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

Kerman illustrates the loving dynamic of some prison friendships: “The more friends I had, the more people wanted to feed me; it was like having a half-dozen Jewish mothers” (209). Despite all the extra food, she remains in shape because of the hard construction work and the yoga. Yoga Janet leaves; while Kerman misses her terribly, she feels thankful for their time together and does yoga to a Rodney Lee VHS—Yoga Janet’s favorite.

Pennsatucky asks Kerman to write a letter for her to give to the judge. Kerman agrees and writes a heartfelt letter about how Pennsatucky longs to be a good mother and turn her life around, and about how “cocaine had taken away all the things that were most important to her, had hurt her health, her judgment, her most important relationships, and wiped out years of her youth” (215). Pennsatucky is thankful and admits that everything in the letter is true.

Kerman gets a personal letter from the new warden thanking her for her service in preparing his new home. Pop thinks that maybe this warden will be better than the last:

The best ones are the ones who are for the inmates. The last one, Deboo, she was just a politician. Smile in your face, act like she feels your pain, but she’s not gonna do shit for you. When they come from a men’s institution like Willingham, they’re usually better. Less bullshit (219).

Kerman watches the big baseball game between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Kerman is a huge Red Sox fan, and when they win, she cries:

I wasn’t crying because I wished I was home celebrating, but I was completely taken aback at the level of my own emotion. I had joked that I had to do hard time in order to break the Curse so the Red Sox could win, and now I felt that there was some strange truth to that. The world I knew had changed right there in the bottom of the ninth (223). 

Kerman and some of her friends from the garage are hanging out in the visiting room when they hear that a CO is tearing apart A Dorm. The new CO is “fresh from Iraq and had just started working at the prison. It was rumored that he had been stationed in Fallujah, where the fighting had been brutal all spring” (224). Someone in A Dorm had given him trouble, and he just freaked out. The next day, a prison staff member apologizes, and the inmates never see that new CO again.

Kerman’s dad calls to say that her grandma isn’t doing well. She’s hoping that she can get a furlough to go to her funeral, but the chances are slim:

I had seen many other prisoners suffer through the illnesses of their loved ones and had felt helpless watching them when the worst would come—when they had to confront not only their grief, but also the personal failure of being in prison and not with their families (226).

Halloween comes around, and while Kerman’s friends are feeling festive and try to get her to join in, she isolates herself. Kerman is distraught over her grandma’s declining health and her inability to see her beloved relative: “I shut myself off and kept quiet […] Anything else would be an admission to the world that the feds had succeeded in bringing me down, lower than my knees, flat on my face” (227).

While “professions of faith or discussions of religion in prison” (230) usually put off Kerman, talks with her friend Gisela are the exception. Gisela “had no money, and many responsibilities […] she also exhibited the peacefulness at her core, the loving calmness that made her the kind of person to whom everyone was drawn” (230), and she attributes it to God.

To deal with the pain of missing her grandma, Kerman begins doing yoga more frequently. To add to this pain, her good friend Little Janet receives immediate release from her lengthy sentence; Kerman is happy for her but sad to lose a friend.

Kerman realizes that while she grew up believing she is an Episcopalian, her new experiences accentuate a different part of her:

I didn’t realize it, but I had really been raised to follow the ethos of Stoicism—the Greco-Roman answer to Zen. Many people on the outside (especially men) had admired my stoicism when I was on my way to prison (241).

While she decides that prison makes her less stoic than she thought, she at least realizes that she’s doing better: “I wasn’t so good with chickenshit rules, but I was more than capable of helping other people” (242). 

Kerman’s release date is drawing near, and she finds out that she will only have to “serve thirteen months of [her] fifteen-month sentence and be released in March with ‘good time,’ the standard federal sentence reduction for good behavior” (244). However, she soon receives a letter from her lawyer stating that the feds are going to transfer her to Chicago to serve as a government witness and testify against a man she’s never even met. She’s “horrified” because she doesn’t want to leave the life she’s grown accustomed to in Danbury. To add to her sadness, Kerman’s friend Pom-Pom writes her a letter from the outside saying how her life since release has been awful; she’s basically homeless, with no food, and her family could care less that she’s been released: “It was the strangest feeling ever, but I wished that Pom-Pom was back with us in the prison. I was scared for her out there” (248).

Larry visits Kerman frequently, and they always talk about her upcoming release. However, things are uncertain regarding what will happen with Kerman’s transfer to Chicago. Christmas comes and goes, and the Camp wins a Christmas decorating competition and gets to watch Elf as a result. After the festivities, Kerman gets a copy of the New York Times, which has an article written by Larry; the piece is called “Modern Love” and it “described, with great humor, our untraditional courtship, and why neither of us really thought it was important to get married, although we’d only been to twenty-seven weddings together. But something had changed” (254). Regarding the article, she thinks: “Even here, without him, I couldn’t imagine any sweeter Christmas present” (256).

