Orange is the New Black

Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison
Author: Piper Kerman
Publisher: Random House (2010)
ISBN: 9780385523387
pages: 295

genre: popular nonfiction
subgenre: biography

3.5 (out of 5) STARS

Annotation: Piper Kerman spent thirteen months in prison for a ten year old drug crime.

Summary:When Piper Kerman was in college she became friends with a motley crew of characters. One was her lesbian lover named Nora who was involved in drug trafficking. Piper traveled the world with Nora just for the fun of it. On only one occasion did Piper help smuggle drug money back into the United States. Five years later this particular drug ring was infiltrated and names were named. Piper was one of those names named. It took five more years for Piper to receive her prison sentence.

Piper was sentenced to thirteen months in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut for a ten year old drug crime. This book tells the story of the many unusual and interesting people Piper met and lived with during her incarceration.

Piper stood out in the prison for many reasons. She was blond, blue-eyed, middle class, educated and well-loved outside the prison. She had an amazing support group and received letters, magazine subscriptions, care packages, and books on a daily basis. Every time there were visiting hours Piper had people there to see her. Yet despite all this she still had to learn how to live inside the prison. Inside she was the same as everyone else. There was no special treatment. In fact, at the beginning she was quite worried that her differences and privileged life would draw undue attention to herself. What she found though was a great capacity for love and compassion not only towards the other inmates but directed toward her as well.

Evaluation: The basic writing style of this book was average, but still commendable. Occasionally memoirs can be painful to read; such as Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Prison by Malika Oufkir and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. The stories are amazingly interesting but the writing leaves something to be desired. On the other hand, Orange is the New Black has an acceptable writing style and I did not find it painful to read. Periodically, I got a bit bogged down but overall I quite enjoyed it.

I greatly enjoyed the stories Kerman portrayed. There were many interesting people and experiences discussed in this book. I also found the social commentary on prisons, prison life, and woman prisoners to be interesting and thought provoking.

One such comment by Kerman warrants much consideration. “Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in” (pg. 181).

This book brought to mind an article I was recently reading entitled Prison Without Walls. Both authors seemed to have arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion that our criminal justice system is ineffective and does not accomplish much of anything. “Criminals typically differ from the broader population in a number of ways, including poor impulse control, addictive personality, and orientation toward short-term gratification rather than long-run consequences. More than a fifth of all incarcerated criminals are in for drug offenses, and a large portion of the others abuse legal and illegal substances. If one were to design a criminal-justice system from scratch with these characteristics in mind, it would be difficult to come up with something less effective than what we have today” (Wood, 92).

Wood, G., Prison Without Walls. The Atlantic. Sept. 2010. Pg. 86-96.


Read-a-likes:
Life on the Outside by Jennifer Gonnerman
Going up the River by Joseph T Hallinan
A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars by Cristina Rathbone
Forget You Had a Daugher: Doing Time in the "Bangkok Hilton" by Sandra Gregory
13 Women by Karlene Faith
The Farm: Inside a Woman's Prison by Andi Rierden