Before it was an Emmy-winning Netflix original series, “Orange is the New Black” (OITNB) was a memoir about author Piper Kerman’s yearlong prison sentence. Kerman’s book was adapted by “Weeds” creator Jenji Kohan in 2013 and has been a hit ever since.
Kerman will speak at Elon in a lecture titled “Gettin’ Outta This Place” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 30, in McCrary Theater.
Though “famous ex-con” is not a common descriptor for Elon’s external speakers, Kerman has leveraged an unfortunate experience into an opportunity to influence reform and has inspired a series with a cult following in the process.
“Kerman was selected because of the success of her memoir, ‘Orange is the New Black,’ and the subsequent Netflix series,” according to Patti Gibbons, staff adviser for Liberal Arts Forum, a committee that makes decisions about who will come to speak at Elon. “Her talk on [Sept. 30] will be a combination of her background story, the state of criminal justice in our nation and the impact incarceration has on individuals, families and communities.”
The author’s journey to OITNB began in 1993, when she first engaged in a romantic relationship with a drug dealer, inspiration for OITNB character Alex Vause. Kerman was indicted in 1998 on drug smuggling and money laundering charges, to which she eventually pleaded guilty for a deal that would lead to a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 months. In 2004, she went to prison and served 13 months in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut (FCI Danbury).
While serving time at FCI Danbury, Kerman was thrust into an environment that stifled her freedom and autonomy for what she calls a “10-year-old offense.” Though Kerman was devastated for being indicted after trying for years to forget the entire ordeal, she finished her prison sentence with a greater understanding of the justice system and its shortcomings.
“Orange is the New Black” was her outlet for sharing details about women’s prisons from an unexpected perspective.
“I thought that if I talked about my own experience and told my own story, maybe people would think a little bit differently about who’s in prison and why they’re there and what really happens to them there,” Kerman said in a 2014 interview on “The View.”
In addition to writing about her own experiences, Kerman speaks frequently about the justice system’s inadequacies, notably the lack of opportunity afforded to prisoners and the negative effects of mass incarceration.
“Unfortunately, the way the criminal justice system works, sometimes folks are sent to prison for very long periods of time for nonviolent offenses and that takes them out of their community, it takes them out of productive, mainstream work and there’s very little that’s happening behind bars to ready someone to go back to their community and back to society,” Kerman said in a 2013 interview with Sandler TV.
Beyond the isolation prisoners experience, Kerman emphasizes the fact that while serving their time, incarcerated individuals put their lives on hold as the world continues on without them. She often speaks of women who spend decades of their lives in prison, missing out on technological, social, political and personal changes they are not equipped to handle after a significant, nonproductive time behind bars.
“If it comes to pass that someone is incarcerated, the period while they are incarcerated is this incredible moment of opportunity,” Kerman said in the interview. “Everyone in prison is thinking about how they cannot come back there ever again. But what doesn’t happen typically is any opportunity for them to start translating that into real change that they can then carry home with them.”
Some of the examples Kerman offers about isolated ex-prisoners with bleak outlooks are deeply personal and disheartening. She said some women she knew who were released during her time in FCI Danbury “were heading out to, ironically, an even more uncertain future than their life behind bars, which is really tragic.”
During Wednesday’s talk, Kerman is likely to offer some of these tragic anecdotes to underscore the unfortunate implications of incarceration that affect millions of families, in addition to the advocacy and reform work she is doing to try and change a broken justice system.
“We hope that she will also bring us up to date on her current projects,” Gibbons said, “which include serving on the faculty of two Ohio penal institutions, and her efforts on boards of national prison associations or as a witness at the state and national level to offer testimony to policymakers working to improve conditions inside institutions, to find alternates to hard time and to reconsider mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders.”
After the lecture, audiences can certainly expect to leave with one idea in particular, which Kerman said in the Sadler TV interview. “The reality [of prison] is much more complex and, frankly, much more interesting than conventional wisdom about prisons and prisoners.”