The women's prison

The days I have interviews at the prison, I wake up restless. The warm water of the shower, the hot black coffee, the fried egg on a slice of fresh toast — all of it feels like too much.

That Monday, November 14, 2019, it was my turn to visit the women's prison. I arrived around eight in the morning. No line. After the search, a policewoman walked me down a gravel road. A few steps in, she nodded toward a large shed on our right.

"That's a factory — some of the inmates work there," she said.

To the left stood the nursery cell, where women with babies live. When those babies turn three, the law takes them from their mothers and hands them to a relative, or sends them off to a state shelter.

Is a three-year-old a thing you can simply transfer? I don't know what I would do if someone took my daughter, or my son. I don't know what would become of my own children if they were pulled away like that, overnight.

The policewoman and I walked into a wooden building with a courtyard that once held a mango tree and flowerbeds, now paved over into a concrete slab that bakes under the noon sun. We continued down a hallway toward the deputy director's office. The administrative building looked half-demolished, though it had apparently looked that way for years.

The young woman I spoke with over the following weeks arrived in rough shape — cuts on her arms, her legs, her neck. There was barely room left on her skin for another scar. She began to speak. I'll call her La Panzona, "Big Belly," since she was pregnant.