Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison is a memoir by Piper Kerman, detailing her experiences as an inmate at a federal women’s prison, where she served for just over a year. Piper was a privileged, well-educated white woman from an upper-middle-class family.Shortly after graduating college in the early 1990s, Piper became involved with her girlfriend Nora Jansen’s international drug smuggling operation. Despite the glamour of her jet-setting lifestyle, however, Piper had growing apprehensions about what she was doing. She knew that Nora was untrustworthy, dangerous, and fully willing to exploit her for her own advantage. Nora thought little of putting Piper at great legal and physical risk if it meant more profit for the drug smuggling operation. Ultimately, Piper ended her relationship with Nora and cut off all ties with her.
Piper began a more conventional, risk-free life, glad to have put her criminal past behind her. She landed a job as a television producer and editor, working primarily on infomercials and met and fell in love with a man named Larry. He was not the risk-seeking, hip, bohemian type she had traditionally been attracted to, but he was good-hearted, kind, and loved her intensely—and Piper found, this was all she ever wanted.
The happy couple moved to New York City for work in 1998. That May, US customs officials appeared at their home to tell Piper that she was indicted on conspiracy charges related to her old drug smuggling activities. Nora had given Piper’s name to the authorities, which had resulted in her being charged as a co-conspirator. Terrified of a potentially long sentence if she risked trial, Piper accepted a plea deal and awaited her fate. After Piper pleaded guilty, Larry proposed to her. She knew that together, they would be able to overcome whatever the future had in store for them.
Piper was, at last, sentenced on December 8, 2003 to 15 months in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, a minimum-security women’s prison. The unknown date which Piper had dreaded for five years was at hand.
Piper self-surrendered in February 2004, a decade after committing the offense for which she was convicted. As a glaring symbol of her privilege, Piper ate a foie gras sandwich while she waited to be processed. All throughout the dehumanizing intake process, the guards barked orders at her and treated her with minimal human dignity and respect. Piper underwent a humiliating strip search, during which she was forced to strip, bend over, squat, and cough, while the correctional officer (CO) performed a cavity search. At last, she was issued her prisoner number. She was no longer Piper Kerman; she was now federal inmate #11187-424, a new identity for a new life.
Once she arrived at the minimum security camp, the inmates showed Piper around and introduced her to the basic rhythms of prison life that all inmates were required to follow. These included daily prisoner counts, assigned meal times, and bed inspections. All in all, it was a barrage of unfamiliar (and seemingly arbitrary) rules and regulations. Piper learned that everything in prison was governed by a maddeningly slow and inefficient bureaucracy.
At prison orientation a few days later, the female warden warned the new arrivals about sexual contact in prison and reminded the women that non-consensual sex was strictly prohibited. As she spoke, Piper realized she wasn’t talking about sexual contact between inmates—she was talking about unwanted advances from the guards.
Race determined and defined the culture at Danbury. Segregation was the unwritten rule behind bars. Most of Piper’s friends were white, predominantly Italian-American. The prison officials reinforced this dynamic by lumping racial groups together into the same cell blocks, which, characteristically, bore stereotyped names (“Spanish Harlem” for the Latina inmates, “The Ghetto” for the African-American inmates).
Piper clung to daily rituals and routines in an effort to give some order to her day and provide herself with some agency and mastery over her life—giving herself some power and control in a situation where she otherwise had none. So she would make her coffee the same way every morning; sit in the yard at her usual spot; and internalize the old prison mantra of doing your time, not letting your time do you.
Piper had to overcome some of her own subconscious prejudices about the kinds of people she now found herself living with. One day, a black inmate named Rochelle asked Piper if she could borrow one of her books. Piper was ashamed to discover that she harbored racialized fears that Rochelle would steal her book. When Rochelle returned it a week later, Piper mentally chided herself for assuming the worst about Rochelle. She saw that she had much to learn about humility—how was she any different than these other women?
Inmates managed to hold on to their culture and dignity, even inside prison. The West Indian women and “Spanish mamis” managed to make genuinely delicious Latin and Caribbean dishes, using nothing more than junk food from the commissary as ingredients. The human spirit and passion for creativity could not be extinguished, even at Danbury.
Piper tried hard not to advertise her privilege and unique status as an upper-middle-class white woman in a prison disproportionately populated by underprivileged people of color. She turned down an opportunity to become the prison van driver (a coveted high-status position) and declined an offer from Pop, a powerful and influential leader among the white prisoners, to become her bunkmate, lest she be perceived as racist if she chose to leave her black bunkmate, Natalie.
Although Piper had chosen not to bunk with her, Pop became like a mother to Piper, guiding her through the trials and tribulations of prison with a unique mixture of compassion and tough love. She was exactly the kind of guardian figure someone like Piper needed in Danbury. She had a genuine warmth and compassion and made it her business to look out for the “girls” in her crew. And that now very much included Piper.
The women of Danbury did everything they could to hold onto some sliver of their humanity and their individuality. This included setting up a makeshift beauty salon on campus and sewing alterations into their uniforms (strictly prohibited by the regulations) to better match their personal style. Piper also found strength in her community outside prison—from her parents, Larry, and friends, who came from all over the country, dropping other commitments to visit her.
That spring, a new inmate came to the minimum security camp as a reward for her good behavior at the neighboring maximum security facility. This woman, “Crazy Eyes” Morena, attempted to seduce Piper. Piper knew that many women engaged in brief, experimental same-sex relationships during the period of their incarceration—going “gay for the stay” as it was called—but she was determined to remain faithful to Larry. Eventually, Piper politely but firmly rebuffed Crazy Eyes’s advances.
The key to survival and sanity was to avoid getting sucked into the petty drama and upheaval of prison life. So many women, Piper saw, became institutionalized and unable to function outside of prison—for them, prison had become their entire world. She witnessed many inmates returning to Danbury after being released, even requesting to be reassigned to their old cell blocks and bunks.
After months of being told it was unavailable, Piper was finally able to acquire a portable radio from the commissary. The radio became her constant companion on her daily runs through the yard, the music connecting her back to the days of her youth, when she was carefree, foolish, and filled with limitless possibilities. Like so much else, it was a precious connection to her life in the world outside. On May 17, Piper celebrated her eighth anniversary with Larry and yearned for the day when she would be free again.
That spring, Piper helped two inmates earn their GEDs—her bunkmate Natalie and a longtime inmate named Mrs. Jones. This was important, because, without a high-school education, many inmates lacked the credentials to get decent jobs, often landing them right back in prison. Although Piper did a lot of the actual coursework (especially for the barely literate Mrs. Jones), she knew she was doing the right thing. When they graduated, Piper was overcome with emotion, openly weeping at seeing how these women had overcome such enormous obstacles to regain some power and agency over their lives.
One summer day, Piper enjoyed an unexpected trip to a picnic area by a lake, where the prisoners were laughing and enjoying the rare opportunity for outdoor recreation. Piper plunged her hands into the lake, feeling the cool water rush over her. Her work situation also improved that summer. After being humiliatingly sexually harassed by DeSimon, her odious boss in the electrical shop, Piper requested and received a work transfer away from him.
Piper saw how the American criminal justice system was very good at locking up addicts, but spectacularly bad at treating their addiction. The ideology driving the prison system was entirely retributive—there was almost no focus on restoration or rehabilitation, on making sure that people who were released from prison didn’t come back. The consequences of this failing system were everywhere—broken families, squandered opportunities, and ruined lives.
That fall, the annual job fair came to Danbury. This event was yet another reminder of how inadequately the prison was preparing its inmates to functionally reintegrate into mainstream society. When inmates had questions about job training, or what employers might be open to hiring women with a record, the prison’s job fair organizers simply had no answers. Pre-release programs, meanwhile, offered no information about how to access health and reproductive care services (obviously a priority for destitute women), find a job, secure housing, get drug treatment, and regain custody of their children.
Poor administration created unsafe conditions in the prison and exposed prisoners to the most sadistic and abusive impulses of individual COs who were eager to exploit the massive power disparity. One woman even got sent to solitary confinement after carrying on a (possibly non-consensual) sexual relationship with a male CO and getting sucked into a power struggle between the CO and a top administrator at the prison.
Prisoners had no recourse against abuse at the hands of the guards—such was the nature of the drastic power imbalance between male guards and female prisoners. These men fed off the power they wielded over powerless inmates, relishing their authority and capacity to inflict harm on those who couldn’t fight back.
In the second week of December, Piper’s lawyer contacted her to tell her that her time in Danbury would be coming to an end even sooner than she thought, but not because she was getting early release—she would soon be transported to Chicago to testify against an old drug ring associate. Piper would not be returned to Danbury before her ultimate release to say a final goodbye to her prison friends and family.
On January 3, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) put Piper on a plane. As she was leaving, the other women gave Piper advice for surviving the ordeal of the prison flight, with one prisoner urging her to smile at the guards escorting her onto the plane, so they wouldn’t cuff her too tight and kill her circulation.
Piper’s first destination wasn’t Chicago—it was the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, a temporary holding facility that held prisoners either awaiting trial or waiting to testify in someone else’s trial. It would be Piper’s home until her time came to testify.
Life in Oklahoma City was dull and monotonous—the lack of windows made it difficult to even tell the passage of time. One day, Piper saw a familiar figure emerge from a cell and take her place on the breakfast line—Nora Jansen, the woman who’d sent her to prison and totally derailed her life. Piper fantasized about taking violent revenge, but, thankfully, was talked out of doing anything rash by one of her friends from Danbury who had also made the journey west with her.
In mid-January, Piper was told once more to pack out and board a plane to Chicago. But, this time, she was joined on the flight by Nora and her sister, Hester. The marshals even made Piper sit next to Nora on the long flight. After arriving in Chicago, Piper began to experience a thaw in her attitude toward her former girlfriend. They were no longer enemies with a tumultuous history. Now, they were fellow travelers on this bizarre journey together.
In this environment, Nora and her sister were the only people with whom she was capable of forming some sort of friendship. They formed a trio in Chicago, hanging out together, cooking meals with one another (the sisters were accomplished prison chefs), and generally lamenting the sloppy and unprofessional conditions at the Chicago correctional center.
Nora insisted to Piper that she had not given her name to the feds. Piper knew Nora to be a cunning and manipulative liar, but she decided to accept that she would never know the truth and let go of it. After nearly a decade of all-consuming hate toward Nora, it was time to make peace and move on.
After the largely pointless and perfunctory trial, Piper focused on her impending March 4 release. Piper took the time to reflect and take stock of her experience and the wild journey she’d been on. She’d found a community of women in prison that had saved her and made her feel less alone in the world. Their struggle and success in preserving their humanity in the face of a system that sought to crush it was nothing short of heroic. They taught her compassion she never thought herself capable of and revealed strengths she never knew she had.
On March 4, Piper received her final call to “pack out.” (She was released two months early for good behavior.) The COs took her down the service elevator of the federal prison in Chicago. And just like that, she was on the streets again in broad daylight, a free woman once more. Larry was waiting outside to meet her. She sprinted over to him as fast as she could. Her long ordeal was over at last—but she would be forever shaped by her experience and the incredible women with whom she’d shared it.
Orange Is the New Black is Piper Kerman’s memoir of her year at a federal women’s prison. Piper was a well-educated white woman from an upper-middle-class, liberal New England family. Growing up in these circumstances, there seemed to be little doubt that Piper would go to a good college, graduate, and start a successful career as a white-collar professional. With her social and financial privileges, as well as her obvious intelligence and solid work ethic, this kind of life was certainly open to Piper. But Piper was to take a different path, one that her experiences and background could never have prepared her for.
