Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison

Kerman doesn’t consider herself religious, and those who profess their faith too loudly often annoy her. She details the “host of religious opportunities at Danbury,” noting the multicultural inclusion of services:

[A] Friday Mass for Catholics, and sometimes a Sunday Mass as well (usually delivered by the ‘hot priest,’ a young padre who played guitar and spoke Italian and was thus adored by all the Italian-Americans); a Spanish Christian service on the weekends; a Buddhist meditation group and also rabbinical visits on Wednesdays; and a wacky weekly nondenominational be-in led by volunteers armed with acoustic guitars and scented candles. The biggie, though, was the ‘Christian’ (aka fundamentalist) service held in the visiting room on Sunday evenings after visiting hours were over (105).

Pop and the rest of the kitchen staff make an elaborate and delicious Easter dinner. Shortly after the celebration, Nina leaves for the drug rehab program. Kerman misses her and eventually grows closer to Pop, Nina’s former best friend and bunkmate. Pop is a formidable woman who “had lived a crazy life on the outside, arriving in this country from Russia at the age of three. She was married out of her parents’ house at eighteen, to a Russian gangster” (108).

Although the prison forces the inmates to wear unflattering prison uniforms, the women find ways to feel more feminine and beautiful. This often comes in the form of doing one’s hair or makeup, and the rituals are often communal. The women come together, often in the broken-down salon, to do each other’s beauty requests: “Approximately a third of the population wore makeup almost every day—out of habit, as an effort to feel normal, or to be more alluring either to a staffer or another inmate” (110).

Kerman points out how lucky she is to have regular visitors Thursday through Sunday. Some of the other women never have a visitor “because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody” (111). When Mr. Butorsky leaves, Mr. Finn replaces him. Kerman is initially worried that her new counselor won’t keep up-to-date with her visitor’s list. However, Mr. Finn says, “I don’t give a shit how many people you have on your visiting list. I’ll put ‘em all on” (112), implying that he’ll do her a special favor because he finds her attractive. 

Many of the women in Danbury are avid crocheters, and Kerman tells an anecdote about a woman named Nancy who crocheted an “astonishingly lifelike crochet penis […] with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip” (116). This entertains all the women who see it.

Kerman befriends a woman named Allie B., a “daffy horndog and an unrepentant junkie […] [who] was counting down the days out loud until she could go home, get laid, and score some junk, in that order” (116). Just as Kerman seems to be making friends, many of the women complete their sentences and leave, and new inmates replace them. Among the new arrivals is Morena, “a Spanish woman who looked like a deranged Mayan princess” (117). She was beautiful and only looked “deranged” because she had crazy, unreadable eyes. Morena gets an obvious crush on Kerman and begins walking with her to work. Kerman makes it clear that she’s not interested, saying she’s not “like that” (120), and Morena eventually leaves her alone. However, Kerman is really missing Larry on a physical level:

For the first time in many years I was living a completely chemical-free existence—right down to going off birth control pills. My body was returning to its actual organic state. And after almost three months of enforced celibacy, I was feeling very warm under the collar. If you had spit on me, I might have sizzled (120).

When Larry comes to visit that weekend, it’s clear that he’s feeling the same way. When she gives him the allotted first kiss, he sneaks another one when they sit down. The brutish guard Kerman has nicknamed “Gay Pornstar” (121) yells at them for the infraction.

One of the best parts of Kerman’s day is running on the track by the gym. However, every time she goes to the commissary to buy a headset radio, they’re out of stock, and this upsets Kerman because she knows her runs would be more enjoyable with something to listen to. She asks her bunk neighbor Lionnel, who works in the warehouse, if she knows when a new shipment is coming in, but Lionnel says that she can’t talk about warehouse business.

New prison guards come and go. Gay Pornstar leaves, and Mr. Maple replaces him: “[Mr. Maple] seemed to be his predecessor’s exact opposite. [He] was young, recently out of the military after service in Afghanistan, and exaggeratedly courteous and friendly” (129). The women immediately like the new guard. Even though Mr. Maple is nice, he’s a rare exception. Kerman is quick to point out that it’s unnerving to have guards in complete control and power while the inmates have none because the guards can easily abuse their power. 

Mother’s Day is a special occasion in Danbury because “[a]bout eighty percent of the women in US prisons have children” (131). Many of the inmates have broken themselves into “mother-daughter pairs” (131), where the older women take the younger women under their wing. The younger “daughters” look to their “moms” for “advice, attention, food, commissary loans, affection, guidance, even discipline” (131). Kerman’s prison family centers around Pop, and Nina, Rosemarie, and Toni are like her siblings.

When Kerman looks around at the mothers, it’s hard to believe that they’ve done something bad enough to land them in prison, separated from their children. One inmate, Doris, is pregnant and goes into labor. While she delivers the baby in the prison hospital, the guards immediately return her to Danbury without her baby. Kerman sees her mom on Mother’s Day, and the visiting room is the fullest it’s ever been, with toddlers through teenagers seeing their mothers, some for the first time in a year.

Kerman fixes a fellow inmate’s broken fan, and the word quickly spreads: “Soon I was besieged by women bearing broken radios and broken fans and seeking repair for things in their cubicles—hooks for their clothing, loose conduits, busted shoe racks, all sorts of things” (136).

Kerman finally gets her headset radio. During her runs, she listens to “90s Mixtape” and “relived every song [she] had heard in the background when [she] was […] a careless and ignorant young girl, launching [her]self into trouble so deep that it put [her] on this prison gravel eleven years later” (143). She finds solace in this weekly radio mix and it helps the time pass more quickly.

