Her friends send her books and letters daily. Her fiancé comes to visit her every single week. She is educated and pretty, so the prison officials treat her better. From the beginning, she has a lot of self-awareness and appreciation for how lucky she is. It’s not about the “colorful characters” she meets or how she gets to know - and like - women from the projects.
Kerman had plenty of gratitude for how good her life was before those two federal agents came knocking. And then she went to prison.ĭon’t think this is a “white girl goes to prison and finds meaning in her life” kind of book. Her flirtation with the underworld was very brief, and she got out, came home, met a nice man and landed a good job. She’s a graduate of Smith College who fell in love with a romantic idea of being bad and dangerous. But this book is impossible to put down because she could be you. She is not a poet or a master of metaphor. This is not Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” It’s not Chester Himes’ “Yesterday Will Make You Cry.” When Kerman looks up at the sun, she sees the sunshine and it feels warm. The 13 months she serves, two off for good behavior, are by far the longest of her life. But in “Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” Kerman puts us inside, from the first strip search (yes, even women have to squat and cough) to the prison-issue unwashed underwear to the cucumbers and raw cauliflower that count as salad. She pleaded guilty and in return was awarded a relatively light sentence, 15 months.ĭoesn’t sound like a long time, and “compared to most of these women’s sentences, fifteen months were a blip” - but not to Kerman her “first time down.” To those of us “on the outs,” able to run to the grocery store, use the phone and take a shower in private, a year can pass in a blink. This was despite the top-notch attorney she could hire, despite the support of her parents, her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s parents and all her friends, and despite the fact that she had lived an exemplary life in the meantime. It was a conspiracy charge, someone had named her and under the specifics of the law she was almost definitely going to jail. Five years later, the Feds appeared at her door and busted her. She had followed her drug-dealing lover halfway across the world and been persuaded to ferry some money - one time only - through international customs.
Piper Kerman’s wild youth came back and kicked her in the butt. Had it gone just a little awry or had the wrong person shown up at the wrong time, we could be wearing that orange jumpsuit. The pot we smoked in college, the time we sold a couple of hits of ecstasy to a friend, even being in the room when a bigger drug deal went down could have sunk us. Many of us have done something that could have gotten us arrested.
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