It’s 7 a.m. at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center and the guards are about to open the doors for people with prison jobs or academic programs. Women crowd around four metal tables at the front of the pod, some sitting, others standing, all loaded down with transparent bags full of books and snacks.

The past four years of my incarceration in this Oklahoma prison have conditioned me for this. I wake up at 5:30 a.m., drink a cup of Maxwell House instant coffee, stand in front of the mirror for 10 minutes to wash my face, pick out which shade of orange T-shirt to wear, and am ready by 6:30 a.m. After double-checking that my lockers are locked and my bunk is able to pass inspection — blankets neat and tidy with no excess items on my desk — I check my wrist one last time. Not for my watch, but to make sure I have a hair tie.

Before prison, I wore my long brunette hair down, styling it with a couple of waves I added with a straightener. Wild-but-put-together-chic, I liked to think. “I like how you do your hair,” a co-worker once told me as we served tables at Buffalo Wild Wings. “That’s your look.” They were right. It felt like me.

But the truth is my hair wasn’t all that important to me then. It wasn’t until I got to prison that it suddenly meant something. When you’re stripped of everything, you’ll find anything to hold on to.

In this foreign landscape of state-issued orange, my long hair feels like all I have left of my identity from before I was given a number and labeled “inmate.” Before I was exposed to the unnatural way women here are herded through fences toward the dining hall like cattle. Before standing naked in front of a stranger became the standard operating procedure of weekly visitations, not the stuff of nightmares.

Most people here don’t know how long my hair is. I always pull it up, particularly in the summer. Oklahoma summers are thick with humidity and the days regularly reach 100 degrees. As a runner and workout enthusiast, I am either outside or in the gym, where there’s no air conditioner. Once, after returning from a morning run, my hair soaked in ringlets of sweat around my face, someone ribbed me by asking if it was still raining outside.

Though it’s rarely down, I still constantly fuss with my hair — readjusting, pulling it back, buying more hair ties to keep it from intruding on my daily activities. Prison has forced me to reduce my once wild-but-put-together-chic look to a messy bun or loose braid. It’s definitely a nuisance, but when someone suggests cutting my hair shorter as a solution, I am instantly offended. My hair isn’t a vanity project. It’s my last connection to the life I used to have.

In here, I no longer feel the wind blowing through my hair the way it did when I rode my bike along the Arkansas River in Tulsa. But if I run fast enough around the prison’s quarter-mile trail, the swishing of my ponytail triggers a faint recollection of that cherished routine. For 5 miles, I escape the drab, redundant scenery of the prison yard and quiet the constant chatter of 1,200 women.

I start to imagine Tulsa’s distant skyscrapers. I see strangers stopping at a QuikTrip to fill up tanks and grab cold drinks between destinations. I begin to make out the smell of gas and hot concrete, and to hear the sounds of traffic and the songs of the wind that formed the soundscape of my rides along the peaceful river trail.

About a year into my incarceration, one of the few women who managed to keep a straightener hidden after they were banned from the facility let me borrow it. It didn't take long — a few minutes to heat up the straightener, a few more to add a couple of waves. Then I looked in the mirror.

My hair fell well below my shoulders. In that moment I came back to me: the girl who listened to Grimes and took her beagle mix, Lola, to the grocery store. The girl who wore Rag & Bone jeans and ordered Starbucks. The girl people knew as Lindsey Smith and not 873962.

Lindsey Smith is an editor of The Mabel Bassett Balance, a prisoner-run newspaper at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, Oklahoma, where she is serving a sentence for manslaughter.