Piper graduated from Smith College in the early 1990s. Not wanting to settle down right away and start a career, she instead went looking for adventure and new opportunities for self-exploration. She moved to the nearby town of Northampton, Massachusetts, where she began a bohemian chic life alongside a clique of other 20-something college graduates. She worked at a brewery and enjoyed casual sexual encounters with her peers. During this time, she also explored another dimension of her sexuality, having relationships with women as well as men.
It was during this period of Piper’s life that she met a mysterious, but intriguing woman named Nora Jansen. While Nora was not conventionally attractive, she had an allure that mesmerized Piper. Piper quickly learned that Nora was a far-from-conventional person with a far-from-conventional job—Nora, in fact, was a drug dealer, working for an international heroin smuggling ring headed by a West African drug lord.
For Piper, who was desperately looking for adventure and unique life experiences, Nora was a window into a thrilling and high-stakes world. Piper fell under Nora’s sway and began a torrid love affair with her. As the months went on, Piper became more and more involved with Nora’s smuggling operation, as did many of her Northampton friends.
Nora provided Piper with the adventure that Piper craved. On a whim, she moved with Nora to San Francisco, where they began a life defined by travel to distant and exotic locations, where Nora would meet her contacts in the drug ring. Piper was engaged as a courier in this operation, transporting bags of drug money through international airports. She was fascinated and thrilled by the adventure and risk of it all, and she relished the opportunity to see the world.
Later in life, Piper would look back on these experiences and reflect upon how insulated she was from the real-world consequences of her criminal behavior. Drug abuse was something that destroyed lives, tore families apart, and was a main driver of the ever-escalating costs of mass incarceration, particularly in the United States. As a willing and eager participant in a heroin smuggling ring, Piper was directly contributing to this social destruction, but she was blithely unaware of the consequences of her actions at the time. To her, it barely even registered that she was committing crimes at all.
Still, Piper had growing apprehensions. On one trip, Piper journeyed with Nora to Indonesia. They stayed in a luxury hotel and enjoyed the height of comfort and splendor, but Piper was taken aback by the wildness of the country. Her mind boggled at seeing the stark contrast between the dire third-world poverty and the decadent excesses of unrestrained, unregulated, and illicit capitalism practiced by the endless parade of oil tycoons, arms dealers, and drug kingpins.
Piper began to feel that she was on a truly dangerous and reckless path and had gotten herself in far over her head. In particular, she began to have her doubts about Nora. During the Indonesia trip, Piper and Nora journeyed to Krakatoa, where they spent the day in a pool that lay atop a 35-foot waterfall. Nora dared Piper to jump over the waterfall into the river below. Reluctantly (and after pressure from Nora), Piper made the terrifying plunge. Nora followed after, but told Piper she was using her as a guinea pig—she only jumped after seeing that Piper had done so with dying or suffering gruesome injury. This set off an alarm in Piper’s mind that Nora was dangerous and untrustworthy.
She knew that Nora was exploiting her, using her as a courier to help herself make money. Clearly, Nora was willing to put Piper at great legal and physical risk for her own benefit. After one final trip during which Nora asked her to smuggle actual heroin (instead of money) through the airport in Zurich, Piper decided enough was enough. She ended her relationship with Nora and cut ties with her. She closed this exciting, but frightening chapter of her life—or so she thought.
After breaking it off with Nora, Piper returned to San Francisco to begin a more conventional, risk-free life. She landed a job as a television producer and editor, working primarily on infomercials. She settled into a stable, normal, contented life, with a good network of friends. She was glad to put her criminal past behind her and found that she was happy living a more conventional life, believing that her thirst for adventure had at last been satisfied.
While in San Francisco, she met and fell in love with a man, a freelance writer named Larry Smith. Larry was not the sort of person Piper expected to fall in love with. He was a man, and not the hip, conventionally attractive kind of man she had been in relationships with before. Their relationship began in a purely platonic way, after they were introduced by mutual friends. After some time as friends, the pair realized that they had a special connection. Larry may not have been a bohemian chic pretty boy of the type that Piper had known in Northampton and in her days with the drug ring, but he was good-hearted, kind, and loved her intensely—and, Piper discovered, this was all she ever wanted.
After some time in San Francisco, Piper and Larry moved to New York City in 1998 to take advantage of job opportunities. They settled in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan and began what they thought was going to be a quiet and contented life together.
In May 1998, Piper and Larry’s happy life in New York received a rude awakening. One day while Piper was at home in their apartment, she heard a knock at the door. When she answered, she was shocked to find two US customs officials. She let them into the apartment, where they told her that she was being indicted on conspiracy charges related to her drug smuggling activities with Nora, which she had ended five years before. The customs officials told her that she needed to speak to a lawyer as soon as possible.
As Piper read the indictment, her past came flooding back. Apparently, the drug ring had collapsed and the participants started informing on one another in an attempt to secure more lenient sentences. Nora gave Piper’s name to the authorities.
Naturally, Piper was shocked, embarrassed, and terrified upon hearing this news. Was this real? Could she really be facing the prospect of going to prison? When she called to tell Larry what her situation was, he was initially incredulous, believing that she was pulling a prank on him. Piper told him that it was no joke, that she was really being indicted on federal drug charges. Piper told Larry all about her past with Nora—a subject he knew nothing about. Larry was taken aback, but supportive, telling Piper that he would stand by her no matter what happened.
After speaking with an attorney, Piper learned that she was facing a potential sentence of a decade in prison if she was convicted at trial. This, she learned, was because of “mandatory minimum” statutes. Mandatory minimums limit the ability of judges to modify sentences based on individual defendants’ circumstances and are a major driver of the skyrocketing US prison population.
Piper’s lengthy sentence could be avoided, however, if she agreed to accept a plea deal in exchange for a lighter sentence. Although she would certainly go to prison by taking this deal, she would be incarcerated for a much shorter period of time. Not wanting to run the risk of receiving the maximum sentence by going to trial, Piper pleaded guilty in 1998 and awaited her fate.
Amidst all this tumult, Piper and Larry made the journey up to Massachusetts to tell her family what was happening to her. Like Larry, they were shocked at the news that Piper would be heading to prison. She was bracing herself for anger and judgement, but she was surprised—and relieved—when they expressed their support for her. More than anything else, Piper felt their love and warmth in her hour of need. Although they were scared for Piper and worried about what would happen to her in prison—a place they never dreamed she would be going—they refused to turn their backs on her.
Piper was expecting to be formally sentenced and taken to prison imminently, but then, something curious happened—her sentencing was delayed. The West African drug kingpin who was at the head of Nora’s smuggling operation was being held in London. The American government wanted to have him extradited for trial in the US, but the British authorities also had claims on him and were interested in trying him in the UK.
While these legal issues were wrangling themselves out, Piper’s sentence was delayed indefinitely. She was a potential witness in his case, and the Department of Justice did not wish to send Piper to prison until after he had been convicted, believing that she would be a more compelling witness if she were not already in prison by the time of his trial.
This began an anxiety-ridden five-year period, during which Piper was already convicted of conspiracy and knew she was going to prison, but did not know when she would be going or for how long. During these long intervening years, Piper grew paranoid about her impending fate. It also became difficult to explain the nuanced legal situation to her upper-middle-class friends and family, who struggled to understand the concept of being free while waiting to be told when to report to prison.
On top of this, Piper and Larry faced heavy financial burdens. She started working multiple jobs to support her mounting legal fees. Piper marvelled at how all the money she and Larry earned seemed to be going toward paying off the consequences of her disastrous relationship with Nora.
Piper did enjoy one truly joyous moment during this odd and tortuous five-year purgatory period—in summer 2003, Larry proposed to her.Piper tearfully accepted his proposal. Although she was terrified for what lay ahead of her, she was grateful to have the love and support of a wonderful man like Larry. She knew that, together, they would be able to overcome whatever the future had in store for them.
After the engagement, it was also time to break the news of Piper’s criminal past and future time in prison to Larry’s parents. This had been kept secret from them for the past five years, but Piper and Larry could put it off no longer. Piper feared how Larry’s parents might react—although they had always been kind to her, they were older and more conservative than her parents. Where her family treated Piper’s plight with sympathy and support, she feared Larry’s family might react with scorn and judgement.
But to her surprise, they were supportive and open-minded about Piper’s legal troubles. They were angry at the harshness of a justice system that imprisoned good and upstanding people like Piper for mistakes made years before and were baffled as to why the government would commit precious resources to imprisoning a nonviolent offender like her. Larry’s father, an attorney, even offered to help Piper with her case. As with her family, Piper was immensely relieved and grateful to have such a strong and nurturing support system in Larry’s parents.
Ultimately, the UK government decided in 2003 not to extradite the West African drug kingpin, choosing instead to place him on trial in Great Britain. Piper would no longer be needed to stand as a witness in his trial. This meant that there was no longer any need to delay her sentencing. Piper was again overwhelmed with emotion when she saw how much support she had from her friends and family, who wrote letters to the court attesting to her character and urging the government to give her a light sentence.
Piper was, at last, sentenced on December 8, 2003 to 15 months in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, a decade after committing the original offense for which she had been convicted. The unknown date was finally at hand. Although she was frightened by the thought of prison, she was relieved to be sentenced near her family, where they would be able to visit her on a regular basis.
After the sentence was handed down, Piper had one more meeting with her attorney. He assured her that, while she was unlikely to face physical danger at a minimum-security facility, incarcerated life would still be a major transition for someone of Piper’s background. He warned her not to make friends or get entangled in disputes among inmates or between inmates and the correctional staff. He predicted that the most difficult aspect of prison life for Piper would be putting up with the myriad petty tyrannies of poorly educated and ill-tempered prison officials, or as he put it, “chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people.”
After a tequila-soaked goodbye party in Manhattan’s East Village the night before she was to report to Danbury, she and Larry headed out the door the next morning to greet this new, and most unexpected, phase of their lives.
Piper self-surrendered in February 2004, reporting to Danbury with Larry. They sat in the waiting room of the correctional facility for hours as they waited for her paperwork to be processed—an early introduction to the red tape and bureaucratic inefficiency that would define so much of her prison experience.
While waiting, Piper munched on a foie gras sandwich that Larry had packed her the night before, a glaring symbol of her wealth and privilege. In a prison whose inmate population was disproportionately poor women of color, eating a gourmet sandwich made of fattened duck liver reminded Piper of just how different she was from these other inmates who were about to become her neighbors and daily companions. She mused to herself that this had to have been the only time in the history of the American penal system that someone was eating foie gras in the waiting room.
At last, Piper was asked to leave the waiting room and enter the prison to begin the intake process. Larry was not allowed to accompany her beyond this point. Piper said her tearful, painful goodbye to her fiancé, during which Larry told Piper that he would call her and come back to visit her as soon as he possibly could. She watched as he left the waiting room and looked out the window as he crossed the parking lot, got into his car, and drove off out of her sight. She was now truly alone.
After Larry was gone, Piper was brusquely told by the female guard performing her intake that she might not have the opportunity to see Larry for weeks. It would take time for her paperwork to be processed—until it was, her friends and family were not cleared to visit her. Every inmate had an approved and vetted visitor list; if a visitor wasn’ton the list or a correctional officer failed to complete the paperwork to get a visitor on the list (which, Piper learned, was an all-too-common occurrence), the visit would not be approved. This was devastating news for Piper, who desperately needed to see Larry immediately and couldn’t bear the notion of an indefinite separation.
