceration has taken on her, about what it’s done to her looks,
     “because that’s the way they degrade you in here, that’s the way they get you good.” The polished-steel mirror over the steel
     sink in her cell is a constant reminder of her real punishment for the laws she’s broken, she says to me, as if it is the laws themselves that are her victims, not human beings she has violated or killed.
    “I keep trying to make myself feel better by thinking,
Well, Kathleen, it’s not a real glass mirror,
” she muses from the other side of the white Formica table. “Everything that reflects anything in this place must cause distortion,
     don’t you think? The same way something is distorting the TV signal. So maybe when I look at myself, what I’m seeing is distorted. Maybe I don’t really look like this.”
    She waits for me to affirm that her beauty really isn’t lost, that her steel mirror is guilty of fraudulent reflections. Instead
     I comment that what she describes sounds terribly difficult and if I found myself in a similar situation I’m sure I’d share
     many of her same concerns. I would miss feeling fresh air on my face and seeing sunsets and the ocean. I would miss hot baths
     and skilled hairstylists, and I sympathize with her about the food especially, because food is more than sustenance to me
     and I feel comfortable talking about it freely. Food is a ritual, a reward, a way of soothing my nerves and brightening my
     mood after all I see.
    In fact, as Kathleen Lawler continues to talk and complain and blame others for her punishing life, I think about dinner and
     look forward to it. I won’t eat in my hotel room. That would be the last thing I feel like doing after being trapped in a
     dirty stinking cargo van and now inside a prison with an invisible code word stamped on my hand. When I check into my hotel
     in Savannah’s historic district, I will wander along River