Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  By now conflicting things were churning around in my brain and my guts. Had I ever been so completely out of my element as I was here in Danbury? In a situation where I simply didn’t know what to say or what the real consequences of a wrong move might be? The next year was looming ahead of me like Mount Doom, even as I was quickly learning that compared with most of these women’s sentences, fifteen months were a blip and I had nothing to complain about.

  So though I knew I shouldn’t complain, I was bereft. No Larry, no friends, no family to talk to, to keep me company, to make me laugh, to lean on. Every time a random woman with a few missing teeth gave me a bar of deodorant soap I swung wildly from elation to despair at the loss of my life as I knew it. Had I ever been so completely at the mercy of the kindness of strangers? And yet they were kind.

  The young woman who furnished my new shower shoes had introduced herself as Rosemarie. She was milky pale, with short curly brown hair and thick glasses over mischievous brown eyes. Her accent was instantly familiar to me—educated, but with a strong whiff of working-class Massachusetts. She knew Annette, who said she was Italian, and had made a point of greeting me several times already, and now she came by Room 6 to bring me reading material. “I was a self-surrender and I was terrified. You’re going to be okay,” she assured me.

  “Are you from Massachusetts?” I asked shyly.

  “My Bahston accent must be wicked bad. I’m from Nawh-wood.” She laughed.

  That accent made me feel a lot better. We started talking about the Red Sox and her stint as a volunteer on Kerry’s last senatorial campaign.

  “How long are you here for?” I asked innocently.

  Rosemarie got a funny look on her face. “Fifty-four months. For Internet auction fraud. But I’m going to Boot Camp, so when you take that into account…” and she launched into a calculation of good time and reduction of sentence and halfway house time. I was shocked again, both by her casual revelation of her crime and by her sentence. Fifty-four months in federal prison for eBay fraud?

  Rosemarie’s presence was comfortingly familiar—that accent, the love for Manny Ramirez, her Wall Street Journal subscription, all reminded me of places other than here.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “And don’t feel bad if you need a shoulder to cry on. I cried nonstop for the first week I was here.”

  I made it through the first night in my prison bed without crying. Truth was, I didn’t really feel like it anymore, I was too shocked and tired. Earlier I had sidled my way into one of the TV rooms with my back to the wall, but news of the Martha Stewart trial was on, and no one was paying any attention to me. Eyeing the bookshelf crammed with James Patterson, V. C. Andrews, and romance novels, I finally found an old paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice and retired to my bunk—on top of the covers, of course. I fell gratefully into the much more familiar world of Hanoverian England.

  My new roommates left me alone. At ten P.M. the lights were turned off abruptly, and I slipped Jane Austen onto my locker and stared at the ceiling, listening to Annette’s respirator machine—she had suffered a massive heart attack shortly after arriving in Danbury and had to use it at night to breathe. Miss Luz, almost imperceptible in the other bottom bunk, was recovering from breast cancer treatment and had no hair on her tiny head. I was beginning to suspect that the most dangerous thing you could do in prison was get sick.

  CHAPTER 4

  Orange Is the New Black

  The next morning I and eight other new arrivals reported for a day-long orientation session, held in the smallest of the TV rooms. Among the group was one of my roommates, a zaftig Dominican girl who was an odd combination of sulky and helpful. She had a little tattoo of a dancing Mephistopheles figure on her arm, with the letters JC. I tentatively asked her if they stood for Jesus Christ—maybe protecting her from the festive devil?

  She looked at me as if I were completely insane, then rolled her eyes. “That’s my boyfriend’s initials.”

  Sitting on my left against the wall was a young black woman to whom I took an instant liking, for no reason. Her rough cornrows and aggressively set jaw couldn’t disguise the fact that she was very young and pretty. I made small talk, asking her name, where she was from, how much time she had to do, the tiny set of questions that I thought were acceptable to ask. Her name was Janet, she was from Brooklyn, and she had sixty months. She seemed to think I was weird for talking to her.