Worse still, they told her that the money in her commissary account (the prison commissary was where inmates could purchase various food, clothing, and personal hygiene items that were not issued by the prison) would have to go through a circuitous process before it was processed and available for use. This, too, she was told, might not be done for weeks.
As she went through the various security checks and moved further and further into the bowels of the prison (and further away from her former life), she was intimidated by the harshness and severity of the prison’s maze of concrete walls, as well as the coarseness of the guards. All throughout the dehumanizing intake process, her jailors barked orders at her and treated her with minimal human dignity and respect. Even worse was the strip search. In an effort to find potential contraband or drugs smuggled into the prison, Piper was forced to strip, bend over, squat, and cough, while the correctional officer (CO) performed a cavity search.
The female CO grilled Piper when she saw that she had some photos of friends and family. The CO demanded to know if Piper was smuggling in nude pictures (or “Nudie Judies” as she called them), which was strictly against prison rules. Piper said she was not, and was allowed to take the photos in. Capping off the bewildering process, Piper was finally issued her prisoner number. She was no longer Piper Kerman; she was now federal inmate #11187-424. It was a new identity for a new life.
After making it through the initial intake process, Piper was issued her prison uniform. It was standard-issue khaki prison garb, coarse and uncomfortable. Moreover, it was only her temporary uniform. Permanent uniforms wouldn’t be issued for a few days, so her clothes were different from what most of the other inmates were wearing—as if she didn’t already feel alone and isolated from everything she had ever known, now her clothes distinctly marked her out as a newcomer.
Next, she met her counselor, an older male prison official named Butorsky. He had a softer tone toward her than did the COs who handled her intake, and Piper could tell that he was a man of some intelligence. He treated her with relative kindness, remarking upon how unusual it was for someone of her background and upbringing to have received a prison sentence at all. Much to Piper’s relief, Butorsky told her that what she had heard from the COs was not true—all the names on her visitor list were already cleared and Larry would be able to visit her that very weekend! Piper was grateful when Butorsky told her that he would help make sure all the paperwork was clear for Larry to come.
But there was, Piper quickly learned, a darker and more menacing side to Butorsky. He warned Piper to stay out of trouble and went on to express his disdain for the homosexual activity that took place inside the walls of the prison. He described himself as an old-fashioned traditionalist who had little patience or tolerance for lesbian relationships. Piper recognized his homophobia and had no idea if Butorsky knew about her bisexual history. She was unsure whether to take Butorsky’s anti-LGBT speech as a general warning he would have issued to anyone, or as a more pointed threat directed at her.
After her meeting with Butorsky, Piper went in a van to the camp where the minimum security facility was located. To her surprise, the driver of the van was an inmate named Minetta. Piper hadn’t thought that inmates would be allowed to operate vehicles on the premises. After arriving at camp, Piper was assigned to her bunk area and introduced to her bunkmates. The layout of the minimum security camp was not cell blocks with rows and rows of cages, as Piper had pictured. Instead, it was a series of open-concept bunks and common areas, somewhat more akin to a college dormitory.
Minetta showed Piper around and introduced her to the basic rhythms of prison life that all inmates were required to follow. These included daily inmate counts, which occurred at regular times throughout the day, during which prisoners were required to report to their assigned bunk and stand at attention so the COs could make sure that no one was missing.
Minetta also told Piper about the assigned meal times, which were staggered for different sections of the prison—Piper would eat dinner at 4:30 (ridiculously early for a hip New Yorker like Piper). Bizarrely, Piper also learned that in order to pass Butorsky’s rigid inspections, she would not be allowed to actually sleep in her bed under the bedding. She would need to make the bed and then sleep on top of it without getting under the covers. All in all, it was a barrage of unfamiliar (and seemingly arbitrary) rules and regulations.
Later, Piper met Rosemarie, an Italian-American woman from Massachusetts. As a fellow Bay Stater with a comforting demeanor, Rosemarie provided a feeling of familiarity for Piper in this strange and bewildering place. After meeting Minetta and Rosemarie, she used the office phone of another prison counselor, Mr. Toricella, to call Larry. Piper was delighted to hear his voice and to hear him tell her that he loved her—it was a connection to her old life, which already seemed so distant.
The next day, Piper received her permanent, official uniform. But she was still not fully integrated into the Danbury ecosystem. As a new arrival, Piper was classified as “A&O” (admission and orientation). This meant that she was not yet eligible to be assigned to a permanent job, for which she could be paid (albeit at $0.14 per hour), until she was cleared to have one. This was yet another example of the maddeningly slow and inefficient bureaucracy, which seemed to be an inescapable feature of prison life.The slow-moving pace of events was called “prison time” by the inmates.
Piper headed to the orientation session with her fellow new inmates. These women were a mix of those who, like Piper, were experiencing the penal system for the first time, as well as recidivists who had been in and out of prison before. At orientation, they listened to a series of lectures from various prison officials, the goal of which was to familiarize the new arrivals with the rules and culture at Danbury. The on-staff psychiatrist was blunt in admitting to the women that he had no resources to provide comprehensive mental health services—all he could do was issue antipsychotic and antidepressant medications.
The final presenter was the female warden, Ms. Deboo, an attractive, put-together, and thoroughly professional woman. She used her speaking time to warn the new arrivals about sexual contact in prison and reminded the women that non-consensual sex was strictly prohibited. As she spoke, Piper realized she wasn’t talking about sexual contact between inmates; she was talking about unwanted advances from the guards. Clearly, the fact that Warden Deboo felt the need to give such a warning spoke to the abuses that were possible in an environment with such a stark power disparity between male guards and female inmates.
Piper was impressed by Warden Deboo, but other inmates saw through her polished presentation. They said that the warden was disingenuous, driven by ambition, and concerned primarily with appearances, assuring Piper that she rarely ventured into the prison to interact with inmates and staff.
One of the things that first struck Piper was how much race determined and defined the culture at Danbury. Segregation was the unwritten rule behind bars—although there were some exceptions, most people hung out in racially homogenous groups, with little intermingling across racial lines. In these early days of her prison sentence, most of Piper’s friends were white, predominantly Italian-American. The prison officials reinforced this by lumping racial groups together into the same cell blocks, which, characteristically, bore stereotyped names (“Spanish Harlem” for the Latina inmates, “The Ghetto” for the African-American inmates).
She saw the racial solidarity during her first days at camp, when a series of white inmates gifted Piper various provisions from the commissary, because they knew that she didn’t yet have the money to purchase anything. This, Piper learned, was a ritual performed by all the racial groups at Danbury with new arrivals.
In conversations with other women, Piper saw that they freely discussed one another’s lengths of imprisonment. She was baffled by the seeming randomness of different inmate sentences, as women convicted of similar offenses often received wildly divergent punishments. It was also clear that there was racial bias built into the criminal justice system, as women of color tended to have disproportionately harsher sentences than white inmates who’d committed similar offenses.
She befriended a group of women, including Nina, Rosemarie, Annette, and Yoga Janet, an older hippie who organized yoga classes in the recreation room at the prison. This clique of women kept an eye out for Piper, easing her transition to prison life and coaching her through the dizzying rules and regulations—both official and unofficial. The consequences of violating this code could vary from being mocked to having one’s visiting privileges revoked to even being sent to solitary confinement in the segregated housing unit (SHU) for an indeterminate period of time.
Piper saw that prison life really was a series of “chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people.” Much of the day-to-day experience consisted of standing in line, whether it was to eat, receive mail, shower (in maggot-infested stalls with notoriously unreliable hot water), or be counted by the COs. Many of the women who came from less-privileged backgrounds than Piper knew this dehumanizing experience all too well, having dealt with the welfare, public housing, drug treatment, and juvenile criminal justice bureaucracies all their lives.
Piper found herself clinging to daily rituals and routines in an effort to regain some agency and mastery over her life—giving herself some power and control in a situation where she otherwise had none. So she would make her coffee the same way every morning; sit in the yard at her usual spot; and talk with Nina. She internalized the old prison mantra: do your time, don’t let your time do you.
Piper was relieved and grateful to have a community that took an interest in her well-being and helped soften the blow of prison. Even small acts of kindness, such as when Nina made Piper a root beer float (made by pouring cans of root beer into a coffee cup and dumping scoops of generic commissary ice cream into it), went a long way toward easing her crushing homesickness.
For the first few days at Danbury, Piper lived in “the Rooms.” These were dormitories where new inmates lived until they could be assigned permanent housing. Also in the Rooms were inmates who were pregnant, chronically ill, or otherwise unable to live in the general population.
Each day, Piper learned something new and strange about prison—and about the women with whom she was serving time. One inmate, she learned, was a nun. This woman had been locked up for organizing anti-war protests at Department of Defense facilities. Piper’s clique of predominantly Italian-American, Catholic inmates were outraged that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) would actually incarcerate a member of the clergy.
Despite making friends, Piper was still new to prison life, blinded by her privilege, and capable of putting her foot in her mouth. One day at mealtime during her first week at Danbury, Piper made a wisecrack about how the inmates should organize a hunger strike to protest the bad food. Pop, a Russian-American inmate who sat high atop the prison social pyramid (and who also ran the kitchen whose food Piper was insulting), dressed Piper down. Pop told Piper never to make jokes about that, because another inmate might tell a CO that she was trying to incite a riot, which could land Piper in the SHU. It was a lesson to Piper—watch what you say, and watch who you’re talking to.
But there was something to look forward to—Larry’s visit that weekend. Piper could hardly contain her emotion upon seeing him in the visiting room, though the physical contact she could have with him was severely limited by BOP rules. Although it had only been a few days, it already felt like a lifetime since she’d seen him. Piper also noticed children in the visiting area, coming to see their incarcerated mothers. It was a humbling reminder that she was not the only one whose family had been impacted by prison.
It was not just Larry who was offering Piper emotional support from the outside. She was struck by the outpouring of sympathy and love from friends and family who sent her books and letters on a near-constant basis. The books did somewhat single her out as a privileged intellectual and outsider among the other inmates, not to mention the fact that many of her fellow prisoners simply lacked the kind of outside social and emotional support systems that Piper had.
Piper needed to overcome some of her own subconscious prejudices. One day, a black inmate named Rochelle asked Piper if she could borrow one of her books. Piper was ashamed to discover that she harbored racialized fears that Rochelle would steal her book (Piper also felt racist for having instinctively given Rochelle a book by black author Zora Neale Hurston, as if that was the only kind of literature she could possibly enjoy). When Rochelle returned it a week later, Piper mentally chided herself for assuming the worst about Rochelle. She saw that she had much to learn about humility—after all, how was she any different than these other women?
Still, Piper was immensely grateful to have so many people who cared about her. She even received materials from friends of friends, people she’d never met, who wanted to correspond with her and show their solidarity.
Think about how your advantages in life might affect your thinking.
Do you have privileges or advantages in life that others might lack? Briefly describe them.
Have these privileges ever made it difficult for you to understand or empathize with the life experiences of others? Describe the situation.
What can you do in the future to be more aware of how your advantages might bias or impact your worldview and interactions with others?
After a week, Piper moved out of the Rooms and into permanent housing in the Ghetto, the primarily African-American housing unit. There, her bunkmate was Natalie, an older woman of Caribbean origins. Natalie was widely respected among the other inmates as a tough woman who knew her way around prison—Piper learned from Pop that, years ago, Natalie had beaten another inmate with a sack stuffed with combination locks during an altercation. Thankfully, Natalie liked Piper and agreed to take her under her wing. Natalie was, however, strict about order and cleanliness in their bunk and made it clear to Piper that she would not tolerate messiness or clutter.
