South Middlesex Correctional Center is a self contained community where women eat, sleep, and work within a specified square footage and it often feels to me, an inmate, like it is the world being kept out, not me being kept in. It’s a friendly looking, three-story brick building with white window sashes and a wide, front walkway. The minimum security facility houses one hundred and fifty inmates deemed worthy of living outside the confines of barbed wire because of their good behavior in maximum security or the non-violent nature of their crimes. The building sits in a majestic swath of land bordered by a horse farm, a dense ridge of trees, and full sky views of sunset and sunrise.
The women here are a fairly docile bunch, aggressive in their cattiness, like any other group of women, but that is the real extent of their maliciousness. It’s a transient atmosphere; inmates come and go each day, to and from drug programs, maximum security, and court.
A slab of mauve colored surface serves as the front desk, and off to one side are a series of classrooms. In class, we are taught about ‘non-criminal’ thinking; the ideas spackled on us as ineffectively as old women who apply the latest makeup trend, that is, without much improvement. On the other side of the front desk is a large area where visits take place around round tables situated by a collection of vending machines. Beyond the visiting area is a secure hallway filled with offices. From there, the administration runs the place, sealed off from the rest of the building as if criminality were a communicable disease.
The second floor is a corridor of bunk-bed filled rooms where Mary Carlson lives. Mary is a full figured gal with long, auburn hair, blue eyes, and teeth that look like they were used to open bottles. A 34-year old mother of three, she is serving three years for robbery of an elderly person. Crimes against the elderly and the young are distinguished as such and carry longer sentences.
Mary is a bully; she’ll threaten or rob an old lady to get what she wants. Her anger is her badge of honor. She stares out the door of her room, casing the hallway, and eyeballing everyone’s comings and goings. Not a move is made that Mary does not know about. In the yard or the dining room, Mary seats herself in the spot with the widest view and scrutinizes every person who moves within her range of sight, like a hawk that finds a good perch to survey the ground below. I stay out of Mary’s way and when I have to be in her way, I do my best to remain on her good side. At times, this is difficult but mostly I am able to humor her by nodding in agreement when she bellows her latest complaint or thank her for her knowledge when she bosses me around.
On the third floor are inmates whittling away their sentences with good time by participating in sanctioned programs. For every month an inmate completes of a program, their sentence is reduced seven and a half days. Anna lives on the third floor, hers is the top bunk in room 310. She is a cherubic, 25-year old serving a five year sentence for an accomplice to kidnapping of an elderly man charge.
Anna participates in the Correctional Recovery Academy program, same as me. In class, she giggles and eyes her friends for approval. She has a runt-of-the-litter type quality; I often want to give her a pat on her head or coddle her. Anna keeps to her room, sprawls on her bed, and reads ghetto fiction, novels whose protagonists are strippers or rappers with nine children from eight different women. She speaks with a lisp and when she smiles she reveals an endearing gap between her two, front teeth. I rarely exchange words with Anna but I can picture her, immobile and nervous, standing to the side, as her friends tie and duck tape an old man to a chair.
Mary, Anna and I work, for the money, although it is a meager $15 a week, and the chance to get off the property, even though the job is across the street at the maximum security facility. We are three of a five woman crew who leave every night to clean the lobby area and the officers’ locker room at the maximum security facility. Part of the job is to carry out the trash bags and dispose of them in a small shed at the far side of the parking lot. Inside the shed, out of the surveillance camera’s range, we smoke cigarettes hidden in the beams by sympathetic officers.
On Thursday night, June 6th, Mary claims the duty of taking the trash to the shed, a euphemism for wanting to smoke a cigarette, and volunteers Anna to go with her. Melissa, Sandy, and I, don’t argue; we are happy to be rid of Mary since she’s bossy and does no work anyway. While they are gone, we finish the cleaning. It takes only forty five minutes, but we have to wait an hour or two for the work officer to drive us back to minimum security. The officer pretends to be busy in that way people fake importance when they really have nothing to do. Melissa, Sandy, and I lounge in the lobby’s pleather seats and wait to be escorted back.
Melissa, a thin woman with blonde streaked hair, asks, “Do you think they are getting high?”
“No,” I say. “They’re smoking. Someone probably left a whole pack.”
 “I know,” says Sandy, the senior of the three of us. “They’re probably chowing on a large pizza.”
“Yeah, right. Imagine? I’ll take a large pizza and please deliver it to the shed at 99 Loring Drive,” Melissa says.
 We laugh, the raucous laugh of people who hide their fear with obnoxious behavior, and then grow quiet.
“Do you think maybe someone picked them up?” Melissa asks.
“Mary was acting kind of strange tonight,” Sandy says.
