A compelling, often hilarious, and unfailingly compassionate portrait of life inside a women's prison, by a Smith College graduate who did the crime and did the time.
When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman she was shortly after graduating Smith College when she committed the misdeeds that caught up with her. 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.
She spent 15 months in prison, 13 of them at the infamous women's correctional facility in Danbury, CT, which she found to be no "Club Fed." There 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 locked up in a place with its own codes of behavior and often arbitrary hierarchies, where a practical joke is as common as an unprovoked fight, 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.
Piper Kerman is a communications consultant working with foundations and nonprofits. She lives in Brooklyn.
