In the basement classroom, a woman talks about her daughter. She reads from a folded piece of white construction paper.

"The best celebration of my life was the day my daughter was born," she reads. "It was hard for me then. I went into labor for thirty two hours. And it was hard to give up everything I had: a planned future, a college education, a job. But when I found out I was pregnant I knew I was destined to be a mother."

Her name is C-. She has been coming to my writing workshops for six months.

C- pulls her hair into a tight ponytail. She's black and Portuguese. She's small set, and her eyes look as if they could belong to a teenager, but she's in her early thirties. Her clothing is baggy, cotton, navy blue, last name written in black permanent marker on a white patch. She's legally blind without her glasses, so at first I wrongly assumed she was illiterate.

I am also small, but I am twenty, and my skin is white and pale. I wear plastic glasses and keep my brown hair short. When I come into prison, I'm the only person wearing street clothing. Sometimes I debate with myself in front of the mirror about whether I should try to look nice for the women in my workshop. I always end up settling on some middle ground.

Some come into the room with hard candy. Some come in with armfuls of lined legal paper, with ten years of poetry. Some come inside with love notes to pass back and forth. With fights to settle. I come to the room with affected naïveté. I make believe that I'm not studying the system. I try to check my baggage at the metal gate. I try to put my ideology in the baggage. I remove my earrings and underwire bra.

The workshop is supposed to be a space for inspirational words like "hope" and "recovery." The words are double-edged swords; they cut the pain, but they also cut out the real. We construct a common language by suspending our disbelief. We find a reason to be gathered in one space. Some women share memories of Christmas morning and first baby showers, and oaths about the GED, and mutely spoken regret-deeply rooted regret-and everyone repeats: You were a bad, bad girl. Move forward, leave this waste behind, pick a straight path!

Sometimes it is that space.

But sometimes the space is full of fury. The fury is so loud that it stifles every word, like a censor blacking out sounds before they take shape in the air. The women are clawing at the bottoms of their thighs as they sit on their hands. I know that C- is here because she was a prostitute. She was almost killed in a car accident with her drunken pimp. She signs her writing with an epithet, "From the Unfinished Manuscripts of the Insane Inmate, C."

When we write together in the workshops, we share a general quiet. Then we read out loud, and the quiet splits into static categories. Our humiliation is textured by age and experience, education, sexuality, money and memory. Those things "shouldn't" make a difference, but they do. The writing redistributes legitimacy. Among the women, I am profoundly, humiliatingly illegitimate.

When I went in for prison training, the correctional officers were firm with their instruction. The women, they told us, are two-faced. They made them sound like shape shifters from frightening northern folklore. They said, the masks the inmates show you are not the same masks they wear on the wing. They will want you to get comfortable, to make sweet talk and draw you in. It's easy in a workshop to know them as humans, as addicts in recovery, or as writers and artists. But on the wing they are soviet arms dealers in the cold war. They speak another language. They bargain and seduce. You are now part of that language, whether you like it or not.

So don't cut corners. Consistency, equity and strength are your guiding principals. There is no room for interpretation.

They said, you're going to want to make friends.

Don't do it.

Don't ever do anything you wouldn't want to be caught doing on camera.

Before the workshops, I try to come up with a decent prompt. I consult the advisors in my head.

One says, "Don't use rap. You don't know if they like rap, and even if you did, you would still seem fake. Don't be presumptuous." Fine. I alternate between bluegrass and Slick Rick.

B- asks, do you actually listen to either of these at home?

The second voice says, "Anything political is didactic. Don't raise issues of representation. Don't try to fight their fights."

I wonder, what separates Their fights from My fights?

The third says, "Don't do anything you wouldn't want to be caught doing on camera. Don't establish relationships. Don't make friends." And I thought writing was about relationships.

If I want to be empathetic, should I look over my shoulder first?

We made masks in one workshop. I brought in shiny art magazines from the racks at Borders, thickly bound Japanese-style designs and throwback retro covers. When the class was over, B- had not finished. "Can I take the magazine and work on my mask?" She asked.