“I know, right? She was uptight and like bossier than usual. Maybe she was nervous about what she was going to do.” Melissa says.
“Don’t they have cameras in the parking lot?” Melissa asks.
“Yeah, Mary wouldn’t be that stupid,” Sandy says. “Maybe they’re just outside.” She gets up and walks out the door to look. A moment later, she is back inside. “Nope,” Sandy says.
A locked door opens and the inflated work officer lumbers towards us. “Time to go!”
Sandy tucks her hair behind her ear; she wears a bob and looks remarkably innocent for someone accused of assault and battery on an elderly person. “We’re just waiting for the other girls to get back from taking out the trash,” Sandy says.
“Really?” the work officer asks. Her pudgy face widens with genuine surprise. “When did they leave?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sandy says. She consults us with her eyes. “What do you think, guys, maybe a half an hour ago?”
Melissa and I glance at the enormous clock on the opposite wall as if it will provide the answer, and nod in agreement.
“Well, go get them,” the officer orders Sandy.
Sandy tilts her head down like all inmates do when they are taking an order, and scurries out the door. We watch her go and avert the officer’s glare in Sandy’s absence. We look up when Sandy hurries in the door and notice Sandy raises her eyebrows.
The officer snaps. “Are they coming?”
Sandy’s chest is constricted and as she speaks it is as if the invisible stronghold around her middle releases. “I couldn’t find them,” she says.
A ripe moment passes as Sandy’s words infiltrate the air. Melissa and I freeze in our seated positions, Sandy looks at the floor, and the officer’s face registers shock, the recognizable slackening of all facial muscles. “What did you say?” the officer asks Sandy.
Sandy straightens her back and says, “I could not find them.” Her diction is as clear and resonant as a bullet shot out of a gun.
The officer yanks her walkie-talkie off her belt and screams for the Shift Commander, a Lieutenant Shaw.
Lieutenant Shaw is a slight, shriveled woman hiding her decreasing physical strength behind hair die and a stern face. She rushes to the work officer’s side holding a styrofoam cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. The Lieutenant ‘s jowls shake as she speaks to Sandy. “When did you last see them?”
“Ummm, we’re not sure. Maybe a half an hour ago.” Sandy says.
The Lieutenant whips off her walkie-talkie and calls for Captain Dunbar. He emerges through the door, belly first, with a pinched expression on his face. The three uniforms turn their backs to us and confer. Melissa, Sandy, and I stay quiet but exchange looks like students who make faces behind the backs of their teacher. The captain swivels around to face us.
“Get in the car. Now!”
Sandy, Melissa, and I dart out the door and scramble into the backseat of the blue sedan parked out front in the fire lane. The work officer thrusts her weight into the driver’s seat and drives us back to South Middlesex. We shuffle out of the car and stand by the front desk waiting to be strip searched, a routine that follows any trip off the property.
Inmates walk by us on their way to the stairwell that leads to the gym or to the lobby's ice machine. Michelle, a long haired beauty serving a mandatory five years for selling drugs, passes us. A long time resident, she notices the slightest change in routine. "Where are Anna and Mary?" she asks us.
We shrug and look toward the work officer. Michelle's mouths, "no way," and hurries away so we do not get in trouble.
The speed of fiber optics is archaic compared to how quickly news travels in prison. The story spreads across the hallways and through bathroom stall conversations. Within moments, the cellmates of Mary and Anna are summoned to the Security Office, down the foreboding and rarely entered hallway. We watch them being taken downstairs poised by the doors of our cells, unable to leave our rooms after 9:15 except to go to the bathroom. The women are gone for hours.
Inmates familiar with the Department of Corrections' response to escape having witnessed an escapee being apprehended or been in prison during other escape attempts explain in a know-it-all way what will happen to Mary and Anna; their knowledge provides them temporary status amongst the other inmates. An Apprehension Team will be alerted and the search for Mary and Anna will begin immediately  in full force. Police officers will knock at their relatives’ doors, investigate their former addresses, and comb the streets of their old neighborhoods. "The police will find them. No question. Those guys do not mess around. Those girls are fucked."
The morning's television news alerts the world by reporting on the convicts’ escape in crisp, alarm-inducing syllables. “Two inmates escaped from prison last night and are unaccounted for at this time. They are both violent criminals.” Listening to the news, I imagine the community double checking the locks on their doors, drawing their children closer, and ‘tsk-tsk’ing about what the world is coming to.
At South Middlesex, we share the shock of the larger world but for fundamentally distinct reasons. We are scared for them not scared of them. We worry about their children. We think of their families whom the police will badger and harass. We wonder how Mary and Anna will live on the run. We, at South Middlesex, droop in sadness. Two have dropped from our ranks, digging their hole in life deeper, and all of our minds run with them.