Orange is the New Black

Orange is my favorite color, so I suppose I wouldn't mind if orange became the new black - a moment discussed in Piper Kerman's memoir, Orange is the New Black. Perhaps though I wouldn't enjoy that fashion shift it was a joke written to me by my best friend whilst I was in prison. Piper Kerman found it endearing that her friend send her a newspaper clipping of a fashion trend saying "New York is going orange!" but I think that I would feel super conscious of my new prisoner's uniform.  

I found myself going into the memoir expecting it to be a close resemblance of the Netflix hit TV show. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Although all of the same elements are there, many of the things that we see happen to Piper in the TV show are exaggerations of the truth, or they're things that happened to other people and the writers of the show took all those things and made them happen to Piper. In her memoir she states often that she learned to survive prison because of the women in there whom she spent time with, but she also laments "prison is terrible!" and I think that in the show they took her reality out of it and made it a farce. I say this disappointingly because I love the TV show, but I think I must now separate the TV show from the book before I get irritated with how helpless and unfortunate the TV show Piper is. In the show, Piper struggles with her family and fiance on the outside, whereas in the book her friends and family are nothing if not absolutely supportive of her. Sure, they might not understand some things she has to deal with, but they don't make it all about them like they do in the show. In my opinion, Netflix's version of this woman's real life experiences is more entertaining than the book, but the book's got way more heart. 

Obviously this memoir is more genuine and certainly more authentic than what I saw on Netflix - but let's be reminded I never would have picked up this book if it were not for the show. I was indeed touched by Piper Kerman's accounts of her time in prison and the relationships she formed there with women - but unlike the show she never indulged in any lesbian affairs and every relationship was purely platonic, although filled with love and care. Also her ex-girlfriend is NOT in the prison with her, but she does happen to meet Nora later at another prison when they're both sent to testify against another drug smuggler who Piper does not even know. It's pretty tense considering Nora is the one who ratted Piper out to the feds for a crime she just barely participated in ten years ago. Nora is "Alex" is in the TV show. Many names and characters were also changed or events were switched around compared to the memoir. 

If I take the Netflix hit off my radar, here's what I think purely about the book. Piper's prison experience did not hold all of the violence, sex, intrigue, time spent in solitary, etc. that I thought it would or that I was expecting. It was truly an account of how a group of women tried to survive the day-to-day nonsense of an institution that didn't care about them and that they didn't want to be in. It talked about the small and large injustices that these women faced and how they were able to cope with it all. In Piper Kerman's case it seemed particularly unfair that she was being punished for something that she did so long ago; something that she doesn't even remember doing, and something that was done by a person she doesn't even recognize anymore as herself. Once sentenced, Piper had to wait 6 years before she actually did her 13 month prison sentence, and then was on probation afterward for 2 years. This means she was basically under federal control for 9 years. 9 years of her life gone for a stupid mistake she made in her early twenties. 

Piper "Chapman" from the show and the real Piper Kerman

One aspect of her memoir that I respected, but that also made the book less engaging than the show (I know I said I'd drop the show, but listen!), was that Piper included many statistics for us to drive home the point that America has invested too much money in a system that doesn't work, doesn't rehabilitate its prisoners, and only serves to try and dehumanize them as much as possible before throwing them back out into the world, where more than likely they'll have to do something that leads them back to prison. There's also a lot of commentary on how lucky she is, being an upper-middle class citizen with a family to go back to, a job waiting for her, and lots of support. Many of our poor citizens in prisons go through a system of rotating doors. Once in prison they get used to a life of structure and rules and are provided for (however poorly that may be), but once released they have no idea how to get housing, get jobs, and survive. 

61 million American families deal with the "justice system" every year. 1 in 100 American adults are sent to prison. Piper struggles to understand the bizarre and often nonsensical nature of the BOP, for example commenting on standing in line all the time. To this she remarks that "For many women, I realized, this was nothing new. If you had the misfortune of having the government intimately involved in your life, whether via public housing or Medicaid or food stamps, then you'd probably already spent an insane amount of your life in line." This thought comes to her as she's waiting to receive laundry soap packets, one of the only free things handed to you in prison. To this she asks the question of why not soap? Why not something that would help you actually clean your body? "Why not toothpaste? Somewhere within the monstrous bureaucracy of the Bureau of Prisons [BOP], this all made sense to someone." 

Prisoners struggle to reconcile their lives in prison with their future lives on the outside. They often struggle with authority, or the middle-class white women struggle with being locked up with people they think they're better than. Piper laments that she knows she's not better than anyone else she's locked up with, but often because she's white and from the middle-class she is treated better by the authority figures; she tries desperately to avoid these favors and they often make her angry. Going back to the real world is often hard for prisoners, because again they do not have what she has. For this she has to keep herself updated with the real world constantly from newspapers or TV so she doesn't get lost inside her own head. 

Piper also tells us about the inequality between the prison guards and the prisoners. How this formal relationship which is enforced by the institution is one in which the guard's word means everything and the prisoner's means nothing, and that is terrifying. "One can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face." The extreme inequality often leads to abuse of many different kinds, "from small humiliations to hideous crimes," and many times sexual abuse. After experiencing this kind of power dynamic for sometimes many years we expect our prisoners to re-enter society and become meaningful members ... that is something I don't understand. How can they? 

