Women prisoners make up the fastest growing segment of the fast–growing U.S. prison population, the Bulletin said. A twelvefold increase in women in prison in the last decade . . . seventy–five percent with children . . . eighty percent commit nonviolent crimes—possession, prostitution . . . theft usually to pay rent or other bills, unlike men doing it for drugs or thrills.
I skimmed the stories and finished with Model workshops in prison: Coolis is of, for, and by the prisoners. Prison workshops in Coolis allowed prisoners to earn as much as thirty dollars a week manufacturing food and clothes for consumption in the state prison system. The computer produced a blurry picture of smiling inmates in a prison kitchen and two serious–looking women operating monster sewing machines. Carnifice had invested a lot of money in the workshops when they built the prison; they lobbied unsuccessfully to overturn an Illinois law that prohibited sales of goods outside the prison system. In fact, that was the only bill that failed Poilevy’s special crime session.
“The labor unions have a stranglehold on this state,” Jean–Claude Poilevy grumbled when he was unable to muster the votes to overturn the law. “They make it impossible for efficient use of industrial facilities in order to protect their own fiefdom.”
While I waited for the articles to print, I logged back on to LifeStory. I should have done this days ago, but my cocaine adventures had put it out of my mind. I wanted to see what kind of report I would get on Lucian Frenada this time around and contrast it with the first. I pulled up my original report so I could double–check the parameters I had specified.
When it came on the screen I thought I was hallucinating: instead of the modest bank accounts and two credit–card balances I’d seen ten days ago, I got pages of detail: bank accounts in Mexico and Panama; eighteen credit cards with charges on each ranging as high as twenty thousand a month for travel and jewelry; a home in Acapulco and one in the Cote d’Azur. The list went on and on in a mind–numbing fashion.
I was so bewildered I couldn’t even think for a few minutes. Finally I went to my briefcase and took out the wallet of backup disks I carry between home and office. I found the floppy with the Frenada report on it and opened the file. The simple figures were the ones I’d shown Murray yesterday morning.
I sat bewildered for a long time before I could think at all. It slowly came to me that when the vandals broke into my office last week, they’d gone into my computer and altered my files. They’d somehow loaded bogus numbers into the LifeStory files and downloaded them onto my machine.
I wondered whether they had messed around with any of my other documents—altered my case records, my tax data—they could have done anything. Once again the sense of violation made me feel sick. Someone had helped themselves to what was almost an extension of my mind.
I’d started the day determined to drive out to Coolis to try to see Veronica Fassler as soon as I found her trial record, but I was too upset to deal with the prison system this morning. I wished I could find my old hacking buddy, Mackenzie Graham. He could have told me how someone had managed to screw around with the LifeStory data, but he was somewhere in East Africa with the Peace Corps these days.
I opened up several old case files but then decided I didn’t want to find evidence of a stranger’s hands and feet in my life. I zeroed out my disk. Are you sure you want to do this? The system asked me twice and then seemed to shrug its electronic shoulders. Okay, but you will lose all your files. I wiped it clean and reloaded the system from my backup disks, reloaded all my data, offering Mackenzie a million thanks for forcing me to the unwonted discipline of daily off–site backups.
I spent the rest of the day working assiduously with the woman from the agency. By five we had eighty–two neat piles of papers for which she could type folder labels in the morning. I told her what to do in the morning when the Unblinking Eye came to install our surveillance camera and monitors, then lugged my computer to my car and drove it home. I didn’t know where to set it up that would be really safe, but my apartment was less vulnerable than the warehouse, because at least here someone was usually around.