Orange Is the New Black: A Year a Women's Prison -- a Powerful Memoir by Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman's memoir reveals how prison changed her life, and why warehousing people who commit crimes is such a waste of human potential.



Piper Kerman was a 20-something Smith College graduate, somewhat adrift and in search of adventure, which she eventually found in an older woman named Nora. Intimidating, impossibly cool, and always with cash on hand, Nora introduced her to the international heroin trade, a dangerous, unlikely universe for a "well-educated young lady from Boston," as Kerman describes herself in her new memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (Random House). Eventually, Kerman got out of the drug business, but 10 years later and living in New York, her past suddenly caught up with her. She was charged with criminal conspiracy and sentenced to 15 months in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

Kerman is the first to say that hers was not a harsh sentence, not by U.S. criminal justice standards anyway. "A minimum security women's federal facility is probably your best-case scenario if you're going to be incarcerated," she says, as we sit by the window in her sunny Brooklyn apartment. Five years after getting out of prison, she remains acutely aware of her good fortune -- in having had resources, a private attorney, a devoted fiance and even a job waiting for her on the outside. Unlike many prisoners, who frequently end up locked up again after serving their time, often on a minor parole violation, hers was always destined to be a temporary stay. (She even got a book deal out of it.)

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