2 Gwen Harding

       The law is the true embodiment

       of everything that’s excellent.

       It has no kind of fault or flaw,

       And I, my Lords, embody the law.

      W. S. Gilbert, Iolanthe

      Whenever Warden Gwendolyn Harding was asked to give the occasional speech to a group of young people or a women’s association, she would usually begin by telling those assembled, ‘When I was a little girl and people would ask me whether I wanted to be a nurse or a teacher or a mommy when I grew up, I’d answer that question by saying, “No, I want to be a prison warden, because then I’ll get to be all three of those things at once.”’ The story always got a laugh, and Gwen Harding liked to think that laughing helped people to relax a bit. If you can make someone laugh, aren’t you making his or her life a little better? Isn’t it giving him or her a small gift? That was why Gwen was often so disappointed with herself after a long day at Jennings. She couldn’t make the lives of the inmates much better, and she most certainly could not make them laugh. She wished that she could.

      She also wished that she could make the five representatives from JRU International laugh as well. They were all solemnly seated before her in her sunny but somewhat dusty office at Jennings. This wasn’t the first time she’d met with Jerome Lardner, the bald little man with the protruding Adam’s apple, but she didn’t recognize the rest of his staff. They seemed to be interchangeable in their little suits, their little haircuts, and their little ages. They looked like they ranged between ages twenty-four to twenty-eight. Gwen Harding was used to seeing young prisoners, but her staff were mature. Even Jerome Lardner, whom Gwen uncharitably – but only mentally – referred to as ‘Baldy’, was well under forty.

      ‘What we are hoping to achieve,’ Lardner was saying, ‘is not just a new level of productivity, but also a new level of profitability within a correctional facility.’

      ‘Well,’ Gwen pointed out with a smile, ‘any profitability would be a new level, wouldn’t it? Prisons have never made any money.’

      ‘Certainly,’ Jerome nodded, ‘certainly none of the public prisons make money, but the privatized ones do.’

      That word! Gwen decided yet again that she would not argue statistics with Jerome Lardner. Whenever she called any of his ‘facts’ into question, he was always ready with statistics. If figures didn’t lie, then liars like Jerome certainly didn’t figure out anything except how to protect their own position. ‘Inmate Output Management Specialists have been very effective in supervising the productivity of privatized facility workers,’ Baldy droned on.

      Sometimes it took Gwen as long as five minutes to figure out what the JRU terminology meant. They seemed to avoid using straightforward words like ‘prison’ or ‘forced labor’ when they could use their multisyllabic buzzwords instead. It might fool the politicians, but it didn’t fool Gwen. ‘Whatever you just said, I’m sure you are right,’ Gwen responded.

      At last! She got a bit of a chuckle and a few laughs from the JRU staff. That would be her little gift to them. Gwen suspected that they were probably laughing at her, not with her. She imagined that she was probably the butt of plenty of JRU jokes. But that was nothing new. She knew, for example, that at Jennings many of the women – both the inmates and the staff – referred to her as ‘The Prez’ – as in ‘The President’. This wasn’t because of her strong image or authoritative air, but rather because of her somewhat unfortunate name. When Gwen Harding first arrived at Jennings, her nameplate had been erroneously engraved to read: WARREN G. HARDING instead of WARDEN G. HARDING. She assumed that the error was an innocent one and not a purposeful attempt to make her look silly. She had had the sign redone, but she kept the original one at home and amused friends and relatives with it at dinner parties and family gatherings – back when she gave dinner parties and had a family to gather.

      Gwen could laugh about the nameplate now, but it was not the most dignified way to begin her tenure as the new warden. Fortunately, over time, Gwen had noticed that fewer and fewer of the women who were sent to Jennings even knew who Warren G. Harding was. She imagined that ‘The Prez’ would eventually be replaced with a new name – probably something even more offensive. Maybe it already had. The inmate population grew, changed, and became less educated and more troubled each year. She’d been shocked only last week when Flora, the middle-aged inmate in charge of the laundry detail, apparently didn’t know the difference between a city and a country. ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to Paris,’ Flora had said.

      ‘France?’ Gwen had asked her.

      ‘There, too!’ was Flora’s reply.

      It would have been something to laugh about if it wasn’t so sad. But Gwen would’ve preferred that she and Flora had something to laugh about together. Jennings was such a sad place, she wished that all of them – the inmates, the officers, the staff – had something to laugh about. But, after all, it was a prison, wasn’t it? And she was the Warden – not a clown. And most certainly not a teacher, a nurse, or a mommy. The job wasn’t what she had once hoped for. Contrary to what she (and no one else) thought of as her ‘amusing public speaking anecdote’, being Warden had very little to do with nurturing, medicine, or motherhood. Increasingly, it was a purely administrative position that required an expertise in staff management, food preparation, health services, and custodial care, along with – quite obviously – criminal behavior. If she had to do it all over again, Gwen Harding would’ve gladly chosen to be a nurse, a teacher, or a mommy. But she didn’t and she couldn’t.

      Gwen looked at the JRU International staff seated before her. She sighed. It was a big waste of time. As she tried to concentrate on the ongoing monotone monologue of the bald one, she realized that she wasn’t sure she knew what she was any longer; the thrust of her job had changed too much. She had more and more paperwork, less and less contact with the inmates, and virtually no programs in education and rehabilitation. The greatest focus of her work was on cost containment – especially since JRU had begun to explore the privatization of Jennings nearly a year ago.

      Baldy finally stopped speaking and a member of his very young crew was now going on about a ‘facilities facilitator’, who would make the buildings better, stronger, cleaner, bigger, and more beautiful. It wasn’t clear to Gwen how this was going to be achieved without an immense infusion of money. The Jennings infrastructure hadn’t been invested in in decades. She couldn’t even find money for routine maintenance.

      It was very difficult for Gwendolyn Harding to comprehend how an underfunded and crumbling government-controlled institution for the so-called ‘rehabilitation’ of