'New Black' Author Shares Her Wild Ride with UML Crowd
Piper Kerman, author of "Orange is the New Black" about her experience in prison, on which the hit Netflix series is based, speaks at UMass Lowell at University Crossing.
10/01/2014
Lowell Sun
By Ed Hannan
It belongs to Piper Kerman, whose memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, is the real-life story that creator Jenji Kohan has adapted for Hollywood.
Kerman spent 13 months in a women's prison, FCI Danbury in Connecticut, from 2004 into 2005. She's been busy since her release, writing her memoir, doing public-speaking engagements and advocating for prison reform.
Those roads brought Kerman to UMass Lowell Tuesday night, where she spoke for 90 minutes to a standing-room-only crowd at Moloney Hall in the new student center at University Crossing. Kerman shared her experience in prison, the story behind the book and television series, and her feelings on prison reform.
There was so much overflow crowd that the university aired the speech on all TV screens throughout the building. Moloney Hall holds 300 people and there were an estimated 100 additional people watching the talk.
Kerman started by discussing her childhood as the daughter of two teachers. She grew up in the Boston area and went through public schools there before going to Smith College, where she graduated in 1992.
"I was lucky to go to that great college and be part of a remarkable community of women, the first women's institution in which I was held," Kerman said, drawing laughter.
"Despite all the good fortune I enjoyed up to that point, I walked into an uncertain future. I didn't have a clue what my next step would be. I drifted a bit. I waited tables. I was that kid who hung around a bit after graduation.
"At that moment in time, I crossed paths with what seemed to be a worldly and sophisticated older woman. She turned out to be more sophisticated than I thought. She was involved in narcotics. Rather than run in the other direction, which good sense would dictate, I followed her around the globe to Bali, Zurich and other places that seemed unimaginably exotic and exciting. I thought I was having a great adventure, but I didn't think about the impact of the decisions I was making for me or anyone else.
"Of course, that day came when my lover said to me, 'I need you to do something. I need you to carry this money from Chicago to Brussels.' After I did it, I was even more scared. I had crossed the line. I did something illegal."
But within a month, Kerman had ended the relationship, moved to California, and "got my life back together. Years passed. My life progressed. I got a good job. That crazy experience moved into the rear-view mirror."
Yet, Kerman found out she could not escape her past.
"The consequences of our actions always come back to us in one form or another. In my case, that was a knock on the door. If you break the law, understand what you're up against if you're caught."
She entered a plea in 1998, but many years passed thanks to delays in the legal system before she turned herself in on a cold February morning in 2004 when she began what was to be a 15-month sentence that ended two months early. Her identity changed from Piper Kerman to 11187-424, her prison identification number.
But her experience was not all bad. She bonded with fellow inmates like Starr, who made birthday cards for everyone, and Carmen, who had been arrested more than 100 times in her life for things like drug possession and prostitution and had been in and out of jail.
"Those other women schooled me, helped me, shared their own survival and helped me survive and navigate my prison sentence. I am eternally grateful to them."
When she got out of prison in 2005, people began asking her to tell them about her experience.
"We send millions of people to prison, where they are out of sight and out of mind. They disappear from the community and disappear from their families, yet prisons are so hidden from public view that people are really curious."
She said the book title refers to both the orange jumpsuit associated with prisoners and its juxtaposition with fashion magazines where they refer to a certain color as "the new black." "The idea a prison jump suit could be fashionable is ridiculous, but this is a book about women. It's about prison, but it's about women."
It also refers to the fact that there has been an 800 percent increase in the incarceration of women in the last eight years. "Orange is the New Black means that a person wearing a jumpsuit is more likely to be a woman."
Of the 2.4 million prisoners in the United States today (up from 500,000 in 1983), 200,000 of them are women, two-thirds of whom are in for nonviolent crimes, Kerman said.
"You may have ambivalent feelings about these women, but when you lock up a woman, there is impact on many people other than us," she said, referring to the 1.3 million young children who have a mother living under criminal-justice supervision. "When you lock up a mom, it is five times as likely the kids go into foster care than when we lock up a dad."
She told the story of how the memoir was published in 2010, which led to a meeting with one of its readers, Jenji Kohan, who created the Showtime series Weeds and was a writer for Gilmore Girls. They had lunch, which led to Kohan offering to turn Kerman's memoir into a TV series.
She advocates for what she calls "common-sense sentencing" for things like drug possession and other non-violent crimes, public-defense reform for those who cannot afford an attorney, and raising the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 17, 18 or even 21.
Kerman's talk is the second installment of the university's author series, following a talk by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren two weeks ago.