Martha's First Letter From Prison

Martha Stewart said on Friday that she has adjusted to prison life and is keeping busy behind bars since reporting a week ago to a federal penal camp in West Virginia, where she is serving a five-month sentence for lying about a stock sale.

The celebrity homemaker said she was touched by the outpouring of support she has received from millions of people who have visited her Web site, according to a letter posted by Stewart on marthatalks.com.

Stewart, who reported to Alderson Federal Prison Camp before sunrise on Oct. 8, said life at the camp held few surprises.

"The camp is fine; it is pretty much what I anticipated," she said in her Internet posting.

"The best news - everyone is nice - both the officials and my fellow inmates," the letter continued. "I have adjusted and am very busy. The camp is like an old-fashioned college campus - without the freedom, of course."

Stewart, 63, was convicted last March of lying to investigators about why she sold stock in a biotech drug maker in December 2001, just before its price plunged. The home fashion mogul is continuing to appeal her conviction.

On Thursday, Elizabeth Gleick, assistant managing editor of People magazine, told The Early Show that Stewart had entered prison with a good attitude.

Reporters for People magazine have heard that Stewart entered prison with "a really good attitude," Gleick told The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen. "(Martha) said, 'I just want to be one of the girls.' So far, apparently, that's what she's been doing.

"She has been very friendly. She has been talking to the other prisoners and to their visitors over the weekend and they, too, have been sort of excited to have a celebrity in their midst, I think."

Gleick noted that the facility where Stewart is doing her time is minimum security and all-female. Most of its inmates are drug offenders.

She says Martha's not with the general population yet: "For two weeks, she'll be in a sort of orientation area that they call a cottage. But it sounds a lot more like a barracks. It has 60 women. She was assigned a lower bunk. She'll be there for two weeks undergoing psychological and physical tests.

"She's being treated, supposedly, like all of the other inmates and part of (the testing) is to determine what kind of work detail she'll be assigned to.

"At the end of the two-week orientation, she'll be moved in with the general population. She will then do 90 days, like all other new inmates, of kitchen duty, which I'm thinking she'll be pretty good at!"

Martha's daughter, Alexis, "has been (there) quite a lot already," Gleick continued. "There seems to be a lot of visiting hours at Alderson. All day Saturday, all day Sunday and part of the day Monday, every week, are visiting days.

"And Alexis was there with a good friend of theirs, a staffer, Kevin Sharky, Saturday and Sunday for much of the day. There's an open visiting area and they spent the time playing Yahtzee and Scrabble and getting food from the vending machine."

Gleick told Chen that Alexis had a bit of a problem her first day visiting her mother: "She didn't realize she needed (so much) change for the vending machine. She was planning to be there, I think, all day and she ran out of quarters. So there was nothing for her to eat so she had to cut her visit short."