Life in the Ghetto was unlike anything Piper had ever been exposed to before. One night, a woman urinated on the floor of the neighboring bunk as part of an ongoing feud with another prisoner. More generally, there were loud, chaotic nights, with women talking, yelling, singing, playing music, and calling out to one another across the dormitory.
On Valentine’s Day, Piper saw that the women of Danbury engaged in all the merriment of the holiday that couples on the outside did. There were romances, discreet displays of affection, and even exchanges of cards. Piper was genuinely surprised by this aspect of prison culture. She marveled at how relationships could exist in such a place.
Piper was impressed by the ways in which women managed to hold on to their culture and dignity, even inside prison. The West Indian women and “Spanish mamis” made genuinely delicious Latin and Caribbean dishes, using nothing more than junk food from the commissary as ingredients. The human spirit and passion for creativity could not be extinguished, even at Danbury.
At Danbury, inmates performed menial labor for $0.14 per hour. These were low-skill jobs, providing prisoners with none of the workforce training or experience they would need to reintegrate into society upon release. This dysfunctional system, Piper learned, was a contributing factor to high rates of recidivism—prisoners simply re-entered the criminal justice system when they couldn’t get living wages outside of it.
The women at Danbury used their paltry wages to buy overpriced commissary items like toiletries or feminine hygiene products that weren’t provided by the BOP. Piper wanted a job so she could stock up on much-needed items and repay her friends who had loaned her these things upon arrival.
Some prisoners worked for private companies, like Unicor, that contracted with the federal prison system. Although these jobs paid more, they were still exploitive—these companies were taking advantage of what amounted to forced labor to pay the kind of starvation wages that would be illegal anywhere else but the penal system. Other jobs, meanwhile, were coveted by the inmates because they offered rich opportunities for smuggling and contraband.
Piper wanted to work in the prison education program, believing that, with her background, she would be a unique asset. Despite her enthusiasm, Piper was warned against this job by the other inmates. They told her that it was understaffed, poorly supervised, and that she would have to deal with unruly and insubordinate student-inmates with no interest in learning.
Ultimately, Piper was assigned to a job in the electrical shop. On her work crew were two other inmates, the perpetually nervous Little Janet and Levy, a French Moroccan Jew. Piper developed a quick distaste for Levy, who was snobbish and constantly insisting that no one else at Danbury had any “class.” The head of electrical was the cruel and odious DeSimon, who took pleasure in emotionally tormenting the inmates. DeSimon was the head of the CO union and widely disliked even by his colleagues.
Piper and the other inmates lacked any background in electrical work and were poorly trained for their jobs, creating hazardous conditions. One day, Piper found, to her horror, that she’d walked out of the shop without returning the screwdriver she was using. This was strictly prohibited, as tools like screwdrivers could be used as weapons. All tools needed to be properly signed out and returned at the end of the day. Piper feared that it was only a matter of time before DeSimon fingered her for the infraction, which could result in her being sent to the SHU and possibly even having time added to her sentence as punishment.
In a panic, she disposed of the screwdriver and hoped that the whole thing would just blow over. She told the whole story to Nina, who reassured her that nothing was likely to come of it—DeSimon was too lazy to pursue the matter, nothing could be proven, and they weren’t going to waste precious limited space in the SHU on the likes of Piper.
One day, DeSimon took Piper, Little Janet, and Levy in a van to a pump house just outside the prison. He then left them outside of the pump house and drove off for several hours. This was pure emotional torment for the three—DeSimon surely knew that if any prison officials passed by and saw them standing outside, off-campus, in their uniforms, they could be charged with attempting to escape. Finally, he returned and ordered them to clean the pump house in preparation for an upcoming inspection of the prison by the BOP. The work was grim and dark—the women screamed when they found discarded snakeskins in the pump, which elicited an evil chuckle from DeSimon.
One of the more unpleasant features of Piper’s prison routine was her weekly check-in with Butorsky. He was in the habit of making homophobic and racist comments about other inmates, ideas which he (wrongly) believed Piper to be in sympathy with. He drew distinctions between people like himself and Piper, and the other inmates, whom he viewed as being inferior. He observed that “northerners” (a common euphemism for “white” among the prison staff) deserved the best jobs, like van driver.
Butorsky offered Piper, a fellow “northerner,” the coveted driver job, which was available with Minetta’s impending release. Piper, however, turned it down—the job, while not without its perks, was seen by the other inmates as the one reserved for the jailhouse snitch. She did not want to lose social standing with her fellow prisoners or do anything else to mark herself out as privileged or special.
In addition to Minetta, Nina was also leaving Danbury to enter a drug treatment program “down the hill” at the maximum-security facility. While harsh, successful completion of the program promised to reduce Nina’s sentence, so she was eager to participate. Piper was upset to see Nina leave, as she was her first real friend at Danbury. Nina was Pop’s bunkmate—and her departure created an opening for someone to replace her as Pop’s new bunkmate and lieutenant, a highly prized spot at Danbury.
Piper, to her surprise, was offered the opportunity to move into the predominantly white Dorm A—“The Suburbs”—and assume this role. But she decided to reject this offer too. Piper suspected that she might be perceived as racist if she chose to leave the Ghetto, plus she did not want to offend her current roommate Natalie, with whom she had grown close. Piper recommended a new inmate, an Italian-American named Toni, for the slot instead. Through this whole process, Piper was surprised to see that an inmate had such an ability to call the shots on bunk assignments—but, then again, Pop was no ordinary inmate.
There was no shortage of piety and faith-based activity at Danbury, though Piper had her doubts about how much of it was motivated by sincere spiritual conviction. Every denomination was represented in the prison, and they all had their own designated time for religious services. Although fairly secular herself (she was a blue-blood Yankee Episcopalian), Piper was tolerant of everyone’s expressions of faith. There was only one group that managed to irritate her—the Evangelical Christians. Piper found these women to be loud, judgemental, pushy, and holier-than-thou. They were constantly parading through the dorms, loudly declaring what they were going to pray for, while castigating everyone else as damned, unrepentant sinners.
But Piper did manage to find some level of comfort from religious holidays. When Easter came up in March, it was the first holiday she knew she would miss with her family because of her incarceration. But Pop and her kitchen crew prepared a wonderful Easter meal that managed to give Piper a small taste of home. They served up baked chicken, cabbage, dumplings, and deviled eggs. Pop’s connections gave her access to contraband that no one else in the prison could dream of getting.
Although Piper chose not to bunk with her, Pop became like a mother to Piper, guiding her through the trials and tribulations of prison with a unique mixture of compassion and tough love.She was exactly the kind of guardian figure someone like Piper needed in Danbury. Although Pop had a tough exterior and came from a completely different background than Piper—she was a Russian gangster’s wife who had spent years on the run from the FBI before finally being apprehended—she had a genuine warmth and compassion and made it her business to look out for the “girls” in her crew. And that now very much included Piper.
In prison, inmates were issued drab uniforms instead of being allowed to dress in their personal style, and issued numbers and called “inmate” by the COs, instead of receiving the dignity of being called by their real names. In such circumstances, incarcerated women at Danbury did everything they could to hold onto some sliver of their humanity and their individuality.
The prisoners operated a makeshift beauty salon on campus, where they could maintain their hair, nails, and makeup. Even in Danbury—especially at Danbury—Piper saw that these women maintained pride in their appearance. This was especially true if they were preparing for a visit. Indeed, one could tell who was expecting a visit from a loved one based on how much time they spent in the salon. Women also did whatever they could to sew alterations into their uniforms (strictly prohibited by the regulations) to better match their personal style. Sewing was a highly valued skill at Danbury and women who knew how to do alterations could make a fortune in the prison barter economy, trading their talent for commissary goods.
Piper certainly availed herself of these services, considering the barrage of visits she received on a continual basis from Larry, her mother, and her friends. Her mother was a particular source of strength. Piper knew that it was destroying her mother to see her daughter in prison, but she dutifully made the journeys down to Danbury to support her. Her father also made his best efforts to help Piper feel normal (or, at least, as normal as possible under the circumstances), eating M&Ms with her and listening to Piper explain the elaborate and baffling social system that was prison life. Still, it was clearly agonizing for him to see Piper behind bars.
These visits were her lifeline and her strength, although she was always crushed when visiting hours ended and she had to return to the drab world of Danbury. Even worse, every visit was followed by the standard, yet humiliating and dehumanizing, strip search to check for the contraband that COs feared visitors were always attempting to smuggle in. Many women eschewed visits altogether out of distaste for the strip search, but this was a price Piper was willing to pay.
And Piper was floored by the wellspring of support she received from those who knew and loved her. Friends came from all over the country. Her visitors attracted attention and comments from the inmates, many of whom were serving long sentences and received few visitors. Piper often overheard the male COs mocking her gay friends who came to visit and making homophobic jokes. When they weren’t doing this, they would leer at her female friends.
Sex was on the minds of almost everyone at Danbury. The prisoners were deprived of the company of their partners, creating an atmosphere of sometimes aching sexual repression and lust. Piper was no stranger to this feeling, never having experienced the sensation of being deprived of Larry for so long.
Piper grew increasingly lustful for Larry. The “no touching” visiting hours rule became increasingly difficult to obey, though Piper feared the consequences of defying it. One particularly harsh CO (nicknamed “Gay Pornstar” for his mustache, which reminded the inmates of male stars of adult films from the 70s and 80s) was known to strictly enforce this rule, threatening to cancel visits altogether if he saw even the slightest contact between a visitor and an inmate. Piper began to wonder if her relationship could withstand the stress of her incarceration.
The women of Danbury found unique ways to cope with pent-up sexual frustration. One prisoner, a proud hillbilly nicknamed “Pennsatucky,” even discussed with Piper the subtle art of making homemade prison dildos using sporks, maxi pads, and rubber gloves.
That spring, a new inmate came to the minimum-security camp as a reward for her good behavior at the neighboring maximum-security facility. Her name was “Crazy Eyes” Morena, so nicknamed because of her powerful expressive eyes, with which she would stare at the other inmates. Crazy Eyes was one of Danbury’s few “out” lesbians and she quickly took a fancy to Piper, attempting to seduce her. To Piper’s dismay, Crazy Eyes began following her around on her daily walks through the yard—which were typically a time of quiet reflection and solitude for Piper, one of the precious rituals she maintained to ease her time in prison.
Now, Crazy Eyes was starting to seriously interfere with Piper’s routine. She was in the habit of proclaiming to Piper that she had no time for all these “silly bitches” and that she needed a “real woman” like Piper. She boasted that she was a big-time drug dealer on the outside and that she needed a lover who respected and admired her the way she felt she deserved. Piper would always listen politely, but she was becoming seriously intimidated by Crazy Eyes.
Piper knew that many heterosexual women engaged in brief, experimental same-sex relationships during the period of their incarceration—going “gay for the stay” as it was called—but she was determined to remain faithful to Larry, regardless of her own romantic history with women. Eventually, Piper politely, but firmly rebuffed Crazy Eyes’s advances, telling her that she hoped she would eventually find the “real woman” she was looking for. To Piper’s great relief, Crazy Eyes backed off.
