Anna Sussman

Amika was convicted of vehicular manslaughter.

She was sentenced to nine years and eight months in California state prison.

Amika began serving her 10-year sentence in the polka dot muumuu women are dressed in when they go over the wall.

The prison was over capacity.

Some women were pregnant, some were living with HIV, some were in need of psych care or methadone, and people were triple bunked, some even housed in boiler rooms.

Amika was walked to her dorm, shackled at the legs and the wrist and the waist, and handed a blanket and some clothes.

One of the first things she did when she got there was she took a little paper envelope of pictures of her kids, Milo, Soleil, and Blossom.

And she took a tube of toothpaste and put a little dot of toothpaste on the back of each picture and hung them up in her locker, where she could see them all the time.

Sometimes she would take the pictures out of her locker and lie on her bunk and just hold them.

she could finally have a contact visit.

She'd been locked up for almost a year, and now that she was out of county jail and in state prison, she could visit them without a pane of glass in between them.

Amika's papa was going to bring the kids for a visit, all three of them.

They'd been living with him at the time, and he booked a flight and packed their bags.

And Amika thought she could hold on just a little bit longer and wait it out until she got that visit.

But waiting it out was harder than she realized.

What Amika didn't yet understand was that inside prison, there's an invisible and changing set of rules, predicated often on the whims of the guards.

A write-up is a punishment for breaking a rule.

She said it was as if the COs were everywhere.

She calls them green cops because they wore green uniforms.

She says there were a few in particular she knew to avoid.