Summary Of Orange Is The New Black

Piper Kerman is a Caucasian woman who is well educated, and of a comfortable socioeconomic class. Piper wrote the book Orange is the New Black to expose the injustices of the justice system through her personal account of her sentence in federal prison. Piper has written about all of her experiences starting from graduating college to her time spent in prison, to her release, and writes her account to exploit the criminal justice system and the struggles women face during their time of incarceration.
After graduating from Smith College, Piper lived a comfortable, yet predictable life, in Northampton, but yearned for a sense of adventure. Piper then meets a woman named Nora Jansen who was a lesbian, and seemed to be the opposite of who Piper

Piper decided to plea guilty to avoid the possibility of losing the case and receiving the maximum sentence. She was going to go to prison pleading guilty, but for a shorter time. After five years, Piper is sentenced to a year and two months in federal prison. When Piper enters prison she is considered an “A&O” which means “Admissions and Orientation status,” and is restricted to participate in receiving mail, having money for commissary, and having a job like the rest of the inmates. Once she is granted rights Larry and her family are able to visit her, she receives sixteen letters and a dozen books, and she starts to make friends including “the tattooed latina,”the salty redhead,” “little Janet from Brooklyn,” and “Yoga Janet.” The women of the prison avidly try to make Piper “gay for the stay,” but she states that the women of the prison are not like real lesbians because they are unable to be intimate or romantic—they had school girl crushes that did not last more than a month or two. Piper was moved to the “B dorms” where she had a pleasant roommate. However there was quite a bit of commotion that the B dorms faced, including an inmate squatting and leaving behind a puddle of pee in a cubicle. Piper was able to buy commissary items including: “XL sweatpants, $24.70,” “hot sauce, $1.40,” and “squeeze cheese, $2.80” (Kerman, 78). She says that she desperately wanted to buy a

Kerman did touch base with a few injustices there are, minimum sentences on drug related cases regardless of a person’s involvement, the unfair sentencing of inmates (an inmate received six months for having six keys of coke in her car), prison staff harassing the inmates, slow processing, and neglect of health and safety conditions. However, Kerman illustrated her visit overall as a walk in the park—in my opinion at least. It almost seemed like the pros in the prison outweighed the cons for Piper Kerman. She had several positive experiences that she was able to take away from prison, and got to help a lot of the inmates. She had friends, had freedoms to watch movies, use microwaves, go to the gym, read and write as she pleased, and even had a birthday party. One example of the relaxed scene that piper experienced in her time at prison was that the women of the prison so desperately refused to have Martha Stewart, the celebrity, at their prison. It was not a big time drug lord, or murder that they did not want to attend the prison, but a woman who had cooking and crafting shows for a living. Piper Kerman neglected to speak on the account of the other women of the prison’s accounts, which played a role in the overall scheme of the book for