Maintaining some semblance of normalcy and connection to the outside world was crucial to survival and sanity at Danbury. Piper, Rosemarie, and another inmate named Carlotta would plan their future weddings, thinking about the guest list, the food, the venue, and the music selection. All of this was a lifeline to the world outside of prison and a way of clinging to a better and more hopeful future. Piper and Rosemarie wanted to get married because they loved their partners. Carlotta, on the other hand, wanted to wed so she could lord her happy, stable life over the dysfunctional women she had grown up with, or, as she put it, “so bitches can hate.”
The inmates were always focused on who was being released from week to week. This served as a reminder that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that their time at Danbury, too, would eventually end. An inmate being released was a victory for everyone. To celebrate these victories, prisoners organized “going away” parties, in which the soon-to-be-released inmate gave away their extra commissary items and clothes, while their friends prepared special send-off meals. These rituals were a crucial part of prison life and vital to maintaining one’s sanity.
The key was to avoid getting sucked into the petty drama and upheaval of prison life. Many women got into squabbles over what they would watch on television in the recreation room, who got to sit at what table in the dining room, or who cut who in line at the commissary. In prison, your reputation was one of the few things you could still control, especially if you were a “lifer” or serving a long sentence. Many inmates saw winning such struggles as vital for maintaining their self-respect.
Piper believed these women were making the mistake of treating prison as though it was real life. She tried to think of this period as a temporary aberration in her life, maintaining her focus on what came after prison. So many women, she saw, became institutionalized and unable to function outside—for them, prison was their entire world. This, Piper came to realize, was a contributing factor to recidivism—indeed, two-thirds of all released convicts in America are reincarcerated at some point.
She witnessed many inmates returning to Danbury after being released, even requesting to be reassigned to their old cell blocks and bunks. They were often grateful to be back in a federal prison like Danbury, where conditions were far better than those in local jails or metropolitan detention centers.
As she spent more time in prison, Piper began to understand that prison had the power to break those who were unable to come to terms with their incarceration. This was true of every woman at Danbury, from every background—whether it was working-class women who rebelled furiously against any form of authority or upper-middle-class women like herself who bristled at the idea of being confined with (and forced to obey) people whom they considered to be their social inferiors.
At the end of May, it was Mother’s Day. This was an especially difficult day for many of the incarcerated mothers at Danbury, as it reminded them of their forced separation from their children—indeed, 80 percent of the American female prison population are mothers. Piper saw that families missed whole chapters of each other’s lives because of prison—births, deaths, weddings, graduations, and other major milestones. Many women at Danbury experienced a loved one passing away on the outside without ever having the opportunity to say goodbye.
Deprived of the company of their real families, prisoners formed their own adopted families. These usually featured an older woman functioning as a “mom” to a group of younger “daughters.” Pop served as Piper’s “mom,” while two inmates named Toni and Rosemarie were her “sisters.”
One pregnant inmate, a woman named Doris, went into labor at Danbury and gave birth to her son after she was transported to a local hospital. Piper learned that in some prisons in the US, pregnant inmates were forced to give birth while shackled—a barbaric practice that, thankfully, Doris was not forced to endure. Nevertheless, Doris was immediately separated from her son after birth. Clearly, motherhood operated under a different set of circumstances in the prison system.
Although she detested working in the electrical shop under the crass, vulgar, and mean-spirited DeSimon, Piper’s electrical skills were markedly improving. After word got out that she successfully fixed a radio for a fellow inmate, Piper began earning some respect from the broader prison community. She developed a reputation as Danbury’s resident mechanic, making her and the entire electrical crew more popular around the prison.
After months of being told it was unavailable, Piper was finally able to acquire a portable radio from the commissary. The radio became her constant companion on her daily runs through the yard. Piper particularly enjoyed a program on a local college radio station that played a lot of early-90s alternative rock music—bands like Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, and Blur. Hearing this music (which was no longer being heavily played on mainstream rock stations in 2005) transported Piper back to the days of her youth, when she was carefree, foolish, and filled with limitless possibilities. Like so much else, it was a precious connection to her life in the world outside.
Another connection to the outside presented itself on May 17, when Piper celebrated her eighth anniversary with Larry. To honor the occasion, she wrote him a message on a Hallmark card (one of the free ones on donation at the prison chapel). The anniversary brought home the reality that she was incarcerated and unable to be with the man she loved. Piper bemoaned her imprisonment and yearned for the day when she would be free again.
Although Danbury did offer a GED program for inmates, it was notoriously inadequate. The teachers didn’t care about their students or their results and the program was marred by student delinquency and misbehavior.
The situation was all the more tragic because inmates who lacked a high-school education were not eligible for wage increases unless they completed the GED program. Natalie, Piper’s bunkmate in the Ghetto, was one such prisoner. Although Natalie was highly skilled as a baker, her earnings were capped at $0.14 per hour because she lacked a high school diploma.
Even worse, the failures of the prison education program put recently released prisoners, especially women, in an incredibly vulnerable position. Without a high-school education, most of these ex-convicts were unable to secure legal and gainful employment. This, of course, led them right back to a life of crime in the underground economy—as prostitutes or drug dealers—which, in turn, landed them right back in prison.
Despite the obvious failures of the program, some women did manage to complete it and earn their GEDs. The spring that Piper was at Danbury, Natalie graduated. Graduation Day was always a huge occasion for celebration at camp. It was an extraordinary accomplishment for these women, who overcame enormous struggles in their journey to earn an education and build better lives for themselves and their families. Many entered the program with almost no formal education at all, having dropped out of school more than a generation ago. Their differences with the worldly and college-educated Piper could not have been more stark, but Piper was nevertheless ecstatic on Graduation Day. Piper was overcome with emotion when Natalie was called to receive her diploma.
Not long after Natalie’s graduation, Piper began mentoring an inmate, an “OG” named Mrs. Jones. Piper had a reputation as book-smart and Mrs. Jones wished to tap into Piper’s academic skills to help her in her coursework. Mrs. Jones was Danbury’s longest-serving inmate, incarcerated there since the mid-80s. She also seemed to Piper to be somewhat mentally unstable—a combination, Piper learned, of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband and of her long incarceration.
Now, however, Mrs. Jones was due to be released within the year and she wanted to wrap up her GED before she stepped back out into the real world. She needed to write a paper for her business course, but, as Piper soon realized, Mrs. Jones expected Piper to do all the work. Piper had qualms about helping a student essentially cheat in her coursework, but reasoned that the greater injustice would be to let Mrs. Jones fail.
Piper dutifully wrote a generic three-page essay for the course, for which Mrs. Jones received an A. She ultimately helped Mrs. Jones “earn” an A- for the course. The sudden transformation of a barely literate student into one who could write eloquent term papers on the Industrial Revolution and hybrid cars never raised the slightest suspicion from the clearly apathetic course instructors.
But when Mrs. Jones graduated with her cohort, Piper had the privilege of witnessing the speech of a prisoner named Bobbie, who was the class valedictorian. Bobbie was exuberant and inspiring, reminding the women on stage that they had overcome extraordinary odds to earn their degrees and that it was proof they could achieve anything. It was a powerful assertion of the inmates’ agency—a victory over the systems of oppression and discrimination that held them back for their entire lives. For her part, ** Mrs. Jones sent Piper a card with a single message on the back: “To a dear friend. I made it. God bless you.”
As spring turned to summer and the weather began to warm, Piper became reinvigorated. She saw that her sentence, which once seemed so daunting and insurmountable, was gradually going by—one-quarter complete, one-third complete. Each time milestone was a small victory.
One day in June, Piper was reading a book on one of the benches in front of the electrical shop, on a day when DeSimon hadn’t shown up for work. The scene was peaceful, although occasionally marred by the crack of rifle fire from the COs’ shooting range—unsettling because Piper knew the COs on the range were preparing for the day when they might have to shoot her and her fellow prisoners.
Suddenly, the boss of the carpentry and construction shops pulled up to Piper in a white pickup. Although he could be vulgar, Mr. Thomas was generally garrulous and jovial, at least for a CO. He invited Piper to hop into the pickup truck, not telling her where they were headed.
Piper was delighted when Thomas pulled up next to a picnic area beside a blue and glistening lake. ** Inmates from carpentry and construction were sitting at the picnic tables, laughing and enjoying the rare opportunity for outdoor recreation. Piper plunged her hands into the lake, feeling the cool water rush over her. She spent the rest of the day painting the scenery and taking in the entire sight—a rare opportunity to see something beautiful in the middle of the ugliness of prison. Although the lake trip reminded Piper that this was the first summer she wouldn’t be swimming, it was still a glorious day.
But working in the electrical shop with the detestable Mr. DeSimon was a grim reminder for Piper that she was still in prison and, therefore, subject to the whims and power trips of the COs. Piper had particular distaste for DeSimon, who took delight in emotionally tormenting her. One of his favorite ways to tweak her was to call her “Kermit,” instead of her last name, Kerman. The whole experience of working in the electrical shop was degrading, dehumanizing, and often dangerous.
One day, the electrical crew was working on a project to fix the air conditioning in the visitors’ room on the floor above. This required them to snake long, thick cables through a hole in the roof and connect them on the next floor. It was a multi-person job, and quite a dangerous one at that—someone had to lift the cables off the ground floor, hand them to someone perched atop a ladder, who then needed to feed them through to the person on the next floor. If someone dropped the heavy cables, the person on the ladder could fall and become gravely injured. DeSimon assigned Piper the job of “greaser.” She was to lubricate the cables with a petroleum jelly, which would make them easier to snake through.
He deliberately gave Piper this job so he could direct leering and menacing sexual innuendos at her. He ordered her to grease up the “horse cock,” in reference to the phallic-looking cables. The rest of the day, he made lewd jokes to Piper about how much she enjoyed “horse cock.” It was the most disgusting and threatening experience she’d had at Danbury, one which demonstrated to her the rampant culture of sexual harassment and abuse among the male COs.
Outraged, Piper reported the incident to DeSimon’s boss and requested a transfer out of the hated electrical shop. To her great relief, her request was granted and she secured a transfer to construction in July.
Working on the construction crew that summer, Piper was part of a team that was building a house on campus for the incoming prison warden (Warden Deboo was leaving for a new position in California). Although the work was hard, Piper enjoyed the opportunity to be working inside a house instead of toiling in the electrical shop. She noticed how physically strong she had become since arriving in Danbury that February.
Working on the house one day, she went into the bathroom and took the opportunity to strip off her clothes—something she lacked the freedom and privacy to do in the cramped quarters of the Ghetto. It was the first time she’d seen herself naked in a mirror in over half a year. To her amazement, Piper saw that she’d lost many of the physical marks of thestressshe’d accumulated since being indicted. She looked as young as she had when she jumped the waterfall in Indonesia ten years ago. Somehow, prison had recharged and rejuvenated her. It was as if she had gotten a new beginning.
If summer brought Piper a new job assignment and more exposure to nice weather, it also brought about other changes around the prison. She noticed that conditions got noticeably worse in the summertime months, as washing machines and hair dryers began to break down, due to the limited electrical supply and the overuse of air conditioning in the warm weather. The camp began to get dirtier, uglier, and meaner. The social ties that bound individuals and groups together frayed. For Piper, it was like Lord of the Flies.
That summer, a new prisoner named Vanessa came to camp from the maximum security facility. Vanessa was an object of great curiosity and some apprehension—she was a post-op transgendered person, having been born a male. Many of the women at Danbury feared her, believing that her muscular, masculine body (partially the result of being deprived certain hormones in prison) gave Vanessa a dangerous physical advantage.
