It was twice as big as any dry cleaners or Laundromat I had ever seen on the street. Outside, the laundry building looked like all the other structures of the institution—nondescript gray cinder block with pale blue trim. Inside, it was a large open space filled with huge commercial washers and dryers with a network of metal pipes and wires snaking along the steel structure supporting the unfinished ceiling. The building was also filled with noise. The hum of motors, the rush of fan-blown wind, the stamp of the press, the whistle of the steam, and the continual metallic slaps and clanks obscured every other sound made by the officers and inmates working among them. “I knew you’d get around to me eventually,” Brent Allen yelled above the noise when Merrill and I walked up. He stretched a shirt between the two steaming halves of the press and pulled the lever releasing the top onto the bottom one and the wrinkled cotton fabric between them.