In volunteer training, the correctional officers taught us prison terminology. The first term we learned was "illegal contraband." The rule is easy enough: everything is illegal contraband. Pens, string, glue, letters, food, scissors, journals and books. There are systems in place for delivering goods to the inmates; volunteers are not part of that system. The goods we leave in prison are intangible. The exchange between visitors and prisoners excludes material objects and gifts, which means everything from excessive personal encouragement, to sexual favors, to photocopied novellas.

Magazines are illegal contraband. It doesn't matter that B- and I both like fashion photography, or that we turn the pages together and look at the models. On that day, I looked around and checked the shelving units in the prison library; the section labeled "Magazines" was empty. There was a metal tray fastened to the wall with nothing on it. Maybe if I just left the magazine there, I thought-pretended not to notice I had left it-We might not get caught?

Did I really have to ask?

Imprisonment is intended to make inmates internalize the consequences of deviation. There is no reason to ask questions when the rules are written down. Under the law, the answer to every question is "NO." Until you can answer without asking, you haven't internalized the system. I am supposed to know that; I am not an inmate. But I struggle to feel that distinction. I have not found my faith in the doctrine handed down; I can't uncover reason in the regulations. This authority seems insecure, or role-playing, like a bad parent telling a child to "Shut the Hell Up." I thought, I want to leave this fucking magazine, it's just words and pictures. There is no reason in here at all.

I decided not to when I pictured B- in orange punishment clothing.

In another class, B- reads from her paper, an answer to the question, "What is your spirit animal?"

"I am a hummingbird," B-says. "Hummingbirds seem calm on the surface, but inside their hearts are going a thousand beats a second. With the human eye, it looks like hummingbirds are frozen in mid-air, holding still, but really they're darting back and forth. They embody many paradoxes. Everyone has seen a hummingbird at least once in her life, but only ever for a moment."

Paper is accessible and equal, but prisoners' papers rarely get outside. The points of egress for paper are the United States Mail and creative writing workshops. I have heard of some people using the United States Mail to publish plays and novels, to send letters to politicians, and to make apologies. I have met ex-cons who applied to college through the post. But that doesn't seem to happen very often; there's a wall of silence around the gates which keeps most words low to the ground.

That wall isn't only literal. Sure, a brick wall and four fences keep the inmates inside. But a hundred other walls silence all the discourse about prison. The framework of approved language regiments our thinking, and we give in to the safety of self-doubt. We uphold the silence at every level, first by muting out the prisoners, then by covering our mouths. Everyone is afraid of ethical trespass.

Do I have the right to write? Speaking about prisoners is always already stigmatized, like exploiting the over-ironic homonym in "write" and "right." It is potential humiliation, like clapping between movements at the symphony. I know I have no "right," but I decline to respect the silence.

K- tells us that the best day of her life was her first baby shower. Her family came to Rhode Island from across the country; her sister even drove from Florida. K- 's mother couldn't stop taking pictures of her, telling her that she was beautiful pregnant. Her belly was swelled and stretched like a beach ball. Every time K- opened a new gift, her mother stuck the bows to her body, so that by the time they were all opened, she looked like a giant Christmas present. K- 's mother kept saying, "I know you're going to do everything right for the rest of your life."

"We" "believe" in "hope" and "recovery." They might be hollow words. "We" rests on an assumption of solidarity; "hope" and "recovery" depend on the suspension of disbelief, like a simple children's story: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

One week, C-brought in a perfectly hand-printed copy of a journal entry and asked me to take it home and read it. She was going to get out in three weeks. She was going home to be with her daughter. The journal entry was a portrait of her bunkmate using repetitive sounds, tap, tap, tap, and crunch, munch, munch. On her bed, C- is going to snap, snap, snap. When I brought it back, she asked, "Do you do this kind of writing in school?" Of course, I said. Why? "I'm thinking of going to college for writing when I get out. I think I'm good at it." From the Unfinished Manuscripts of the Insane Inmate.

There are 300 women in the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions; most are twenty years older than me. That means six thousand years of stories with no readers, because the language is not approved and the writers have no rights. Language piles up and rests inside the gates. Language is illegal contraband.

I hope that someday 2.25 million stories will humiliate the system.

That's one for every prisoner in America.