MS. NÚÑEZ, YOU’RE BEING RELEASED
ALM No.95, November 2026
ESSAYS
"Women on the left. Men on the right."
That meant we were getting frisked.
I had never been frisked in my life.
Now I had some woman who looked like she should have been driving an eighteen-wheeler telling me to spread my legs while she started by feeling underneath my bra.
"Wooah," I said as she continued to work her way up my leg and toward my crotch.
I remember thinking, What the fuck kind of job did I take?
Before I worked in a maximum-security women's prison, I didn't even know there was a difference between jail and prison.
I had never been arrested. I had never visited anybody in jail. I had probably gotten a couple of parking tickets in my life, and that was about the extent of my experience with the criminal justice system.
Prisons scared the shit out of me.
So naturally, I got a job in one.
I was hired to work in an optical lab inside a maximum-security women's prison in Florida. It was an inmate work program that manufactured eyeglasses, and I worked in the office. A lot of our customers were doctors' offices and organizations in Puerto Rico. I was hired to handle the Puerto Rico accounts because I spoke Spanish.
Different prisons had different industries. Some made license plates. Some made uniforms.
Ours made eyeglasses.
I had no idea any of this existed.
Every morning, I had to get through security before I could even start work.
Correction officers with shotguns guarded the entrance. There were officers on the rooftop behind razor wire. Sometimes dogs were in the parking lot sniffing for drugs.
I had to leave my purse in my car.
A security machine scanned my hand.
My lunch went through an X-ray machine.
And every once in a while, we got a surprise frisk.
Once I was finally cleared, I had to walk from one end of the compound to the other to get to the optical lab.
That was another layer of discomfort.
"Good morning, Ms. Núñez."
"Good morning, Ms. Núñez. I love your skirt."
"Oh, you look pretty today, Ms. Núñez."
"Have a good day, Ms. Núñez."
I walked what seemed to be a never-ending runway while being gawked at by incarcerated women who were very excited to see a fresh piece of meat.
I was trained alongside the correction officers.
The inmates had to give us the same respect they gave the correction officers. We had the authority to enforce the rules and discipline them if they crossed the line. They were required to address us by our last names.
To them, I was Ms. Núñez.
The rules were very clear.
Do not give or accept anything from an inmate.
Do not investigate their crimes so you don't subconsciously discriminate against them.
Do not wear revealing clothes.
Don't wear too much makeup.
Don't wear perfume.
We were told that inmates might try to manipulate us. They might give us something innocent at first and later ask for something in return.
During training, I asked one correction officer who had worked in both men's and women's prisons which he preferred.
"Men."
"Why?"
"Men get mad, fight, and it's over. I break it up and do the paperwork."
Then he shook his head.
"Women? They argue and talk shit forever. They don't fight, and I still have to do the same paperwork."
I laughed.
"The worst part is I have to do the paperwork every time they argue. I mean, fight already."
I thought that was hilarious.
At training, we were warned that every inmate was going to tell us she was innocent.
My boss, Maricela, had her own way of dealing with that.
"Yeah, because all you bitches are innocent, right?"
She would say it right to them.
My eyes would get big.
Maricela was Cuban, loud, funny, vulgar, and she did not give a fuck.
Training told us not to get too familiar with the inmates or their crimes.
The first thing Maricela did was tell me what everybody had done.
We would be walking through the compound at lunchtime, and she would point somebody out.
"You see her over there?"
Then I'd get the story.
Murder. Drugs. Husbands. Girlfriends. Insurance money.
One woman wore a cross around her neck, and Maricela told me about the terrible crime she had committed.
Then she looked at the cross.
"Look at this bitch now, walking around with a fucking cross around her neck."
I wanted to disappear.
I was new.
I kept thinking, She can hear you!
Maricela did not care.
There was one inmate who worked with us in the lab who had killed her girlfriend and stabbed her repeatedly.
Maricela asked her in front of everybody:
"So after you stabbed her the first ten times, you didn't think she was already dead? Why did you have to keep stabbing her?"
Everybody laughed.
I sat at my desk thinking, Where the hell am I?
That was Maricela.
She would ask the questions everybody else was probably thinking but would never have the nerve to ask.
The optical lab itself fascinated me.
These inmates were manufacturing actual eyeglasses.
I used to wonder if the people wearing them knew where their glasses had been made.
They cut and shaped the lenses to fit the assigned frames, and eventually everything reached quality control.
If the lenses were wrong, somebody heard about it.
Maricela would call somebody out.
"Hey! What the fuck are you doing? Pay attention!"
One thing that always stayed in the back of my mind was the equipment.
There were tools everywhere.
I would sometimes look around and think, If somebody really wanted to go crazy in here, we have given them plenty of equipment to work with.
That thought was never especially comforting.
At the end of every workday, before the inmates left, every tool had to be accounted for.
The women who worked in the optical lab had earned the privilege of working there. They were getting paid and were expected to behave. If they got into serious trouble, they could lose the job.
There was one young Black inmate who worked in the office. She looked like a young boy. She was gay and proud of it. She knew I was married.
One day she brought me a small flower.
I looked at her.
"Why are you giving me that?"
"I brought it for you."
"I don't know what game you're playing. You know you're not supposed to give me anything, and I'm not supposed to take anything from you."
Then she asked me how I knew I wasn't gay if I had never been with a woman.
I looked at her.
"Listen. Don't test me. I grew up in the ghettos of New York. I know all the games, so don't fuck with me."
She got the point.
I joked and laughed, but that did not mean you could try to get over on me.
When the inmates did especially good work, the big boss sometimes rewarded them with outside food.
Publix sandwiches.
Brenda, who worked with me in the office, and I would go pick up dozens and dozens of them.
All different kinds. All the toppings.
Publix subs were huge.
Somebody on the outside might eat half of one and be full.
These women would eat the whole thing.
Sometimes they would even eat two.
At first I thought, Damn.
Then I realized what I was looking at.
Some of these women had not eaten outside food in ten or fifteen years.
Some were serving life.
I could leave work that afternoon, stop at Publix, and buy myself another sandwich if I wanted.
They couldn't.
Suddenly a sandwich was not just a sandwich.
Things I took completely for granted looked different once I started spending every day inside a prison.
We weren't allowed to touch the inmates, and they weren't allowed to touch us.
Even among themselves, there were rules about physical contact.
I would think about women who were going to be there for years.
Some forever.
Then, at the end of my shift, I walked out.
I went home every night.
They didn't.
I went home on weekends.
They didn't.
It even felt strange coming back on Monday and asking somebody I worked beside, "How was your weekend?"
What kind of weekend could she have had?
After a while, the strangest thing happened.
I got used to being there.
The searches.
The guns.
The gates.
The inmates.
"Good morning, Ms. Núñez."
"Good morning."
It became normal.
And that bothered me.
I had spent my whole life afraid of prison, and now I was going there every morning like I was doing time with everybody else.
I stayed for about a year.
Eventually, I found another job much closer to home and decided it was time to leave.
By then the inmates knew I was going.
One of them looked at me and said:
"Ms. Núñez, you're being released."
I laughed.
She was right.
One year had been enough for me.
I was going home.
Paula Núñez is a first-time essayist and lifelong storyteller. The eighteenth of nineteen children, she emigrated to the United States in 1968 and went on to work roughly fifteen different jobs over her career — including years on a Citigroup trading floor and in the optical lab of a maximum-security women's prison. She lives in Florida and is completing her first collection of personal essays.
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