Lancaster, Calif.

EVERY weekday morning the prison’s not on lockdown, the yard holds its collective breath waiting for the pale-orange package cart to appear through multiple layers of chain-link and razor-wire fences. For most prisoners, this lumbering vessel is their only tangible, physical connection back to the free world. The last couple of years the cart has arrived less often and with visibly lighter loads.

We get broadcast television, so the state of the economy outside is no secret. Our families and friends tend to come from the segments of society that are the worst off in the best of times, and worse off still in times like these. Our mothers and fathers, wives and children, those to whom the ties that bind haven’t been unbound by the course of our lives, tell us how hard it is out there.

The first inkling of financial difficulties in here surfaced in the chow hall. All of a sudden prison officials became concerned about our overeating. In the last couple of years, our brown plastic trays have started to look and feel a lot emptier. Even the old staples, beans and rice, shrank into bite-sized portions. Luxury items like frosted cake and meat cut from the carcass of a once-living thing vanished. The new menus, chock full of potatoes and meat substitutes, seem right out of a Spartan’s cookbook.

Prison is a world reflected in a looking glass, however. The past 25 years were generally prosperous for California; the economy boomed and fortunes were made in the sunny San Fernando Valley. But during this time, the lives of prisoners became much drearier. We were forced into demeaning uniforms, with neon orange letters spelling out “prisoner,” and lost most of the positive programs like conjugal visits and college education that we had had since the ’70s. Money was flowing outside the prison walls, but new “get tough” policies against criminals were causing our population, and our costs, to soar.