Once Upon a Time Dating

I, like many of you that are probably reading this, have been obsessed with Orange is the New Black from the moment I went on Netflix and pressed play. For those of you who haven’t watched (and you really should), it is an adaptation of Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name, detailing the 13 months she spent in Federal Prison due to a 10 year old drug offense.

I have been obsessed with the show for a while now, and am not ashamed to admit I watched the entire second season in a day and a half. While there are certainly other television shows focused on women, Orange is the New Black is unique in that it doesn’t portray the female protagonist as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, or a sister. But rather, it simply illustrates Piper’s relationship with herself, in addition to the personal struggles of her fellow inmates. It is common to see men portrayed as stoic, introspective, tenacious characters, but rarely do we see women that way. This show is remarkable for “going there”.

I recently read Piper Kerman’s book and was surprised at how different the tone of her book is from that of Jenji Kohan’s show. While the television show is touching, hilarious, entertaining, and at times heartbreaking, the book is full of revelations and is incredibly enlightening. Here are some parts of Piper’s book I found particularly thought provoking:

• “It’s hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything, and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world- cops, elected officials, soldiers- we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying.”

• “A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would have probably driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our 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. Instead, our system of ‘corrections’ is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.”

• “I would seem to have been ready-made for prison time then, as a familiar jailhouse trope says ‘you come in alone and you walk out alone,’ and common counsel is to keep to oneself and mind your own business. But that’s not what I learned in prison. What I discovered was that I am emphatically not alone…I realized that I was not alone in the world because of the women I lived with for over a year, who gave me a dawning recognition of what I shared with them. We shared overcrowded Dorms and lack of privacy. We shared eight numbers instead of names, prison khakis, cheap food and hygiene items. Most important, we shared a deep reserve for humor, creativity in adverse circumstances, and the will to protect and maintain our own humanity despite the prison system’s imperative to crush it. I don’t think any of us could have managed those survival techniques alone; I know I couldn’t- we needed each other.”

• “In my third prison (she was transferred twice in order to testify in Chicago), I perceived an odd truth that held for each: no one ran them. Of course, somewhere in those buildings, some person with a nameplate on their desk or door was called the warden and nominally ran the place, and below them in the food chain there were captains and lieutenants. But for all practical purposes, the people who lived in those prisons day in and day out, the captain’s chair was vacant, and the wheel was spinning while the sails flapped…Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key?”

Visit Piper Kerman’s website to learn more about the organizations that are helping to make our justice system work properly for all of us.