  A small white woman on the other side of the room, on the other hand, was chatty. About ten years my senior, with a friendly-witch aspect, straggly red hair, aquiline nose, and weathered creases in her skin, she looked as if she lived in the mountains, or by the sea. She was back in prison on a probation violation. “I did two years in West Virginia. It’s like a big campus, decent food. This place is a dump.” She said this all pretty cheerfully, and I was stunned that anyone returning to prison could be so matter-of-fact and upbeat. Another white woman in the group was also back in for a violation, and she was bitter, which made more sense to me. The rest of the group was a mixed bag of black and Latino women who leaned against the walls, staring at the ceiling or floor. We were all dressed alike, with those stupid canvas slippers.

  We were subjected to an excruciating five-hour presentation from all of Danbury FCI’s major departments—finance, phones, recreation, commissary, safety, education, psychiatry—an array of professional attention that somehow added up to an astonishingly low standard of living for prisoners. The speakers fell into two categories: apologetic or condescending. The apologetic variety included the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Kirk, who was about my age and handsome. He could have been one of my friends’ husbands. Dr. Kirk sheepishly informed us that he was in the Camp for a few hours each Thursday and “couldn’t really supply” any mental health services unless it was “an emergency.” He was the only provider of psychiatric care for the fourteen hundred women in the Danbury complex, and his primary function was to dole out psych meds. If you wanted to be sedated, Dr. Kirk was your guy.

  In the condescending category was Mr. Scott, a cocky young corrections officer who insisted on playing a question-and-answer game with us about the most basic rules of interpersonal behavior and admonished us repeatedly not to be “gay for the stay.” But worst of all was the woman from health services, who was so unpleasant that I was taken aback. She firmly informed us that we had better not dare to waste their time, that they would determine whether we were sick or not and what was medically necessary, and that we should not expect any existing condition to be addressed unless it was life-threatening. I silently gave thanks that I was blessed with good health. We were fucked if we got sick.

  After the health services rep was out of the room, the red-headed violator piped up. “Jesus F. Christ, who peed in her Cheerios?”

  Next a big bluff man from facilities with enormously bushy eyebrows entered the room. “Hello, ladies!” he boomed. “My name is Mr. Richards. I just wanted to tell you all that I’m sorry you’re here. I don’t know what landed you here, but whatever happened, I wish things were different. I know that may not be much comfort to you right now, but I mean it. I know you’ve got families and kids and that you belong home with them. I hope your time here is short.” After hours of being treated as ungrateful and deceitful children, this stranger showed us remarkable sensitivity. We all perked up a bit.

  “Kerman!” Another prisoner with a clipboard stuck her head into the room. “Uniforms!”

  I was lucky to arrive at prison on a Wednesday. Uniform issue was done on Thursdays, so if you self-surrendered on a Monday, you might be pretty smelly after a few days, depending on whether you sweat when you are nervous. I followed the clipboard down the hall to a small room where uniforms were distributed, leftovers from when the place had been a men’s facility. I was given four pairs of elastic-waist khaki pants and five khaki poly-blend button-down shirts, which bore the names of their former wearers on the front pockets; Marialinda Maldonado, Vicki Frazer, Mar
ie Saunders, Karol Ryan, and Angel Chevasco. Also: one set of white thermal underwear; an itchy boiled-wool hat, scarf, and mittens; five white T-shirts; four pairs of tube socks; three white sports bras; ten pairs of granny panties (which I soon discovered would lose their elastic after a couple washings); and a nightgown so enormous it made me giggle—everyone referred to it as a muu-muu.

  Finally, the guard who was silently handing me the clothing asked, “What size shoe?”

  “Nine and a half.”

  He pushed a red and black shoebox toward me, containing my very own pair of heavy black steel-toed shoes. I hadn’t been so happy to put on a pair of shoes since I found a pair of peep-toed Manolo Blahniks at a sample sale for fifty dollars. These beauties were solid and held the promise of strength. I loved them instantly. I handed back those canvas slippers with a huge smile on my face. Now I was a for-real, hardened con. I felt infinitely better.

