Prison made Piper Kerman a voice for reform
Piper Kerman spent a year in a U.S. federal prison for her role in an international drug smuggling ring. Upon her release, Kerman wrote the bestselling book Orange is the New Black. The book has since been adapted into a television series on Netflix, which premieres its third season on June 12. As a board member of the Women’s Prison Association, Kerman has also become an advocate for reform.
Kerman will be speaking at the Unique Lives lecture series on April 20 at Roy Thomson Hall.
The experience of going to prison has turned you into an advocate for reform, hasn’t it?
There’s no doubt that for me the experience of incarceration was an indelible experience and it’s impossible for me to imagine just walking away from that, even though I had a lot of good fortune and privilege that would have made it easier . . . than for most people who are incarcerated.
When you find yourself in the situation of struggling day to day to survive and navigate this experience and you know all these other women who are helping you survive, who are sharing their own survival with you, the recognition that you’ve been treated very differently than they have, that inequality becomes really intolerable.
That idea that we are all connected and that inequality hurts us all is hopefully something everyone takes away from the book.
Did anything positive come from the experience?
That deeply personal recognition of the fact that we all have a calling to make sure that things are fair and that everyone’s treated equally, I think that’s very positive.
I think we all have a purpose in life that we settle upon and those who have a really clear-cut sense of that are very fortunate. I feel very, very fortunate to be able to talk about these issues and to be able to share my own story and to talk about the wider range of issues that are out there.
I gained some amazing friendships, which was not something that I anticipated. When you get sent off to prison, you don’t necessarily think, ‘oh, I’m going to forge these really powerful relationships.’ Those friendships are really important to me.
You were prohibited from contacting your fellow inmates after prison. But did you ever get a chance to catch up with any of them?
When you’re on probation, you’re
not allowed to directly communicate with somebody who has criminal connections but you can talk to their families. So even if I couldn’t talk to someone directly, such as Nina, I was able to talk to her mom to find out how she was.
So there are a variety of ways people manage to stay connected and yes, I’ve stayed connected with a number of people who are depicted in the book. While I was writing the book, I asked some of my friends from prison, ‘should I do this?’ and I have a friend from prison who read the manuscript as I was working on it. And then after the book was published, more people have been in touch and after the show came out, it reached an even broader audience and so there have been other people who have been in touch. And that’s fantastic. Those women are really important.
Were you surprised to learn how much minorities are overrepresented in U.S. prisons?
In the U.S., we have the federal system and obviously we have every single prison system as well. But in all of those systems, we see shocking disparities in terms of the comparison between the incarceration of AfricanAmerican or Latino people and their presence in the general population. African-Americans, for example, are like 12 per cent of the population in the United States but they tend to be 50 per cent of the prison population and there’s no justification for that.
That doesn’t actually have its grounding in who commits crime. I always say that the strangest thing about my own story is not the fact that I committed a crime, because we all know that white people commit crimes and middle-class people commit crimes. But what’s unusual about my story is that I was . . . punished with prison because too often in the United States, we reserve those things for people of colour and poor people.
Were you surprised to learn the U.S. prison population has gone from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today?
I was very shocked by that. When I was indicted, which was in 1998, I knew almost nothing about the war on drugs and America’s incredible investment in and overreliance on incarceration. The very first step for me was trying to make sense of what was happening to me, trying to figure out mandatory minimum sentencing and guidelines and all these things that were completely foreign to me and very, very shocking.
In Canada, our federal government is determined to advance a law-andorder agenda, including tougher laws on mandatory minimum sentences. What would you say to Canadians?
I think that all Canadians should have their eyes wide open about the mistakes the United States has made when it comes to harsh sentencing particularly. We know that an increased prison population and harsher sentences do not make us safer. The five states that have reduced their prison populations in recent years by the greatest numbers, like New York and New Jersey, they’ve reduced their prison populations and enjoyed the biggest declines in violent crime.
It’s quite clear . . . that the increase in the prison population has had very little to do with the decline in crime. Crime rates in the United States are actually at record lows — I don’t know if that’s true in Canada — but we know for a fact that having a big prison population does not make us safer. Sometimes, in fact, the opposite is true.
I would also say that a lengthy prison sentence becomes counterproductive in terms of public safety because someone who’s locked away from society for seven years, 10 years, 15 years is going to have an exceptionally difficult time returning to the community.
A lengthy prison sentence serves to cut people off from their families and the people who care about them on the outside and that is the way that people actually return home successfully and live the lives of upstanding citizens. When they are isolated — and a lengthy prison sentence is very, very isolating — it makes it that much more difficult to reintegrate those people back into the community. In the United States at least, almost everyone we put in prison is coming home someday. So we all need to have a broader concern about whether what the criminal justice system is doing is actually contributing to public safety. And I think we’ve seen in the United States it does not do that.