Lorna

I remember watching some old B-grade movie once called Women in Chains. I could not tell you who the stars were nor even what the plot was about except that it involved women in prison. I do distinctly recall that the downtrodden women who wore those chains had hair and makeup to rival that of any movie star and astonishing figures that poured voluptuously from their scant prison attire. Funny, but I never met a female inmate who looked like a movie star or appeared voluptuous in her uniform. Many of them, though, were under the misguided belief that they did.

Be that as it may, inmates truly can be ingenious when they want to. It’s almost astonishing. Who needs a drug store or beauty salon when you have jail issued cosmetics right there at your disposal? Red punch can be used for lipstick and also cheek rouge. Pancake syrup, if thinned with water, acts just as effectively as hair spray or mousse, and strips of toilet paper can be twisted around the hair to set it in curls at night. You can also scrape a lead pencil against a cinder block wall to get shavings that are then mixed with butter and used for eyeliner and shadow. It works pretty well, actually, as long as you don’t mind getting lead shavings and butter in your eyes. Ah! What price beauty?

I remember one young gal who came into the jail one afternoon with bleached platinum blonde hair and went to court the next morning sporting a luscious shade of lime green. I believe it had something to do with the gelatin dessert on her supper tray. It was trendy and the flies really gathered nicely about her head, but it didn’t do much to impress the judge. He didn’t release her. Neither did he release the girl who offered to leave her purse with the court “for collateral”, nor the one who flashed the judge a lengthy view of her less-than-ample bosom. Female inmates are a hoot.

I remember Lorna because she was an expert at all of the above, from make-up to hair mousse to judge-flashing. She was not a young woman, indeed she was pushing fifty-something and didn’t have anything very interesting to flash with, but I gave her credit for trying.
Lorna had shot and killed her husband. It was never really determined who started the quarrel because they were both drunk at the time, but Lorna was the survivor with the “smoking gun”, so to speak, and she never really denied the incident. Her defense was that the shooting was “accidental”, that her husband had egged her on, shouting at her to “go ahead and shoot!”. Lorna said he would not stop yelling at her to shoot him and she got so agitated and upset that she lost control of her grip and the gun just went off. The fact that the gun went off accidentally five times was sort of damning, but what the heck? Could happen.

It seems to occur a lot, actually, women shooting their husbands or significant others. Most of them do not claim it as being “accidental” though. Most tend to say it was due to domestic abuse and many have the bruises and scars to prove it. Over the years that I worked in the Prescott Jail there were probably a dozen such lethal incidents, and in this somewhat small part of the world that’s a fairly large percentage. The instinct of someone such as myself is to wonder, Why the heck didn’t she just leave the bastard? Why send herself to prison for ten or fifteen years? Of course this question is raised by on-lookers in just about every incident of domestic violence on record and it doesn’t take long to learn it just isn’t that simple. Lorna stayed with her spouse for whatever her reasons were, just as all abused women do. Fear, poverty, co-dependency, the issues are far too complicated to delve into just now and my expertise in that area is limited. Suffice it to say most women in abusive relationships do stay, often with tragic results.

There had been a history of domestic abuse, according to Lorna, but she stated she had never reported it because “she loved him”. When we talked she told me he had sent her to the Emergency Room on several occasions but she always made up excuses as to what had caused her injuries. Besides, when he wasn’t drinking (and when she wasn’t drinking) he was such a good, kind man. They had a wonderful life together. She could not bring herself to throw it all away because of a “little” arguing.

Lorna mourned for her spouse for a while, but not very long. It was only a matter of a couple of weeks, in fact, before she began her flirtations with the Detention Officers and that was when her creativity with jail cosmetics and inappropriate exposure reached the ultimate heights. She became the Tammy Faye Bakker of the female dorm, mixing up colorful concoctions from beet juice, gelatin, punch, commissary candy and leftover coffee. The makeup parties became a regular evening event, with all the women trying to create artwork out of leftover food products. The jail staff condoned none of these activities but there was little anyone could do to prevent them and the resulting faces were as entertaining as all three of Ringling Brother’s rings.
She also found God....