  I strutted back into orientation in my steel-toes. My fellows were still there, their eyes rolling back into their heads from the endless droning. The nice man from facilities had been replaced by Toricella, the counselor who partnered with Butorsky and had allowed me to call Larry the night before. I came to think of him as “Mumbles.” His walruslike visage rarely changed; I never heard him raise his voice, but it was difficult to read his mood, beyond mild aggravation. He informed us that Warden Kuma Deboo would be gracing us with her presence momentarily.

  Suddenly I was interested: I knew nothing of the warden, the big boss, who was a woman, and one with an unusual name to boot. I had not heard a word about her in the twenty-four hours I had been in prison. Would she resemble Wendy O. Williams or Nurse Ratched?

  Neither. Warden Deboo sailed into the room and took a seat facing us. She was only ten years older than me, tops, and she was fit, olive-skinned, and good-looking, probably of Middle Eastern extraction. She was wearing a dowdy pantsuit and hideous costume jewelry. She spoke to us in an informal, faux-warm fashion that instantly reminded me of someone running for office.

  “Ladies, I am Warden Kuma Deboo, and I am here to welcome you to Danbury, which I know is not an ideal scenario for any of you. While you are here, I am responsible for your well-being. I am responsible for your safety. I am responsible for you successfully completing your sentences. So, ladies, the buck stops here.”

  She went on for a while in this vein, with some mention of personal responsibility (ours) thrown in, and then she got down to the sex part.

  “If anyone at this institution is pressuring you sexually, if anyone is threatening you or hurting you, I want you to come directly to me. I come to the Camp every Thursday at lunch, so you can come up and talk to me about anything that is happening to you. We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual misconduct here at Danbury.”

  She was talking about prison guards, not marauding lesbians. Clearly sex and power were inseparable behind prison walls. More than a few of my friends had voiced their fears that in prison I would be in more danger from the guards than the inmates. I looked around the room at my fellow prisoners. Some looked scared; most looked indifferent.

  Warden Deboo finished her spiel and left us. One of the other prisoners tentatively volunteered, “She seems nice.”

  The bitter violator who had previously been locked up at Danbury snorted, “Miss Slick. Don’t expect to see her again, except for fifteen minutes every other Thursday on the line. She talks a good game, but she might as well not be here. She don’t run this place. That zero-tolerance shit? Just remember this, ladies… it’s gonna be your word against theirs.”

  NEW ARRIVALS in Federal prison are stuck in a sort of purgatory for the first month or so, when they are “A&Os”—admissions and orientation status. When you are an A&O, you can’t do anything—can’t have a job, can’t go to GED classes, can’t go to chow until everyone else goes, can’t say a word when ordered to shovel snow at odd hours of the night. The official line is that your medical tests and clearances must come back from whatever mysterious place they go before your prison life can really start. Nothing involving paperwork happens quickly in prison (except for lockups in solitary), and a prisoner has no way to get speedy resolution with a prison staffer. Of anything.

  There are a dizzying number of official and unofficial rules, schedules, and rituals. Learn them quickly, or suffer the consequences, such as: being thought an idiot, being called an idiot, getting on another prisoner’s bad side, getting on a guard’s bad side, getting on your counselor’s bad side, being forced to clean the bathrooms, eating last in line when everything edible is gone, getting a “shot” (or incident report) put in your record, and getting sent to the Special Housing Unit or SHU (aka Solitary, the Hole, or Seg). Yet the most common response to a query about anything other than an official rule is “Honey, don’t you know you don’t ask questions in prison?” Everything else—the unofficial rules—you learn by observation, inference, or very cautious questioning of people you hope you can trust.

  Being an A&O that February—a leap year, no less—was a strange combination of confusion and monotony. I prowled around the Camp building, trapped not only by the feds but also by the weather. With no job, no money, no possessions, no phone privileges, I was verging on a nonperson. Thank God for books and the gifts of paper and stamps from other prisoners. I couldn’t wait for the weekend, and the prospect of seeing Larry and my mother.

  Friday, there was snow. A worried-looking Annette woke me by wiggling my foot.

  “Piper, they’ve been calling the A&Os for snow duty! Get up!”

  I sat up, confused. It was still dark. Where was I?

  “KERMAN! KERMAN! REPORT TO THE CO’s OFFICE, KERMAN!” The PA boomed.