Others harbored traditionalist prejudices against her, believing that it was sinful or unnatural to change one’s gender. Unfortunately, such attitudes were not confined to the inmates. Many of the COs (never an LGBT-friendly lot to begin with) refused to respect her gender identity and insisted on calling her by her original male name of Richard.
But Vanessa was not one to be easily intimidated. She became a popular figure in the Ghetto, showing off her womanly features and displaying her colorful personality. She was charming, funny, and insightful, in addition to being a full-blown diva. Piper liked and admired Vanessa for her courage, although she disliked her nightly ritual of loudly (and poorly) singing religious hymns as the rest of the dorm attempted to sleep.
Piper got another new neighbor, a 22-year-old nicknamed Pom-Pom. Pom-Pom told Piper that her mother had also been an inmate at Danbury, though she had no idea what had become of her. Hearing this story was deeply distressing to Piper. She feared that Pom-Pom’s mother was dead, but could not bring herself to share this belief with her new neighbor. Pom-Pom’s story was all too common—multigenerational convicts in a single family, with parents, children, siblings, and cousins sometimes locked up together in the same prison.
The failures of the prison system were all around Piper. The American criminal justice system was very good at locking up addicts but spectacularly bad at treating their addiction. The ideology driving the prison system was entirely retributive—there was almost no focus on restoration or rehabilitation, on making sure that people who were released from prison didn’t come back. Piper knew that many inmates would simply become part of the revolving- door criminal justice system, falling back into lives of addiction, crime, and almost-inevitable reincarceration.
The consequences of this failing system were everywhere—broken families, squandered opportunities, and ruined lives. Every time Piper saw an inmate walking around with track marks (scars from injecting heroin) on their arms, she felt tremendous guilt. Even though it had been long ago, her criminal activity with Nora contributed to this suffering. On the other side of her glamorous, thrill-seeking, jet-setting life with Nora was terrible social destruction, lives lost to addiction, and families torn asunder.
Even events that were meant to be uplifting were sobering reminders of the grim consequences of incarceration on these women and their families. Each year, the prison organized a Children’s Day carnival with games and activities for kids while they came to visit their incarcerated mothers. Piper manned the face-painting booth at the carnival and genuinely enjoyed meeting and bonding with the children. They were sweet kids who were clearly suffering from the absence of a parent. It was emotional to see so much happiness in such a dreary place. But witnessing the tearful goodbyes at the day’s end was a terrible reminder of the human toll of the prison system.
Danbury, despite being a women’s prison, made minimal accommodations for women’s health. The facility failed to provide even basic items like tampons or Maxi pads, forcing inmates to purchase them at the commissary at inflated prices, using their sweatshop-level wages. Each prisoner was entitled to an annual gynecological exam. The other inmates darkly warned Piper not to take the prison up on this offer. In fact, every woman she knew at Danbury had refused the exam. Piper decided to buck the trend, reasoning that her health should come before everything else. She soon found out why everyone else had turned down the exam.
When she reported to the camp hospital, she saw, to her horror, that her gynecologist was an octogenarian white man.He coldly ordered Piper to get onto the examination table and put her feet in stirrups. He then proceeded to probe and prod her in the most painful, clinical fashion. It was an awful experience, one that left her feeling more alone and vulnerable than ever.
In September, the Bureau of Prisons issued an order banning inmates at Danbury from smoking. This was met with great outcry from the prison population—tobacco was one of the few pleasures and stress relievers these incarcerated women had. Smoking was more than just a habit, it was a ritual for many women and an important social lubricant. People met in groups to smoke together, with cigarettes serving as a focal point for the community.
Piper herself was not a smoker, but she disliked the pettiness and high-handedness of the new regulation. She wryly observed the irony of doing time with a population of women mostly locked up for illegal drug offenses, while cigarettes killed far more people than the drugs did.
That fall, the annual job fair came to Danbury. This event was yet another reminder of how inadequately the prison was preparing its inmates to functionally reintegrate into mainstream society. Piper (in yet another marker of her privilege) was fortunate enough to have a job waiting for her, a marketing position at a company run by a friend of hers.
Her fellow inmates, disproportionately women of color, lacked the kind of social capital necessary to capitalize on these kinds of opportunities. They were poor, marginalized, and convicted felons. The deck was stacked against them from the start. As a result, many of them would fall back into illegal activity upon release.
When inmates had questions about job training, or what employers might be open to hiring women with a record, the job fair organizers had no answers. They didn’t even know that the women of Danbury lacked regular access to the Internet, preventing them from even knowing what jobs were available. They were clearly totally unprepared for dealing with an inmate population.
The only advice the job fair organizers could offer came in the form of a “dress for success” contest, in which the women were given an assortment of outfits and judged on the basis of how “professional” their attire was. While some of the prisoners enjoyed the competition—Vanessa, in particular, relished the opportunity to strut on stage—the sexistimplications of judging women’s suitability for the workplace based solely on their appearances were not lost on Piper. The whole event was condescending, patriarchal, and racially problematic, with its implied denigration of Latin or African-American modes of dress in favor of white ones.
Throughout much of Piper’s time at Danbury, the inmate population was following one news story with bated breath: the trial, conviction, and sentencing of television personality Martha Stewart on charges related to securities fraud. When Stewart was convicted and sentenced in July 2004 to five months in federal prison, there was intense speculation both in the media and among the inmates of federal institutions as to where she would serve her time. Many women at Danbury eagerly hoped that Stewart would be heading to their prison, as it was widely believed to have been Stewart’s preferred location to serve out her sentence.
While all this speculation was going on, news stories began to appear about how dangerous Danbury was. One article in People magazine even quoted a former Danbury inmate who labelled her fellow prisoners as “scum of the earth.” On the other end of the spectrum, the women of Danbury were outraged to learn that a more recently released inmate had given an entirely different account of the prison to the Hartford Courant—and that this inmate was none other than Piper’s old coworker in the electrical shop, Levy.
In her tell-all interview, Levy portrayed Danbury as a cushy “Club Fed” resort complete with gourmet food, college-level courses, and Haagen-Dazs ice cream on demand. This from a woman who had done nothing but complain while she was there and stigmatize her fellow inmates as lacking in any “class.”
Everyone was angry that Levy had portrayed Danbury this way. It was a grave insult and a missed opportunity to expose the truly inhumane conditions at the prison. Why had Levy, of all people, gone out of her way to sugarcoat her prison experience?
Piper reasoned that an upper-middle-class white woman like Levy wouldn’t want to admit that she’d been ghettoized and marginalized like other, “lesser” groups in prison. It was a painful and almost unbearable loss of status and privilege for someone like Levy to admit that she’d been forced into the same prison circumstances as these other women. Thus, she had a psychological need to fictionalize her prison experience.
That fall, Vanessa was released. She was only at the minimum security camp for a few short months, a reward for good behavior at the very end of her sentence. As was the time-honored Danbury custom, Vanessa’s bunkmates threw her a sumptuous (by prison standards) going-away party. These parties were an important ritual for the prisoner community, a well-wishing to someone hopefully closing a painful chapter of their old life and starting a new one. They brought the women together in celebration and solidarity—when someone you knew was finally going home, it was as if everyone had regained a small piece of freedom.
The women of The Ghetto gave Vanessa the warm send-off she deserved, bringing her an array of homemade prison delicacies. Piper even made a “cheesecake,” using vanilla pudding, lemon juice, Laughing Cow cheese, and crushed graham crackers, a delicacy for which she had become renowned at Danbury. In her farewell speech, Vanessa talked about how moved she was by the spirit of love and community she’d found in this most unlikely of places. She told her fellow prisoners that although she’d undergone surgery to become a female, it took coming to a women’s prison to truly become a woman.
This wasn’t the only memorable party Piper got to attend that fall of 2004. On September 28,
Pop summoned Piper to the visiting room. When Piper arrived, she was greeted by her friends yelling, “Surprise!” Pop and Jae had organized a surprise 35th birthday party for her, complete with a full prison banquet, decorations, and gifts. Piper was overcome with gratitude, joy, and emotion when Pop presented her with a pair of homemade slippers, made from reconstructed shower shoes and covered in crocheted yarn.
Seeing all her friends—Pop, Jae, Little Janet, Rosemarie, Pennsatucky, Toni—gathered together was overwhelming. These were women whom, a year ago, she wouldn't have ever thought she would even meet. Now, they were among her very closest friends. Piper saw that she had a community at Danbury, with people who truly loved and cared for her . Little Janet wrote a heartfelt letter to Piper, telling her to stay strong and reminding her that she would soon be back home with her family and her fiance. Jae handed Piper a handmade birthday card, in which she wrote, “I never thought I’d find a friend like you.”
It was a time of transition at Danbury. Women with whom Piper had grown close were leaving—and now, Yoga Janet was one of them. Piper wondered how she would survive in Danbury without her. Yoga Janet was an older woman who had organized yoga and mindfulness classes in the recreation room. These classes were an important part of Piper’s rhythm of prison life, helping to center her mind and give order to her day. In the chaos of Danbury, Yoga Janet was a comforting and inspiring presence. Now, she would be gone.
Inmate send-offs were usually an occasion for celebration, a collective victory for all the women of Danbury. But Piper was distraught to see Yoga Janet go, throwing her arms around the aging hippie and telling her how much her presence had meant to her during her sojourn in prison. Although she was happy that Yoga Janet was finally free, Piper knew there was no replacing her. Even with Yoga Janet gone, Piper continued to do her morning routine, with the help of an old fitness VHS tape that Janet left behind. Yoga would go on without Yoga Janet.
That fall, the Bureau of Prisons decided that it would not be sending Martha Stewart to Danbury after all, citing the facility’s ease of access to New York-based media, which would bring unwanted scrutiny. When it looked like Stewart might be taking up residence in Danbury, new inmates had been redirected to other federal facilities in an effort to avoid giving the appearance of an overcrowded prison if there were to be a sudden media swarm with such a high-profile prisoner. Now that Stewart was not coming, the floodgates opened and new prisoners once again began stretching Danbury’s capacity to the limits. The results were overcrowding, high tensions, and a generally hostile mood throughout the camp.
On top of this, Butorksy retired and was replaced by another BOP lifer named Finn. While Butorsky was racist and homophobic, he was also a stickler for rules, paperwork, and proper procedure—not necessarily bad qualities to have in a chaotic place like a federal prison. Finn, on the other hand, was lax, disorderly, and a disastrously inept administrator. While this did give inmates some greater level of day-to-day freedom, it also contributed to a general breakdown of order and discipline, creating unsafe conditions in the prison. Even worse, individual COs enjoyed greater personal discretion over how to handle inmates in the absence of clear guidelines from the top of the hierarchy . This gave the most sadistic and abusive among them an opportunity to indulge their worst tendencies.
The story of a prisoner named Cormorant demonstrated to Piper just how dangerous this chaotic state of affairs could be. ** Cormorant was carrying on a sexual relationship with a male CO named Scott (given the power disparities between COs and inmates, it was impossible to know how truly consensual the relationship was in the first place). Finn harbored a deep dislike for CO Scott, but he chose instead to retaliate against Cormorant. Finn first had Cormorant sent to SHU as a way of antagonizing Scott. When Scott quit, Finn had Cormorant sent to the maximum-security facility, where she would serve the duration of her sentence. Cormorant was the unwitting (and unwilling) pawn in a power struggle between two different players in the prison bureaucracy.**
That October, the prison was captivated by the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Interestingly, the series broke down largely along racial and class lines, with the primarily white, upper-middle-class, New England-born inmates supporting the Red Sox and the predominantly Latinx or African-American, poor, Bronx-born inmates favoring the Yankees.
