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Prisons:3 6/7/07 2:57 PM Page 12 pale green straight-legged pants common to nurses everywhere and a top printed with calla lilies on a black background. She grabs her fanny pack filled with phone numbers, keys, and pens. She crosses the living room of her new townhouse and sits on her loveseat, leaning heavily into the plush backing, enjoying some last quiet moments before she has to drive to work. A movie is playing on the television, but Upland isn't watching. Her mind is elsewhere. It'll be Upland's first weekend back at the Deuel Vocational Institution, a prison and receiving center outside of Tracy, Calif. for county jail inmates who will be sorted into the statewide population of more than 172,000 incarcerated prisoners at the 33 prisons that make up California's penal system. "I call it 'going back to the rock quarry,'" Upland says. She has worked registry at DVI for the past two years. Upland works registry, she says, because she needs to take breaks occasionally from the grueling drama of prison nursing. "I call it putting myself on parole," she says. Three weeks ago, she decided she was done with the place and vowed never to return. The overcrowding and understaffing endemic to the California prison system have taken their toll on Upland. The ongoing stress of providing care in a correctional environment, and tensions brought on by rapid changes in the system to conform to a court order to improve prison healthcare conditions have made work at DVI, and other California prisons, difficult to bear. For a while Upland avoided the calls from her supervisor asking her to return. They came every few days, as if Upland had never resigned. But like addicts, Upland and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) are involved in a dance of dependence. The CDCR is desperate for good nurses, and Upland is a 33-year veteran of correctional nursing. Raised in a strict military family compelled by duty, and trained as a public health nurse, the needs of the many, says Upland, have always been paramount. In corrections, Upland says she sees the microcosm of human society. "You see everything here. You see drug abuse, domestic violence. It's the place where we have the opportunity to correct these problems." Most of her years have been spent working in county jails. Approximately six of those years have been in state penitentiaries, in- 12 REGISTERED NURSE ERIN FITZGERALD Joey Upland, RN says that working in correctional nursing is seeing "the microcosm of human society." W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G M AY 2 0 0 7