Kerman flies Con Air from Danbury to Chicago and describes the mix of prisoners:

Con Air is like a layer cake of the federal prison system. Ever sort of prisoner is represented; sad-looking middle-aged upper-class white men, their wire-rim glasses sometimes askew or broken; proud cholos looking vaguely Mayan and covered in gang markings; white women with bleached-out hair and very bad orthodontia; skinhead types with swastika tattoos on their faces; young black men with their hair brushed out because they had been forced to undo their cornrows (263).

When the guards handcuff her, Kerman initially feels uncomfortable, but then she feels thankful that everyone on the plane is in shackles. The plane lands in Oklahoma City at the Federal Transfer Center, a “maximum-security facility that houses many prisoners during the course of their airlift experiences. Until [she] reached Chicago, this would be [her] new headquarters” (263). This facility makes Danbury look like a spa: The library is bare and only contains older titles, breakfast is the only edible food, and the TV rooms don’t even have chairs. However, Kerman is thankful to have Jae, a familiar and friendly face from Danbury, with her. Kerman, Jae, and Jae’s cousin, Slice, play cards to pass the time.

One day at lunch, Kerman notices Nora; panic, anger, and old memories flood Kerman. She doesn’t know how to feel about seeing Nora, the woman who, at least in part, landed her in prison. Nora’s sister, Hester (also known as Anne), is also there alongside her. Along with feeling these mixed emotions from her past, Kerman is also bored: “In Danbury, the opportunities for hustle were many. But in Oklahoma City, the only things on the market were sex, other people’s psych meds, and, most important, nicotine” (269), and Kerman doesn’t participate in any of these things.

The guards ship out Jae and Slice, leaving Kerman alone. She does a lot of yoga during this time and tries to stare outside her tiny window. A week later, she’s finally shipped out to Chicago. She’s forced to ride next to Nora and Hester on the plane. Although they make small talk, Kerman makes it clear she’s not happy about it. In Chicago, the guards escort them to the women’s facility, which reminds Kerman of a psychiatric institution:

Psych Ward. That was my overwhelming first impression. Dueling televisions blared at opposite sides of the small room. A cacophony of voices vibrated in the close, crowded space. Women, disheveled and stooped, blinked at us like moles. Although there was nothing playful about this place, it had an infantilized, nursery-school vibe (273).

Looking around, Kerman suddenly feels close to Nora and Hester, realizing that their equal sanity levels and connection are all she has right now. Kerman, Hester, and Nora hang out to avoid intermingling with the other prisoners. Kerman reflects on the other prisoners and empathizes with their shared status within the justice system:

I gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status—their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime (275).

Things here are nothing like Danbury—there isn’t a warm welcome from the other women:

[N]o sense of solidarity or recognition of the sanity-saving value of personal routine or order or self-respect. […] you couldn’t even rely on the tribe system—the white women weren’t worth a damn. Most of them were drooling on meds to keep them from killing themselves (or their neighbors) (275). 

Kerman notes the mundane repetition of her life in Chicago and how only male inmates receive permission to work. The breakfast lines are long because it’s the only edible meal of the day, and most of the women look despondent. As Kerman continues her days in Chicago, she thinks more about her past:

The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn’t just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved (279).

She is miserable in the Chicago MCC because it’s the opposite of Danbury in all the worst ways, and she misses the friends she made there. Kerman and Nora have a love/hate relationship, but they maintain a cordiality to survive their new surroundings:

We served each other as a barrier against the freaks, of which this small unit had an astonishing array. In addition to poor suicidal Connie, there were several bipolar arsonists, an angry and volatile bank robber, a woman who had written a letter threatening to assassinate John Ashcroft, and a tiny pregnant girl who would seat herself next to me and start running her hands through my hair (281).

The only reprieve she gets from the MCC is when the prosecution calls her to court. He explains that she’s going to be a government witness; she eats a delicious roast beef sandwich, and then goes back to the MCC. She explains that the “biggest problem with the MCC was that there was nothing to do. There was a pathetic pile of crap books, decks of cards, and the infernal televisions, always on, always at full volume” (283). Kerman feels bored and sulky, but when Larry finally gets to visit, everything feels brighter. She also finally gets to have “roof time” (287), which means that the women can get fresh air.

The trial for Jonathan Bibby begins. He’s the “guy who had taught Nora how to smuggle drugs way back when” (291), but Kerman has never met him before and isn’t much help during the trial. The court finds Bibby guilty. Back at the MCC, Kerman says bye to Nora and Hester, whom the guards are shipping out:

When they were gone, I got under a blanket on my bunk and cried for hours. I didn’t think I could keep going. Although I was days away from my release date, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. It was totally irrational, but I was beginning to feel like the BOP would never let me go (291).

Kerman describes her last week in prison as “the hardest” (294). She reminisces about Danbury and the friends she made there; she thinks about how if she secured release while at Danbury, her friends would have thrown her a celebration, and she would have gotten to say goodbye. When the MCC finally releases her, there is no fanfare. She simply leaves. The memoir ends with: “Ten yards farther, and I saw Larry, standing in front of the MCC, talking on his phone, until he turned and saw me. And then I was running, as fast as I could. No one could stop me” (295).