Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

The title refers to the title of a New York Times fashion article, which a friend of Piper Kerman sent her shortly after she was imprisoned in the minimum security portion of the federal women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. I wouldn’t have dared.

Piper Kerman was imprisoned for 15 months (she served 13) for smuggling drug money. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts during the early 1990s, she stayed in Northampton and became the lover of a woman, Nora (an alias invented to prot

The title refers to the title of a New York Times fashion article, which a friend of Piper Kerman sent her shortly after she was imprisoned in the minimum security portion of the federal women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. I wouldn’t have dared.

Piper Kerman was imprisoned for 15 months (she served 13) for smuggling drug money. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts during the early 1990s, she stayed in Northampton and became the lover of a woman, Nora (an alias invented to protect the convicted), who was about a decade older. It turned out that Nora’s unusual affluence was due to heroin smuggling. As Kerman was looking for excitement, the illegal nature of the venture, combined with the prospect of travel to Europe and Bali as a hanger on, excited her. In 1993, 24 year old Piper Kerman transported more than $10,000 in undeclared drug (heroin) money through the Brussels airport for her lover Nora. Then, in an outbreak of reason, and after (luckily) a job transporting drugs rather than money fell through, Kerman broke all contact with Nora moved to San Francisco. As this is a memoir, we’ll have to take her word that this all of her involvement.

In May 1998, having moved to New York City with her boyfriend (and now husband) Larry Smith, Kerman was indicted for drug smuggling and money laundering. Unlike so many drug defendants, she was able to pay for a good lawyer rather than settling for a public defender with far too many cases. In order to avoid the swinging minimum mandatory sentences these charges have brought since the 1980s, which probably would have spent more than a decade in prison, she followed her lawyer’s advice and agreed to a plea deal in which she pled guilty in November 1998 only to money laundering , for which the minimum sentence would be 30 months. Then after she pled guilty, her prison date was delayed for 6 years, as the federal government attempted to extradite the Nigerian supplier – the government would have preferred Kerman to appear as a witness as a free citizen rather than a prisoner. After 6 years, the extradition fell through and her court appearance for her sentencing was set. Given the 6 year delay, the prosecution agreed not to oppose her motion for a shorter sentence. During her December 2003 court appearance she was sentenced to 15 months. She was ordered to report to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury on February 4, 2004.

I would have found being indicted for something that seemed like a lark 5 years ago scary, and the subsequent Kafkaesque 6 year delay most unpleasant, However, for Kerman the delays did have the advantage of allowing her to make enough money in marketing to pay for good legal advice.

Actually, the Danbury's inhabitants might have foundthe orange jumpsuits implied in the title an improvement on their actual garments- the women in minimum security had to make do, for their outer garments, with hand-me-downs from male prisoners. This sort of cheapness seems to have characterized Danbury. The minimum security camp at Danbury had poor but edible food, resembling an unpleasant junior high cafeteria from the 1970s. There is a track (on which Kerman was running 30 miles a week towards the end of her stay) and some fitness equipment, as well as the ubiquitous TV rooms. The prisoners had jobs, and some (such as Kerman, who worked first in the electricians shop and then in construction) might have gained some marketable skills from them. Usually there was an education department to help the prisoners get the GED. However, there was no useful help for prisoners to find a job after release, or find housing, or in general deal with freedom. As almost all the prisoners were poor and badly educated, and many had only worked in the illegal sector.

The prisoners usually sorted themselves as either white, African-American, or Hispanic (referred to by all in the prison as “Spanish”), though Kerman bunked (shared a cubicle with bunk beds and 2 lockers) with an older women of Jamaican origin during most of her time at Danbury. Many of prisoners were remarkably kind to those understandably quite frightened newbies to prison. They would provide items, such as bath soap and shampoo, not provided for free by the prison (you had to buy it in the commissary) until the new prisoners began prison jobs whose princely wage rates (from $0.14 (!) to $1 per hour) would allow them to buy supplies. As in so many other ways, Kerman’s upper middle class background saved her from some indignities, as Larry soon sent in a money order enabling her to pay for commissary items and (high-priced) telephone calls. Her white skin seems to have been a point in her favor with some of the correctional officers.

