“The vast majority of altered paper is harmless. Some officials tend to look the other way when toilet paper is crafted into chess pieces (using an age-old prison paper mâchè recipe of toilet paper and water: wetted, molded, dried and wetted again). But where a rook and a knight have an innocuous purpose, the same manipulation of toilet paper can be used to make a deadly knife, called a “shank,” which, it is said, can disappear with a flush” — Katy Bolger for The Awl.