Piper, a Massachusetts native, was a diehard Red Sox fan and wildly cheered her team on as they became the first Major League Baseball club to overcome an 0-3 series deficit and defeat their hated rivals, before going on to win their first World Series title in 86 years. It was a cathartic moment for Piper, one weighted with deep symbolic importance. She broke down crying watching the Red Sox celebrate their historic championship, thinking back to just the year before during the 2003 ALCS, when she and Larry had sat heartbroken in a Manhattan bar as Yankee fans celebrated yet another victory over the Red Sox. In just a year, so much had changed.
The Red Sox victory showed Piper that so many of her assumptions about her life had simply been wrong. She joked to herself that she had to go to prison for the Red Sox to win the World Series. It was truly a world turned upside-down.
In late fall, Piper learned from her father that her grandmother was in poor health. This was deeply upsetting—Piper was locked away in prison, unable to see her grandmother or be with her or the rest of the family during this difficult time. Her grandmother was always an incredibly important person to Piper—although she came from a reserved, somewhat conservative southern background, her grandmother was amazingly broad-minded and easy to talk to. They were close confidantes, feeding off one another’s intellects and shared needs to challenge the status quo. It was her grandmother who first spoke to Piper about topics like feminism, sex, power, and patriarchy.
Now, Piper feared that her worst anxiety was coming true—that her grandmother would die during her period of incarceration. Fearing the worst, Piper wrote a long and heartfelt letter to her grandmother, telling her how much she loved and admired her and how she would always be one of the most important and influential people in her life. She cursed the stupidity of her choices in life that had led her to her present situation.
Piper knew that furlough—a temporary, conditional release from prison—was technically possible under certain circumstances. Perhaps this family emergency would qualify. The other inmates, however, told her that furlough was a pipe dream and lost cause. The veteran prisoners told Piper that they had never seen an approved furlough request in all their years at Danbury. Piper requested it anyway. She knew it was a longshot, but what other choice did she have?
The cynics proved right in the end. Piper’s furlough request was quickly and unceremoniously denied by the Bureau of Prisons. Piper entered a state of deep anger and depression, unable to enjoy the company of her friends, visits from family, the rhythms and rituals of daily prison life, or even special occasions like the Halloween party. She felt miserable and utterly powerless. She did manage to have a brief phone conversation with her grandmother from Finn’s office, after which she broke down sobbing.
Piper began to wall herself off from the world around her. All her life, her stoicism and stiff upper lip had helped her survive. These qualities were certainly being put to good use in prison, a world filled with people struggling to cope with insurmountable loss and hopelessness. Piper’s hard exterior earned her respect from her fellow inmates, none of whom liked a crybaby. Despite her privileged background and elite education, Piper earned a reputation for having street smarts. Nevertheless, everyone knew that she was hurting deeply inside, or was “in some kind of way,” in prison parlance.
In her heightened and deteriorated emotional state, Piper lashed out. One day running on the track, she smacked a particularly annoying and loud “Jesus Freak” named LaRue who happened to be on the track with her at the same time. LaRue was known for making loud and ostentatious declarations of her faith. She recognized that her dislike of LaRue was irrational and mean, and was more about her inability to cope with her feelings than it was about LaRue. Piper was ashamed that prison had transformed her into someone capable of inflicting violence on someone else.
Through it all, Pop urged her not to let the injustices of prison turn her bitter and jaded. In conversations with another inmate named Gisela, Piper also began to understand the fulfilling role that faith played in the lives of many women at Danbury. Piper, although nominally Episcopalian, had always been quite secular, with religion never playing an important role in her life.
Now, she saw that she had been wrong to look askance at faith. Gisela’s relationship with God was joyful and affirming. Rather than treating God like a vehicle for wish fulfillment, Gisela’s approach to spirituality was focused on what others needed from her. In a place like a federal prison, this could be a tremendous force for good.
Piper could sense her freedom getting closer and closer. On one of his visits, Larry mentioned that he had bought a house in Brooklyn for them to live in when she got out. This was wonderful news for Piper—it made her freedom and her life after prison seem more real. She also knew that it marked her out as privileged. Instead of hitting the streets or a homeless shelter, as so many of her fellow prisoners would upon release, she would be living with her fiance in a new house in a chic and gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Visits from Larry and her family were Piper’s lifeline, but she had to pay a price afterwards—the humiliation of the body search performed by the COs after each visit. During these searches, women like Piper were treated as little more than objects to be fondled, groped, and ogled.
Guards knew that they could brazenly violate the physical space of female prisoners without facing any repercussions—such was the nature of the drastic power imbalance between male guards and female prisoners. Those women who dared to file complaints in response to this treatment were handled harshly. They were sent to the SHU (ostensibly for “protective custody”) and had their jobs and visiting privileges revoked.
Many guards were pure authoritarians. These men fed off the power they wielded over powerless inmates, relishing their authority and capacity to inflict harm on those who wouldn’t fight back. Piper even suspected that there was a certain authoritarian personality type that was drawn to correctional work, with prisons giving such men (and they were nearly always men) unchecked opportunity to indulge their worst impulses.
She saw this in action when she earned a low-level “shot” (prison bureaucracy jargon for a disciplinary infraction) after being caught by Finn loitering in a part of the prison where she wasn’t technically authorized to be. There was a graduated system of shots, with small infractions garnering minor penalties and major ones resulting in harsh penalties—the worst could land one in SHU or result in extra charges being added to one’s sentence.
Piper’s transgression was nothing of the sort: she knew it and Finn knew it. No major disciplinary action was ever going to result from her trivial “offense” (cells in SHU were a finite commodity and they couldn’t throw every rule violator in there), nor would the prison even be inclined to pursue the matter (prison officials were generally lazy and wished to avoid cumbersome paperwork).
Nevertheless, Piper had to stand there and listen to Finn menacingly shout at her, despite the underlying absurdity of the situation. In the end, Piper was punished with 10 hours of extra work service. She made the most of her punishment, filling it by helping Pop prepare the Thanksgiving meal in the kitchen.
Think about how power disparities affect relationships.
Have you ever been in a situation where someone in a position of authority or power took advantage of you? Briefly describe what happened.
How did you react to this situation?
What do you think society as a whole can do to protect individuals and groups that are particularly vulnerable to abuses of power?
Now a seasoned prisoner, Piper acknowledged to herself that she had been indifferent to suffering before coming to prison—but that a transformation had taken place within her. She was, in fact, a good person, capable of compassion and empathy and able to provide real comfort and help to those in need. Piper found that she was now experienced enough to serve as a comforting and nurturing figure to new inmates (just as people like Pop and Rosemarie had been to her).
Just like Pop, Piper herself could dispense tough love when she needed to, as when she warned a young inmate named Camila not to lose her temper with the guards; but, also like Pop, she could also be soothing and maternal when the situation demanded, on one occasion cradling a girl named Amy while the distraught young lady cried for her father. The other women at Danbury, Piper saw, had taught her to be better and more compassionate. She hoped that her grandmother would be proud of her for that.
Unfortunately, the thing Piper most feared eventually came to pass when her grandmother finally died on the day after Thanksgiving. It was a devastating loss, especially not having the opportunity to properly say goodbye, but she was able to mourn with the new community of women she found at Danbury.
As November turned to December, Piper began to eagerly anticipate her March release. She was in the final stretch of her sentence, tantalizingly close to closing this chapter in her life. Piper was not the only one whose thoughts were drifting to life after Danbury. Pop and Natalie were also slated for release, when they would be living together at a halfway house on Brooklyn’s Myrtle Avenue (known as “Murder Avenue” by Danbury’s Brooklynites). When she got out, Piper would likely be headed to the same halfway house.
Her impending release made it clear to Piper just how woefully inadequate the prison system’s pre-release programming was. It was meant to help inmates adjust to life on the outside, but these pre-release programs offered no information about how to access health and reproductive care services (obviously a priority for destitute women), find a job, secure housing, get drug treatment, and regain custody of their children. These were urgent needs for all of these women and they were entirely unaddressed by the pre-release program.
The system, through negligence, indifference, and incompetence, set ex-convicts (especially women) up to fail. Lacking the skills needed to thrive in the mainstream economy (or even access it in the first place) many would simply drift back into the illegal economy, which would land them right back in prison. The system was not only cruel, it was stupid and inefficient—prisoners reentering prison wasted taxpayer resources, when a more rehabilitative approach would have been more fiscally prudent in the long term.
Piper’s friend Pom-Pom, for example, would be released back into a dangerous ghetto and be forced to fend for herself with no job prospects. Her choices would be to either hit the streets, check into a homeless shelter, or fall back into a life of crime. In that kind of situation, dealing drugs or engaging in theft was probably the best option for survival.
In the second week of December, Piper’s lawyer contacted her to tell her that her time in Danbury might be coming to an end very soon, but not because she was getting early release—there was a good chance, he warned her, that she would be transported to Chicago to testify against an old drug ring associate named Jonathan Bibby. Piper had never met Bibby and didn’t remember him, but her lawyer said this made no difference. Part of Piper’s plea agreement stipulated that she would serve as a government witness if asked to do so. Now, she was going to be called upon to hold up her end of the bargain. Pop darkly warned Piper about what it would be like to be air transported on a BOP plane, telling her, “Oh baby, the airlift is nothing nice.”
Piper had heard the horror stories from other women who’d flown courtesy of BOP. Some women she knew told her that they’d been sent to gruesome local prisons (especially in the South) while waiting to appear as witnesses in federal trials, where conditions were far worse than anything at Danbury. In her last phone call with Larry before packing out, Piper was careful not to discuss any specific details about the journey, knowing that the feds were listening—and might think she was planning an escape if she revealed too much.
On Christmas Day, Piper learned that she would definitely be transported to Chicago in the new year to participate in Bibby’s trial. This was dreadful news—she did not know how long this would take, if she would ever be returned to Danbury before her ultimate release, and if she would ever get to enjoy a proper goodbye party with her friends and “family” at Danbury.This knowledge put a damper on her holiday, though she still enjoyed seeing how the inmates transformed the drab TV room into a stunning Christmas village using nothing more than homemade decorations. Even in prison, these women found ways to create beauty.
On December 27, Larry published a piece in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. This piece was about his relationship with Piper, their life together, and his thoughts on their engagement and impending wedding. He talked about marrying Piper as an act of sweet and wonderful euthanasia, putting him out of the misery of his singlehood and his life before he knew her. For Piper, it was the sweetest gift of all.
On January 3, the guards told Piper to pack out—she was leaving Danbury. She put her few possessions in a duffel bag and made her way to the transport bus. On her way out of Danbury, she received advice and warnings from the other inmates about how to handle the grueling journey she was about to undertake.
One woman told Piper to wear a sanitary pad inside her underwear, because she might not be able to urinate for hours on end. They also advised Piper to eat whatever was offered, because they didn’t know how long it would be until she would have the chance to eat again. Perhaps the grimmest piece of advice Piper got was to smile at the guards escorting her onto the plane so they wouldn’t cuff her too tightly and kill her circulation.
As she boarded the transport bus that would take her to the plane, Piper had only her duffel bag and a piece of paper, on which she wrote the names and contact information of everyone she knew both inside and outside of prison. She was afraid of getting “lost” in the sloppy prison bureaucracy and wanted to make sure she would be able to contact the outside world to make sure her lawyer, friends, and family knew her whereabouts.
