Review: Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison by Piper Kerman

4 out of 5

I read a digital version from the Google Play store.

Goodreads synopsis:  When FBI agents knocked on her door to investigate a ten-year-old crime, Piper Kerman barely resembled the reckless young woman she was shortly after graduating Smith College.

Happily ensconced in a New York City apartment, with a promising career and an attentive boyfriend, she was suddenly forced to reckon with the consequences of her very brief, very careless dalliance in the world of drug trafficking a decade earlier.

Following a plea deal, she spent 15 months at “Club Fed”, the infamous women’s correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, where she not only gained a unique perspective on the criminal justice system, but also met a surprising and varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances.

In “Orange Is the New Black”, Piper Kerman tells the dramatic story of those long months under lockdown, in a place with its own codes of behavior and arbitrary hierarchies, where a practical joke is as common as an unprovoked fistfight, and where the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailer is constantly and unpredictably recalibrated.

Revealing, moving, and enraging, “Orange Is the New Black” is a bold and wholly original entry in the canon of prison literature.

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I’m really glad I decided to read this one. I wasn’t in need of a inside view of the US prison system, but I definitely see the good to be had from reading Piper Kerman’s account of her time doing time.

The one thing I really appreciated about this book was the absence of self pity from our author. If this had been a poor-pitiful-me story, I would have DNFed the sh*t out of it. Kerman never once gave me that impression in this book. In fact, she reiterates multiple times that she had to own her mistakes and serve her time for making them.

I appreciated that she wrote about the years before her incarceration. I think it gave the reader insight into how she got herself into trouble and what emotions lead here to make the decisions that she did. I can relate to her younger self’s desires to have adventure and live an above average life.

Now, to address what many readers have pointed out through countless reviews; Yes, Piper Kerman is a privileged, white woman and this did affect the way her incarceration and subsequent release went. She even writes about this in the book. These reviewers aren’t writing anything that she hasn’t already and I think it very unfair to berate her for something that she really had no control over. Privileged or not, she still served time in the US prison system. Moving on.

I loved the stories she had to share about the people she met while serving time. They were interesting, touching, and thoughtful. I did not, however, like the way these stories were organized. These stories and retellings of her time were compiled in chapters that had titles. While some of the titles for these chapters seemed fitting for the content contained in that chapter, others seemed completely incongruous. Though, I’m not sure I could have done any better. There were just times were I would recall the title of the chapter and then wonder how the heck the current story related to that chapter’s title.  It was just a little distracting.

The only other thing I can think to comment on, is the bleeding heart that Kerman seemed to have developed from the experience. *holds up index finger* This is not to say that a bleeding heart for prison reform is a bad thing. I totally see her points on how messed up the system is. 100% justified. Unfortunately, I don’t see how to properly resolve the issues that make the prison system so bad.

Kerman is accurate with her assessments of the prison system. There is a dire need for change. Some could argue that serving time for minor crimes should be reevaluated. But then I have to ask, what’s to keep society from increasing the number of minor crime violations? In a vacuum, Kerman’s 10 year old minor drug crimes aren’t as serious as other drug crimes, but if the sentencing for this were reduced, where does it put similarly scaled crimes at? What does that do to the big picture? I worry that any change to how a crimes like this are dealt with could have negative repercussions. …I’m not saying anything more than a crime is a crime, for which you should serve the time for committing it.

Now, as for the reformation of the prison system, I do agree that there should be changes made and improvements to procedures to make it possible for someone to be released from prison and better themselves in the world – if they want that. That being said, I’m not sure how you go about doing that. Sure increasing taxes to procure more funding would be one thing to consider, but then you’re asking the law abiding citizens to foot the bill for people who weren’t law abiding citizens. I for one, I do not feel as though I should be responsible for someone else’s life style once they’ve removed themselves from the category of “law abiding citizen”. ….lots of food for thought can be found in this book.

Lastly, the Netflix series is great! I’ve loved every season so far. However, it’s loosely based on Kerman’s story. You can see similarities and a few select stories portrayed from the book, but its not the same. Do not expect more than entertainment with the series.

-R