The story of Martha in jail is the kind of nineteenth-century fall-and-redemption tale that might fit well on one of the shelves at Turkey Hill. Everyone—Lyne, Magrino—has worked hard on it, and they’ve gotten it right. Not that they’ve made it up necessarily, but they’ve known how to put together the hagiography, what to disseminate and when to keep mum. At first it seemed that Martha was not getting along well in the Big House—she had a roommate, Peanut, who didn’t care for her, but Peanut was swapped with drug-dealing 50-monther Kimberly Renee Bennett, and Martha finally relaxed in her narrow bottom bunk. She spent her time before the holidays in denial of her surroundings, writing out her usual Christmas cards to networking acquaintances. And she got into a spat with another prisoner who had bought her some sugar and butter from the commissary—when presented with a bill, Martha refused to pay for all of it, arguing that the other girl was trying to make her pay for things she had taken from the cafeteria for free.

Through the painstaking observational skills used to wrap a perfect present, though, Martha learned the rules of her new environment, and it was then that her lemons-into-lemonade instincts came out. She gathers stray dandelions and wild onions from the concrete cracks of the prison grounds, like a witch. She hides condiments in her brassiere, to be used later in her microwaved concoctions, a Vietnamese vegetable dish, or a flan. She learned to crochet and is making a scarf. She cleans the prison administrator’s office, and showed the other girls how to do it right—the best way to clean a floor waxer is with turpentine, she explained. She once saw a new girl crying and invited her along to yoga class. She sorts Scrabble pieces to make sure each set has the right number of letters, and has made a prison cat her little pet. She could be less than perfect: She lost a holiday decorating contest, her paper cranes deemed inferior to a Nativity scene. She’s even put aside that pesky insomnia that made her sleep four hours a night and prune trees for the rest.

It was all so sincere, everyone started to believe it. She even wrote this epistle to a reporter days before the Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimum guidelines: “It is astonishing how high hopes are in West Virginia, and I fear that a negative result will cause a severe depression. . . . As you can imagine, when one gets to talk to these women, most first offenders, and many perfectly nice ‘neighbors next door,’ it is mind boggling to understand that they have four, six and fifteen years to serve away from family, friends, jobs and home. It is indeed pitiable.”

There is pity and goodwill, too, out there for Martha, chef’s-hat-wearing fans and all that. She was screwed by the system, a woman made to take the fall for the Kozlowskis and Ken Lays. There’s optimism among her employees, former and current, who talk about a Martha who, while somewhat penurious, empowered them to live the craftsman’s life they loved. She fostered a lab environment at the company, where disciples were encouraged to bring out the essential beauty of a napkin ring, no matter the time and cost. She had her peccadilloes—no fruit with chocolate, for instance. She didn’t like things to go to waste. “If there were peaches left over after a TV show, she’d tell us to make jam and put it in the commissary,” says a former food editor. “We were foodies—we liked doing it. It was nice for us.”

“I got a letter from Martha on Tuesday,” says Margaret Roach, editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart’s publications. “I had been writing to her about how I was going through an ‘iPod thing’ this winter, and she relayed how she had just read the Bob Dylan autobiography and was craving an iPod and Dylan music. So as soon as she gets out, I’m going to pack up all our favorite groceries in a big shopping bag and take it over to her house, to cook her dinner and ingest all the Dylan songs onto her iPod.” (Memo to Martha: This is illegal.)