Surrounding the plane were US Marshals with automatic weapons—an intimidating sight for all the women being packed onto the aircraft toward an unknown fate. Piper boarded the plane in the company of her friend Jae and Jae’s cousin, who went by the name Slice. Jae and Slice were also being transported to give testimony in the trial of a co-defendant. When she got onto the plane, Piper had to help her seatmate into her seat and later feed her during the flight, as the woman was totally shackled and immobilized. There were many co-defendants traveling on the plane together, even members of the same family like Jae and Slice.
To her shock, the plane was also filled with male convicts. Although the marshals admonished the male prisoners and forbade them from looking at or speaking to the women, it was no use. The male convicts made lewd and menacing catcalls as the women boarded the plane, with several of them addressing Piper directly as “Blondie.” Piper didn’t like COs or the militarized security procedures that treated every prisoner as if they were a dangerous killer, but she made an exception in this case—she was very glad to see the shackles on these men.
After picking up several new prisoners at stops along its journey west, Piper’s plane finally landed in Oklahoma City. Piper was ushered immediately from the plane into the Federal Transfer Center, Oklahoma City. The prison seemed to be located right at the edge of the airport, because Piper never saw any of the outside world in her quick trip from the plane to the facility.
She learned that this was a temporary holding facility that held prisoners either awaiting trial or waiting to testify in someone else’strial. ** No one stayed long in Oklahoma City, but this would be Piper’s home until her time came to testify against Bibby in Chicago. Upon arrival, she was issued a meager breakfast consisting of cereal, a bag of milk, and some coffee. She and Jae worried that they would starve if they were forced to live on such a diet.
Unlike the open dormitory plan at Danbury, the inmates at Oklahoma City lived in cells, complete with bars and locks. Although she’d had bunkmates in Danbury, this was the first time since her self-surrender that she had a cellmate. Conditions in Danbury had obviously been awful and unlike anything Piper had ever experienced before. But she had a community of women there that she loved and that loved her back. It was what had sustained her for nearly a year.
Now, in Oklahoma City, she was deprived of all that. She was alone all over again and completely isolated. The phones didn’t work, and there were no televisions, radios, or even newspapers. Piper lacked almost all contact with the outside world. She had no job in Oklahoma City, no way to pass the days. Life was dull and monotonous—the lack of windows made it difficult to even tell the passage of time. Days melted into one another. How long would she be here? When would she be whisked out of Oklahoma City onto a transport to her next prison, as had many of the women with whom she'd arrived? Piper began to feel as if she was adrift, lost in Neverland, not knowing when she’d get back to the real world and her real life.
One day, Piper saw a familiar figure emerge from a cell and take her place on the breakfast line. Piper was floored—it was Nora Jansen, the woman who’d sent her to prison. The woman who had entirely derailed her life. The woman who was responsible for the last six agonizing years. The woman who had robbed her of her chance to say goodbye to her grandmother. Now she was before her in the flesh.
Piper told Jae who Nora was when they sat for breakfast, openly fantasizing about taking violent revenge. Thankfully, Jae was the voice of wisdom and restraint that Piper desperately needed to hear at this time. Piper was mere months away from getting out of prison, Jae explained. It would be colossally stupid and self-destructive to make a move on Nora, maybe get some temporary satisfaction, only to then be sent to the SHU and possibly run the risk of getting an assault charge on top of it all. Of course, Piper knew that Jae was right. It was Piper’s own self-destructive tendencies that had drawn her to Nora in the first place all those years ago. Her relationship with Nora had already cost Piper so much—nothing was worth adding to it.
After lunch, Nora attempted to say hello, but Piper coolly rebuffed her former lover’s outreach. She wanted as little as possible to do with Nora. For the rest of her time in Oklahoma City, Piper did as much as possible to keep herself from the Jansen sisters, maintaining an icy distance and refusing to even acknowledge their presence.
In mid-January, Piper was told once more to pack out and board a plane to Chicago. She was joined on the flight by Nora and her sister, Hester. The marshals even made Piper sit next to Nora on the long flight to Chicago. Following some advice she’d received in Oklahoma City, Piper stored Vaseline under her ears and used it to periodically dab her lips to keep them from cracking during the long flight without access to water.
When they landed, the three women were transported by van to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago. It was surreal for Piper to be travelling through the bustling metropolis that she knew well, but to be viewing it from the inside of a prison van. More surreal experiences were to come.
Piper, Hester, and Nora were assigned to the psych ward at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), Chicago. There, dazed and zombie-like women (under heavy medication) wandered the halls staring blankly at television screens. It had the atmosphere of some sort of demented nursery school. Piper began to experience a thaw in her attitude toward her former girlfriend. They were no longer enemies with a tumultuous history. Now, they were fellow travelers on this bizarre journey together. In a chaotic and weird place like the psych ward of MCC Chicago, Nora Jansen represented a small piece of normalcy. And Piper soon found that Nora was her old funny, charming, scheming self.
All of Piper’s hard-earned knowledge about prison life proved to be useless in Chicago. It was a different environment than what she’d known in Danbury (or even Oklahoma City), one that operated by a different set of rules. Even the more unsavory aspects of the social hierarchy at Danbury, like the racial tribalism, were unreliable guides in Chicago. The cracks in the BOP hierarchy were apparent there as well—guards seemed to be a minimal presence in the ward, with the inmates largely left to fend for themselves. She had the sinking feeling that no one was really in charge. Piper couldn’t even shop at the commissary because the BOP was either too lazy or too incompetent to process the paperwork to unlock her account from Danbury.
Although there was no SHU to be sent to, an even worse threat loomed over those unfortunate inmates who stepped out of line: being sent to Cook County Jail, about which Piper heard bloodcurdling stories from women who’d been placed there (one woman had been blinded there after another, more violent inmate threw bleach in her eyes). As bad as regular prison was, Chicago taught her a new lesson—it could always get worse.
In this environment, Nora and Hester (who was now calling herself Anne) were the only people with whom she was capable of forming some sort of friendship. They formed a trio in Chicago, hanging out together, cooking meals with one another (the sisters were accomplished prison chefs), and generally lamenting the sloppy and unprofessional conditions at the Chicago MCC. This comradeship was a source of comfort for Piper, but she wanted closure from Nora. She wanted Nora to finally admit to her that she had been the one to give her name to the feds.
Nora finally told her side of the story, saying that when she’d been arraigned, the authorities claimed to have already known about Piper. Nora insisted that she’d told them that Piper was just a girlfriend and had no involvement with the drug ring. Piper was conflicted when she heard Nora tell this story. One the one hand, it was entirely plausible. On the other hand, Piper knew Nora to be a cunning and manipulative liar.
In the end, she decided to accept that she would never know the truth and let go of it. Piper had been consumed with rage and bitterness about and toward Nora for the better part of a decade. It had gnawed at her and taken her to places in her mind that she never thought she would go. Now, it was time to make peace and move on.
One day, Piper was taken out of MCC Chicago to the federal court building in the city. There, she met with her lawyer, who explained to her how her participation in Bibby’s trial would unfold. He also told her that it was unlikely she would ever be returned to Danbury, as the process of transferring her back would simply take too long and she would hit her release date by then.
Larry at last came to visit her in Chicago. She was careful to keep her visit secret from the other women at MCC Chicago—for many of these women, a man coming to visit all the way from New York was a big deal. The last thing Piper wanted was to arouse the jealousy of the other women, either over Larry’s visit or her imminent release. She was surrounded by people who had little left to lose in life. In such circumstances, arousing jealousy could be a very dangerous thing. Piper clung to every moment of Larry’s visit, even backing out of the room as she was leaving to be able to look at him as long as possible. She knew she would soon be with him for good, but it still felt an eternity away.
The weeks continued to pass at MCC Chicago in the winter of 2005. One day, Piper and the Jansen sisters were getting some recreation time on the roof of the prison. Their position on the roof afforded them a view of the entire city. Nora pointed out a notable building to Piper. It was the Congress Hotel, where Piper had, a lifetime ago, carried a suitcase of drug money for Nora. Piper had stayed in a luxury suite then. She never thought she would be seeing it again under these circumstances.
At last, the day came for Piper to testify against Bibby. She and the other witnesses were furious with Bibby for not taking a plea deal as the rest of the co-conspirators had and, thus, forcing them to disrupt their lives (albeit prison lives) to testify at his trial for what seemed like an inevitable “guilty” verdict anyway. The whole thing was incredibly wasteful and selfish as far as Piper and the other witnesses, including Nora, were concerned.
At the trial, Piper spent hours on the stand recounting the scant details she remembered about Bibby and his involvement with the drug ring. But the questions the prosecutor asked her were routine and ordinary. It was clear that Piper was not the star witness—Nora was. As everyone expected, Bibby was found guilty after a very short deliberation by the jury. The trial was over and, in theory, there was no reason why Piper couldn’t return to Danbury. But her attorney’s prediction was correct: Piper wouldn’t be leaving Chicago. She would not see her old friends in Danbury, especially as her March 4 release date loomed closer and closer.
She had spent over a year clinging to this date. But as it got closer and closer and she spent her final stretch in disorganized, dysfunctional Chicago, she got paranoid. When she inquired about what preparations were being made for her impending release, the staff at MCC Chicago had no answers. They didn’t even seem to be aware that she was getting out at all.
Her fear began to mount. What if the BOP had messed up her paperwork? What if whoever was in charge of processing her release never passed that information along to Chicago? Would she just rot in her cell long past the date when she was supposed to be free? In a madhouse like MCC Chicago, screened by the opaque and inept bureaucracy of the BOP, it was easy for Piper’s mind to wander to frightening places.
Shortly after the Bibby trial, the Jansen sisters were boarded onto a BOP plane and sent off to a new federal facility. Piper would not be joining them this time. They exchanged a quick farewell with Piper, although they did not understand why Piper was not coming on the plane with them. Although there was no love lost between Piper and Nora after everything that had happened between them, it was a bittersweet moment. Piper was wistful at seeing her go—she knew she would probably never see her again.
With her release just around the corner, Piper took the time to reflect and take stock of her experience and the wild journey she’d been on. She’d been brought face-to-face with people from backgrounds so different than her own, people with whom she never would have thought she’d have anything in common. Now, she saw how wrong she was. The community of women in prison had saved her. Isolated from everyone and everything she’d loved before, these women—Pop, Yoga Janet, Jae, Pennsatucky, Pom-Pom, Nina, Rosemarie—had made her feel less alone in the world. Their struggle and success in preserving their humanity in the face of a system that sought to crush it was nothing short of heroic. They taught her compassion she never thought herself capable of and revealed strengths she never knew she had.
At last, the day came. On March 4, Piper received her final call to pack out. (She was released two months early for good behavior.) She had no street clothes to wear after she handed in her prison uniform, so she was given some ill-fitting male clothes. The BOP also gave her $28.30 in cash, what they termed (bizarrely) as a “gratuity.” The COs took her down the service elevator of MCC Chicago. And just like that, she was on the streets in Chicago in broad daylight, a free woman once more.
Larry was waiting outside to meet her. She sprinted over to him as fast as she could. Piper’s long ordeal was over at last—but she would be forever shaped by her experience and the incredible women with whom she’d shared it.
Think about the main takeaways from Orange Is the New Black.
How do you think the criminal justice system should balance punishment vs. rehabilitation?
What were some of the major systemic failures of the prison system, as Piper saw them?
Describe the roadblocks that most prisoners face that inhibit them from leading law-abiding and productive lives after release. What improvements do you think could be made to alleviate this situation?