Reading About Prison During My Free Time (PUNNY!)

Get it? My FREE time?

Look, I have to start up all kinds of work tomorrow and have to put on real clothes and like, act professional, so throw me a bone here, people.

Bye, bye, reading books for fun! Bye, bye, reading books that I don't have to then write papers about! See you in, oh, June.

But! This is a good one and you must read it.

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

As you know, this is an enormously popular show produced by Netflix, but did you know it's actually a memoir? I haven't seen the show, but I've heard mixed reviews, that it's fantastic and super duper vulgar.

But the book is pretty darn good (and is not vulgar). Piper Kerman, a professional woman in her mid-thirties, was convicted and sent to prison for 15 months as punishment for transporting drug money a handful of times a decade earlier. The beginning of the book, when she writes about her crimes, is stilted and staccato, but just get through it. The majority of the story is about her experience as a white, middle-class, educated woman held in a minimum security prison (with stints in a maximum security prison and also traveling via Con Air). The way she tells it, prison is wayyyyy more boring and less violent than I had imagined. Of course, she wasn't locked up with the crazies and murderers or anything. She tells about the strip searches and bad food and unwritten rules of communication and enduring the bureaucracy and learning new social norms and navigating basically a brand new society. Kerman does a good job portraying an experience that is like culture shock times a thousand. With a lot riding on a quick and successful immersion.

Memoirs are weird. The authors never come across well, like people I would actually want to talk to, or get to know.  That sounds bad. I have to say that Kerman doesn't come across as likeable (to me) although she's not unlikeable either. Reading about prison, though, is fascinating when you don't have any friends or family or other connections to one. It seems so remote, and it is. We spend all of our time trying to stay out of prison, and this book takes us inside.

Enjoy!