Work appears to have been valuable to the prisoners in helping pass the time and reduce boredom. Visits, usually by family members, were the highpoints of prisoner’s weeks; those who lacked visitors seem to suffered psychologically as a result. Many of the women were mothers, and the end of the visitation time, and consequent separation from their children, could be heartbreaking.

The relationship between correctional officer and prisoner was categorically unequal. A number of the officers seemed to relish this authority, usually in a petty-minded (rather than violent) way to create low grade misery among their charges. The chances that a prisoner’s word would be taken over an officer’s account are nil. Officers can take actions which result in the prisoners losing privileges, such as having visitors. Offenses deemed serious could result in solitary confinement, which is apparently an excellent way to cause serious mental problems. Correctional officers, many of whom are men, can frisk a prisoner at any time; though most of male correctional officers frisked as lightly as possible, some took frisking as an opportunity for a gropeThe main sexual issue at Danbury was frustration. Despite the administration’s apparent obsession with lesbian sex (prisoners aren’t supposed to touch each other, period), the main true issue regarding non-consensual sex would appear to be the use by some male correctional officers of their authority to coerce sex from inmates. Despite this unequal relationship, some of the officers, such as the head of the construction unit to which Kerman won a transfer after some appalling remarks by her supervisor in the electricians shop, were quite decent.

Many of the prisoners had drug problems. A few prisoners could take advantage of the limited number of slots in the rehabilitation program run in the real prison (as opposed to the minimum security camp) at Danbury. Most of prisoners were in prison for their low-level involvement in the business aspects of the drug trade, rather than for being drug addicts, and apparently this distinction reduces the chance for treatment. Ironically for a place filled with people with drug convictions, the prison was copiously handing out psychoactive pills. Sometimes these medications helped the prisoners; for other prisoners, the medications kept them in a zombie-like state.

There was little violence in the minimum security camp at Danbury, as one might expect given the non-violent nature of their offenses. Plenty of cursing, not much shoving.

By being exposed in prison to bad effects of drugs as drugs, as opposed to the bad consequences of some policies and laws related to the war on drugs, Kerman came to understand that her actions in 1993 had bad moral consequences by promoting an addictive and damaging drug. Years earlier, during her sentencing hearing, it was driven home to her that her actions reflected on her family and friends.

On January 3, 2005, she was ordered to pack up her stuff, because she was going to (eventually) end up in Chicago to testify at the trial of another member of the drug ring, Jonathan Bibby. Oddly, she was first sent to a prison in Oklahoma City; apparently the federal bureau of prisons airline works like a hub and spoke system, picking prisoners up, dropping them off in the maximum security prison in Oklahoma City, and then redistributing them appropriately. Travel arrangements are unpleasant; handcuffs and shackles. After some weeks in Oklahoma City, Kerman was transported (shackled right next to Nora) to the zoo-like Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), which apparently has the unpleasant ambience of a county jail. One trying aspect of both Oklahoma City and the Chicago MCC was that there was no work to occupy the time of the transients; and furthermore the work at the Chicago MCC was done exclusively by the more numerous male prisoners. The food at both was terrible. Jonathan Bibby’s trial was in February of 2005. Kerman, who had never met Bibby, testified about her association with Nora. On March 4, her sentence up, Kerman was released from the Chicago MCC.

Unlike other prisoners who, upon leaving prison, would be going to a homeless shelter, Kerman was fortunate enough to be going to a newly purchased (by that prince, Larry) apartment in Brooklyn. One of Kerman’s friends had a marketing job waiting for her as soon as she got out of prison.

Kerman was typical in that she was locked up for a drug offense, but in most other ways she was atypical. She had the resources to afford her own lawyer, and the contacts to find a good one, a most important point when only a plea bargain with a prosecutor, rather than the (now non-existent) discretion of a judge can make a sentence more lenient. The length of her sentence (though it would have reduced me to hysterics) seems roughly appropriate. It’s the women who didn’t have a good lawyer, and thus got what seem to me to have been often grossly excessive sentences under the mandatory minimum, who worry me. She was blessed not only with a family and fiancée who could and would make the time to visit her weekly and provide a constant stream of letters, books and magazines to prevent boredom and maintain contact with the outside world, but in addition with many friends who would do the same things. For many of families of prisoners, who were generally poor, it was a struggle to get to Danbury, and so visits for them were infrequent. I would have found Kerman’s circumstances most unpleasant, if perhaps deserved; how much worse was it for the more typical prisoners?