About 80% of women in prisons have children. We're putting these mothers, and mostly these nonviolent offenders, in jail for sometimes very long periods of time. Who are we helping by doing this? "... in the federal system alone (a fraction of the U.S. prison population), there were over 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more." Add to this statistic that many of the women in the prison that Piper went to were poor and poorly educated and come from neighborhoods where the "mainstream economy was barely present and the narcotics trade provided the most opportunity for employment." These women went to jail for anything from dealing, allowing their apartments to be used, passing messages, etc. and for all of this they still received pretty low wages. In the memoir we also found out that if a person is in prison without their GED, they're only allowed to get paid $0.14 an hour. That means you would make roughly around $5 for a 40 hour work week in prison. 

Piper's experience in prison leads her to recognize the harm she did to those around her. Her family and friends suffered because of her when she was convicted, and she was complicit in aiding the addicts get addicted with what she participated in, and she has seen those negative effects firsthand in prison. The women around her have humbled her and helped her take responsibility for her actions. One of her last points on our prison system made me so incredibly angry because the truth of it is so obvious. We are not helping our society. We have prison pipeline that shoots out from poor neighborhoods and poor schools straight to the prison system. Race and class have made it so that prison is a reality in many of our youth's futures, and our country is doing nothing to stop it. We invest more in the prison system than in our schools and the education of our children. We do not invest in opportunities for kids from crappy neighborhoods to have a shot at making out of themselves. And when they do go to prison, we don't rehabilitate them or "correct" them, we purely punish, humiliate, and abuse them. And for the 80% of women who are mothers, we leave their children without a parent. Please do not get me wrong, just as Piper points out in her book many times she realized that deserved to get punished for what she did, and that what she participated in was a drug trade that hurts people in very real ways. But here is what she points out that I think is worth listening to:

"A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But 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. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge, and retribution, all and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in." 

Piper in an interview in the back of the book comments that prison is awful. Her attitude going into it was what saved her. "I didn't focus on feeling bad for myself. And when you start talking to people who are doing so much more time than you, and it seems like the only reason is the color of their skin and that they're from a poor neighborhood or family, it's pretty damn hard to feel bad for yourself." Additionally, Piper reinforces what her book is about, and I would agree with her assessment, " ... the focus on the positive that the book offers is really about finding the value in humanity and warmth in a setting where we're constantly told there's none to be found - people are irredeemable, terrible people. And that's not the case." 

This book is not as entertaining as the Netflix series. The Piper in that series is a lost girl with extremely bad luck, a lesbian lover, and she's a magnet for crazy trouble. The memoir however is a gem. It's a piece of literature that attempts to let us commiserate with her about the injustice of our world, and recognize that she had it good overall. She was genuinely relieved to get out after her relatively short sentence but many of the women who helped her survive her time on the inside were not that lucky. Likewise her friends at the prison were not going to be well equipped when they were sent back out into the world, and her worry for them never stopped. This book is indeed about humanity and surviving in the face of something so surreal that many of us can't begin to fathom it. What if our country was invested in making people atone for their sins in a way that was productive both to the convict and their victims? What if we invested more in our youth - no matter what neighborhood they came from? What if we made it so that our prisons did not contain a large portion of our adult population? And what if we made it so that nonviolent offenders and mothers could indeed be helped so that they could go back to their children and be productive in a society that shuns them? What if we take away the stigma of being a felon and instead try to lessen the amount of time we throw on top of people who get involved in a dangerous enterprise that seems to be the only venue open to them? I think this book made me want to do better. 

Piper was only 1 out of 700,000 people who return home from prison each year. And as she states "What happens in our prisons is completely within the community's control ... what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things." Prisons teach prisoners how to survive as a prisoner not as a citizen. People unlike Piper who leave prison have to prepare for homeless shelters, family court, and uncertain prospects for work. These people usually have little to no help. The United States has the biggest prison population in the world. "We incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners, though we are only 5% of the world's population." Most of our prisoners are low-level offenders who committed nonviolent crimes. As a society I think we can do better for these people. "Lack of empathy is at the heart of every crime," and I think it's time that we teach each other to recognize the harm we do to others. I see it all the time on the playground at my school. Kids will break some one's neck and not realize the repercussions of their actions. This attitude is fostered throughout their early lives. 

In conclusion, in 1980, there were approximately 500,000 people locked up in the United States, but today we incarcerate 2.3 million. Many of these, again, are low-level offenders for nonviolent crimes. The "war on drugs" has not stopped addiction or drug abuse in our country. Our system is a racially biased one that over-punishes and fails to rehabilitate. Over-incarceration in America destabilizes families and limits opportunities for change. You should read this book because it's frustrating, heartbreaking, heartwarming, and genuine. It recounts a woman's genuine experience and shows us her journey of realizing the gravity of her crime and opening up her eyes to see what our justice system really accomplishes - which is not much, and it does not make us any safer. It's a good social commentary on our system as well as a commentary on her life. I will keep watching the show, but for me it takes events from her experiences and turns them into entertainment. This book is about a dialogue and a really terrible time that yielded memorable moments in Piper Kerman's life. 

World Prison Populations from 2008