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Victoria's penitentiary | page 1, 2
A few weeks ago, a new memo replaced the older sheet on the window. It says: "Prohibited attire consists of, but is not limited to the following," followed by the Department of Corrections list. "Is not limited to" means the prison can disallow clothing that isn't on the list -- but what kind? The memo doesn't say. I still don't wear button-front skirts. The oddest rule of all to me is the one against metal underwires in bras. I've never heard the rationale behind it. Sure, metal can be used as a weapon, but the actual logistics of extracting the underwire from a bra while in a closely watched prison visiting room brings to mind something rather Monty Python-esque. Be that as it may, after one summer day at the state prison at Vacaville, when I was one in a long line of female visitors made to remove their bras and walk without them through the metal detector, my personal take was that the regulation was made up by some of the male guards for fun. Perhaps someone else agreed -- the rule now is that women visitors can't go into any prison unless they're wearing a brassiere. The metal detector at San Quentin is so sensitive that underwires do set it off, so I bought a bra that doesn't have them just for prison visits. It's sturdy and well engineered, like something my grandmother would wear, the sort of undergarment that makes you understand why they used to be called "foundations." One morning, though, as I groped blearily in the dark for clothes to wear, I forgot and put on one of my other bras. I realized, halfway to San Quentin, that that familiar dig in my ribs would be contraband at the prison gate. I stopped at Safeway, the only store I could find open along the freeway, in a desperate, unsuccessful search for a sports bra. When I got to the prison, I took off the offending garment in the restroom outside the gate and left it in my car, buttoned my jacket and spent the morning with my arms clutched tightly to my chest. On another morning I forgot completely that I was wearing the wrong bra and strode with oblivious confidence through the metal detector. I realized later, with some surprise, that I hadn't set it off, and that the wires on the bra must not have been metal. But I can't remember which bra that was, so the information has proved useless to me. Women visiting their men in prison learn to dress to avoid being turned away. I see a lot of long skirts, long sleeves, dark colors (but no green). I have four or five prison ensembles I wear again and again: black raincoat, long knit dresses with full skirts, wool jackets, wool slacks, sweaters and turtlenecks, in cream, gray, dark blue, burgundy and black. For prison visits we dress like Puritans. Last December one inmate's large extended family drove en masse all the way from the Midwest for a holiday visit. They showed up in a procession of minivans, from which they emerged dressed entirely in white, except for the inmate's mother, who wore a red dress. They looked mysterious and wonderful, like acolytes of a religious sect traveling with their priestess. It seems that the man they were visiting had written them about the dress code, and they were taking no chances. They made it through, red dress and all.
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