LizaWasHere

Last weekend, I read Piper Kerman’s new book Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I wish I knew people live with whom I could discuss it. (Smith book group? Mom?) I’ve cornered innocent acquaintances and rambled about how interesting it was and how I can’t stop thinking about it, and there’s a lively discussion going on among some of my Facebook friends, but I want more.

Piper Kerman is a Smith alumna who made some very bad judgments not long after graduation, traveling the world in the company of some big time heroin traffickers and money launderers. She didn’t deal or use drugs, but in a legal sense, she was part of a criminal conspiracy to move drugs around the world to sell them. After not too long, sherealized what a bad idea it was, extricated herself from the situation, and got on with her life.

Several years later, the past caught up with her, and Kerman was arrested. Eventually she pled guilty to money laundering. Sentencing was delayed by something like 6 years, so 10 years after she removed herself from the drug trafficking conspiracy, she was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison.

In a nutshell, Piper Kerman is a very talented writer, writing an emotionally compelling, well-researched, surprising, and personal account of an experience totally outside my day to day world, and I’m guessing outside of yours, too.

I think any reader whose youthful indiscretions include the use of any kind of illegal drugs — not necessarily trafficking or money laundering! — imagines how they might have handled the situations Kerman experiences. Not just the facts of prison life, but the emotional challenges she goes through, like telling your grandparents, finding a job, maintaining a romantic relationships, etc.

This story is amazing.

What is amazing is not that well-educated, upper middle class women can exercise bad judgment, or even that they can get caught and be held accountable for their actions.

What is amazing is how well Kerman tells her story, weaving in the sociological realities of how the prison system works, how race and class interact in women’s prisons differently from men’s prisons, the petty ways that the staff demonstrate their power over prisoners, how that uniquely affects women, and how the women in prison relate to, look out for, and help one another.

The book is anything but dry. Kerman tells the story from her heart, not flinching away from her own emotional roller-coaster ride, addressing her own struggles, humiliations, and sources of satisfaction. The pictures she paints of the women she met are equally unflinching, and at the same time, compassionate.

Some of the things that happen in the book are horrifying. Some of the policies and practices Kerman describes are reprehensible. For example: If a woman in federal prison makes a sexual assault complaint against a guard, she gets sent to a segregation unit — put in isolation for her own safety. She loses her prison job, her ability to spend time with her friends, and in many cases, her ability to have visitors from outside.

In other words, for reporting a sexual assault, a female prisoner loses all possible sources of comfort and is herself placed in a status within the prison that is normally used to punish people. (This doesn’t happen in the book, but Kerman’s prison work boss, an employee of the prison, does engage in aggressive, sexually inappropriate behavior towards her; she makes an informal complaint as part of her effort to get a new prison job, explaining to the reader why she doesn’t make a more formal complaint.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I know Piper Kerman personally. We were classmates at Smith, and we ran in overlapping social circles. In fact, I may be one of the few people outside of Piper’s youthful inner circle who knew how restless and in search of adventure she was.

During the end of our sophomore year, one of our close mutual friends had something of a major mental breakdown, and left school. Then another mutual friend left school too. When Piper decided to follow suit, I vividly remember her coming to tell me. I thought she was joking at first, and I know she was worried about my reaction. I gave her a hard time, although I was sort of joking.

Piper and I didn’t stay in touch after college, although the miracle of social media changes things and we are again friendly. (And her roommate from Smith is someone Jill and I both follow on Twitter: @cherylcoward.)

I am quietly amused by the fact that when we were in college, I thought of Piper as someone a little too cool for me. The insight into her personality that the book provides casts that in a different light, and makes me so relieved that my own restlessness and desire for adventure took me in such a different direction.