Prison Stories

The Toilet Tissue Church

How a prized prison commodity turned ritualistic for a group of women believers

Linda Lee Smith Barkman, PhD
GEN
Published in
5 min readJan 16, 2019

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Credit: Catalina Bessell/Moment/Getty

WWhen new prison ministry volunteers and inmate worshippers attend services at the California Institution for Women (CIW), they are invariably surprised as the inmate ushers hand them a neatly folded rectangle of toilet tissue as they walk…

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Linda Lee Smith Barkman, PhD
GEN
Writer for

served 30 years in a California prison, advocates for marginalized women, and her book “Hidden Power and False Expectations” is coming soon from Urban Loft Pub.