On Sept. 29, author Piper Kerman spoke to an audience of over 700 students, faculty and Oxford residents combined at Miami University about her personal memoir that became a successful television series for Netflix. Her book starts with her experience in a women’s prison, but her story began many years before that.
As a blonde hair, blue-eyed twenty-something, Piper Kerman lacked motivation. She graduated from the all women’s institution Smith College in 1992, and it was a pretty tough economy she recalled, so she drifted and got a job waiting tables.
“I was that kid that sort of hung around after graduation. And it was at that moment in time when I crossed paths with what seemed to me to be an incredibly worldly, and sophisticated older woman. She was a lot more sophisticated than I had initially understood, because she was involved with narcotics. And rather than run in the other direction, I instead followed her around the globe,” Kerman said.
With her lover she went on a worldwide adventure to places like Bali and Zurich. It was exotic and exciting. “I thought that I was having a great adventure, when of course what I found, was a great deal of trouble,” Kerman said. “I think I also imagined that I could be around that kind of stuff, and yet somehow not be crossing the line.”
Eventually this woman asked Kerman to carry a bag of money for her from Chicago to Brussels – except she didn’t say, “how would you like to do this for me?” It was more like, “I need you to do this for me.” The woman was scared and so was Kerman.
“I carried that bag of money from Chicago to Brussels, and after I did that I was even more scared because I certainly understood that I had crossed that bright line,” Kerman remembered.
After crossing that line, Kerman left the relationship and traveled back to the U.S. for good. She went to California where she had friends, got a good job and eventually moved to New York City with her boyfriend, Larry Smith. The two fell in love and she was happy, but her past crime was heavily nestled in the back of her mind.
“As every year passed, that crazy experience seemed to recede a little bit more in the rearview mirror. And it was sort of this thing in the lockbox that you keep in the back of your sock drawer, hidden away,” Kerman said.
Kerman reminded the audience that actions have consequences, and hers eventually came in 1998.
“That’s when two federal agents knocked on my door and they let me know that I had be indicted in federal court in Chicago and I better appear at my arraignments, or I would be taken into custody. So this began my journey into the American criminal justice system, a system that ironically I knew very little about. I do advise, should you choose to break the law … read my book before you do that,” Kerman said.
In 2004 she turned herself in to the Federal Correctional Institute of Danbury, Connecticut to serve a 15-month sentence. And this is where her famous prison story began: “Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women’s Prison.”
Kerman told the audience that of course, after reading the book you will find that there is much more conflict in the show. “You know I’m not entirely like Piper Chapman,” she reminded fans.
The story includes many female protagonists from a variety of backgrounds. She said, ”there’s someone in that story that you can cheer for. That’s really important, and the idea that we’re cheering for people who are in prison in the first place is very provocative, I think.”
Today the United States has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. “800 percent is the percentage increase in the incarceration of women in this country over the last 30 years. Which is kind of shocking right? You’re all racking your brains, you’re like, ‘has there been a female crime wave that I didn’t hear about?’ The answer is no, no there has not. In fact, during the same time period the incarceration of men has increased by 400 percent, which is also staggering,” Kerman said.
Female prisoners are often convicted of nonviolent crimes. According to Care2.com, about a quarter of women in jail are there for drug-related crimes, compared to about 17 percent of men.
One female Kerman met was a woman nicknamed Pom Pom whom she briefly befriended. After Pom Pom’s release, she sent Kerman a letter. She was living in a dangerous part of New Jersey on the floor of a relative’s home with no job and no coat to shield her from the cold winter weather. Upon reading the letter in her prison dorm, Kerman began to cry.
“I really, really miss you guys,” Pom Pom wrote. “I feel like you are my real family.”
Kerman said, “I cried because I was worried about Pom Pom. I was worried for her safety. And I also cried because I was so confused about my own emotions, because at that moment in time, I wished that she was back in prison with us instead of being free. And that was a truly strange feeling.”
Prison is not usually the safest place for a person to be, but many prisoners after they are released live in conditions that are not much farther out of harm’s way. Some are released in cities far from their homes without a way to get back, others return to a life of poverty, drugs and overall crime stricken neighborhoods.
Her recommendations for success beyond bars doesn’t start with a prisoner’s release, however, it starts on the inside. This includes maintaining contact to the outside world, escaping through books and experiencing “crime empathy.”
“We know that prisoners who are able to maintain contact with their families and their friends and their communities during their term of incarceration, those people that have those lifelines, are much less likely to end up back in prison or jail,” Kerman said.
Larry Smith was her hero; he was her fiance at the beginning of her sentence and is her husband today. Contact can be in the form of visitations, phone calls or even through snail mail. Many people don’t know that a letter or two can drastically change someone’s outcome in life after serving time.
Books are important because they allow prisoners a faux escape from reality. “It is invaluable that you can escape into a book when there is nothing you would like to do more than escape the from the confines of your prison,” Kerman said.
As much as Kerman wanted to escape, she said her relationships with her inmates proved to her why she deserved to be there. It was in prison that she realized the harm of her past actions – she had fed into someone else’s drug addiction. Because of that realization and the support that she had, she understood that what she did was wrong, but that didn’t mean she was a bad person. She had support and knew that she could do better. And she did.
“Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women’s Prison” continues to hold a spot on The New York Times Bestseller list. Kerman also serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association, was the 2014 recipient of the Justice Trailblazer Award from the John Jay College Center on Media, Crime & Justice and spends much of her time speaking to groups across the country.
As for her next project? In a press conference preceding her lecture, she told a room of students that, “I do have a writing project in mind, which may bring me here to the great state of Ohio soon, but I can’t reveal much more about it. My work remains focused on the criminal justice system and that’s the work that I’m most interested in writing about.”
With Kerman’s experience now well known, along with her personal efforts, she hopes to decrease the number of prisoners in the U.S. and make sure that those of different genders and class are treated equally. She hopes for prisoners to find success on the outside of bars rather than earn additional sentences. We hope for nothing more than the same.