  Annette was bug-eyed. “You have to go now! Get dressed!”

  I tumbled into my new steel-toed shoes and presented myself at the correctional officers’ office, totally disheveled and with unbrushed teeth. The CO on duty was a dykey blond woman. She looked as if she ate new fish like me for breakfast after her triathlon workouts.

  “KERMAN?”

  I nodded.

  “I called the A&Os a half-hour ago. There’s snow duty. Where were you?”

  “I was asleep.”

  She looked at me like I was a worm squirming on the sidewalk after spring rain. “Oh yeah? Get your coat on and shovel.”

  What about breakfast? I put on my thermal underwear and the ugly stadium coat with the broken zipper and headed out to meet my compadres in the whipping, icy wind, clearing the walks. By now the sun had risen, and there was a gloomy half-light. There were not enough shovels for everyone to use, and the one I used was broken, but no one could go back inside until the work was done. We had more salt-scatterers than shovelers.

  One of the A&Os was a little Dominican lady in her seventies, who barely spoke a word of English. We gave her our scarves, wrapped her up, and put her out of the wind in a doorway—she was too scared to go inside, although it was insane for her to be out there in the cold with us. One of the other women told me over the wind that the old lady had a four-year sentence for a “wire charge,” taking phone messages for her drug-dealing male relative. I wondered what U.S. Attorney was enjoying that particular notch in his or her belt.

  I worried that the weather would prevent Larry from driving up from New York, but I had no way of knowing, so before visiting hours began at three P.M., I tried to pull myself together. Freshly showered and wearing the uniform that I thought was the least unflattering, I stood in the fluorescent light of the decrepit bathroom and looked at the unfamiliar woman in the mirror. I looked undecorated and to my eye unfeminine—no jewelry, no makeup, no embellishments at all. Someone else’s name was on the breast pocket of my khaki shirt. What would Larry think when he saw me now?

  I went to wait outside the big recreation room where visits were held. A red light was mounted on the wall of the visiting room. After a prisoner saw her people walk up the hill and into the Camp building, or if she heard her name called over the PA system,
she would flip a light switch by the side of the room’s double doors, and a red light on the other side of the doors would go on too, alerting the visiting room CO that the prisoner was in place, waiting to see their visitor. When the CO felt like it, they would get up, go to the doors, pat down the inmate, and allow her into the visiting room.

  After an hour or so on the landing next to the visiting room, I began to wander the main hall, bored and nervous. When I heard my name called over the PA system—“Kerman, report to visitation!”—I racewalked up to the landing. A female guard with curly hair and bright blue eye shadow was waiting for me on the landing. I spread my arms and legs, and she skimmed her fingertips along my extremities, under my collar, below my sports bra, and around my waistband.

  “Kerman? First time, right? Okay, he’s in there waiting for you. Watch the contact!” She pulled open the visiting room door.

  For visits the large room was set up with card tables and folding chairs. When I arrived, they were about half filled, and Larry was sitting at one of them, looking anxious and expectant. When he saw me, he jumped to his feet. I walked as quickly as I could to him and threw my arms around him. I was so grateful that he looked happy. I felt like myself again.

  Hugging and kissing your visitors (no tongue!) was permitted at the beginning and end of the visit. Some guards would allow hand-holding; some would not. If a guard was having a bad day, week, or life, we would all feel it in that bleak, linoleum-floored visiting room. There were always two prisoners working in the visiting room too, assisting the CO, and they were stuck making small talk with the guard for hours.

  Larry and I took our seats at the card table, and he just stared at me, smiling. I felt suddenly shy, and wondered if he saw a difference in me. Then we started to talk, trying to cover an impossible amount of ground all at once. I told him what had happened after he left the prison lobby, and he told me what it had been like for him to have to leave. He said that he had talked to my parents, that they were holding up, and that my mother was coming to visit tomorrow. He listed all the people who had called to try to find out how I was and who had sent in requests to be approved as visitors. I explained to him that there was a twenty-five-person limit on my visitor list. Our friend Tim had set up a website, www.thepipebomb.com, and Larry was posting all the relevant information (including an FAQ) there.