Piper Kerman’s memoir was adapted by Netflix as one of its first original content tv shows, with the show arguably overshadowing the book itself. That’s a real shame, as while the show is a great showcase for some diverse female actresses, it lacks the nuance and social issues highlighted by the book.
The book chronicles Kerman’s year in a New England prison in the early aughts, roughly 10 years after she committed a drug trafficking offense that led her there. She tells the memoir largely chronologically, including the crime that landed her there: after graduating from college, she became invoked with an older lover with a glamorous lifestyle, funded largely on drug smuggling. Kerman’s role in the operations was minimal but she was wilfully oblivious to the crime finding her adventure. A close call picking up a suitcase at an airport scared her straight across the country to San Francisco, where she found work and love and became a productive member of society. The new life she built unravelled years later, when the feds came knocking at her door- they took down the drug ring and she’s charged as a co-conspirator. Kerman plead guilty in exchange for testifying against the kingpin (who she’d never met) and then has to wait years for the feds to tell her when to serve out her 15 months (reduced to one year with good behaviour).
Her time in prison isn’t filled with stereotypes- no cat fights, prison alcohol, fears for her life- but real women co-inmates and a dehumanizing prison industrial complex. Kerman is good at the details, and that’s because prison seems to be endless small details- when, what and where an inmate can eat, sleep, shower, read, get outside, essentially fill the minutes of their day. She chronicles the highs and lows of a year where her control over most aspects of her life is tightly circumscribed- family day visits where children come to visit, holidays celebrations without loved ones, prison jobs that pay horribly but provide a way to fill time, a grandmother’s death and funeral that she can’t be there for.
Aside from chronicling the year, Kerman is making a number of socio-political points: the pointlessness of mandatory minimums for certain crimes, the role that wealth and privilege play in who ends up experiencing the prison system, the dehumanizing of both the inmates and the guards that enforce the system and the lack of interest the system has in supporting women exiting prison, essentially perpetuating the prison cycle. These are not novel points (especially not years after Kerman’s memoir was published), but they feel poignant here because they’re personal for Kerman.
Kerman writes well, has passion for her subject and is committed to using her book as a catalyst for prison reform. Another ‘book is better than the tv show’ entry.
Counting this one as the ‘Gaslight’ square for cbr14bingo, in reference to the prison industrial complex which sells prison as a just and moral system that creates a safer world but fails on both counts.