At work, DeSimon brings the women out to practice using the lift. While most of the women are too terrified to take the lift all the way up, Kerman volunteers. The women jokingly call her crazy, but she enjoys the view.

Kerman recounts the eclectic skills she acquires in her first five months at the prison:

[H]ow to clean house using maxipads, how to wire a light fixture, how to discern whether a duo were best friends or girlfriends, when to curse someone in Spanish, knowing the difference between ‘feelin’ it’ (good) and ‘feeling’ some kind of way’ (bad), the fastest way to calculate someone’s good time, how to spot a commissary ho a mile away, and how to tell which guards were players and which guards were nothin’ nice. I even mastered a recipe from the prison’s culinary canon: cheesecake (150).

Kerman begins attending Yoga Janet’s yoga classes. This makes Larry laugh because he had always tried to get her to take yoga classes before going into prison. Camila, a beautiful Colombian woman, Ghada, an outspoken Lebanese Muslim woman, and Sister Platte, a nun, also attend the class.

Natalie, Kerman’s bunkmate, receives her GED as well as many congratulations from the other inmates. After this, Mrs. Jones, the woman with the longest-held residence at the Camp, asks Kerman if she’ll help her pass her basic business class; she’s essentially asking Kerman to write her papers for her. Although Kerman initially disagrees with it ethically, she ends up doing it and helping Mrs. Jones pass the class.

During this time, the authorities arrest Martha Stewart. Many women were hoping that she might receive an assignment to their prison, but Danbury has closed its doors to new inmates; the rumor is that this is the prison’s way of keeping Stewart out of Danbury, and thus avoiding public scrutiny into the facility. Right before Danbury stops admitting new prisoners, three new inmates join the prison, “political prisoners, pacifists like Sister Platte” (160), whose only crime was protesting. One of them, Alice, gets sent to the SHU for not agreeing with an officer, and the unfair punishment outrages all the inmates. 

Kerman adapts to her life in Danbury and finds security in her routines:

I hit a groove, and the days and weeks seemed to go faster. I pass milestones—one-quarter of my sentence, one-third of my sentence—and prison seemed more manageable. The outdoors showed me the natural passage of time in a way that was new to a lifelong city girl (168).

Kerman is outside of work, waiting for Mr. DeSimon, but he doesn’t show up. Instead, a truck pulls up beside her; Mr. Thomas, the boss of construction, is driving, and a fellow B-Dormer, Alicia, is sitting beside him. He asks Kerman if she wants to work, and she says yes and gets in the truck. They drive into the woods, and Kerman gazes in awe at the natural beauty:

After several minutes the truck broke into a sort of clearing, and I saw signs of people. In front of us was a picnic area, and some of the women who worked in construction and carpentry were painting wooden picnic tables. But they didn’t interest me at all, because what I saw beyond them filled me with so much excitement. The picnic area lay on the edge of an enormous lake (168).

Kerman loves water, swimming, and sunbathing, and the sight of this this beautiful lake fills her with so much happiness. She paints picnic tables along with the other women, and at the end of the day, she thanks Mr. Thomas for bringing her with him. Back at prison, she daydreams about getting back to the lake.

Back at work with Mr. DeSimon, who “had shaved off his beard and mustache and now looked a lot like a lost penis, wandering around in search of a body” (172), the atmosphere is tense. DeSimon becomes increasingly perverse with Kerman. One day, while she is rubbing lube on a cable, he yells at her: “Oooh, horse cock. You like that horse cock, don’t you, Kermit?” (172). Mortified and angry, she files a complaint against him with DeSimon’s boss. She receives a transfer to construction, and she’ll now be working alongside her friends Allie B. and Pennsatucky. She also gets a new neighbor in B Dorm named Pom-Pom, a “bashful twenty-two-year-old who spend a lot of time sleeping and quickly got a rep for laziness” (175). 

Kerman likes her junkie coworker Allie B., whose erratic behavior remains overlooked:

[Allie B.] seemed lighthearted—that is, when she wasn’t pissed off about something; her pendulum swung a little wildly. She didn’t have the heavy hallmark of incarceration on her, even though this was not her first time down—in fact she was a violator, which made sense because she was a junkie. But she wasn’t locked up for a drug crime, so she wasn’t getting any kind of treatment for her addictions (178).

Kerman worries about what life will be like for addicts such as Allie B. and Pennsatucky once they leave prison; she fears that they will return to the same things that led them to incarceration.

The Camp gets a new inmate from the higher security prison down the hill named Vanessa Robinson, a “male-to-female transsexual […] six feet, four inches of blond, coffee-colored, balloon-breasted almost-all-woman” (181). Although Vanessa is a diva, she’s also mature and intelligent. She becomes Kerman’s new neighbor, and they quickly develop a friendship:

Vanessa was an entertaining and considerate neighbor, cheerful and drag-queen funny, smart and observant and sensitive to what others were thinking and feeling. She was quick to pull out of her scrapbook and share photos and stories of the men whose hearts she had broken (183).

Children’s Day is significant to the women at Danbury because “kids could come to the prison and spend the day with their mothers” (187). The prison allowed numerous activities, “including relays, face painting, piñatas, and a cookout, and the children got to walk around the Camp grounds with their moms, very vaguely like a regular family enjoying a day at the park” (187). Kerman volunteers to do the face painting, and she enjoys watching the joy of the reunited mothers and children. However, when the day is over, she feels the agony of watching their separation and later goes to her bed to cry.

Kerman signs up to get a gynecological exam. While most women choose not to get one, even though they’re pressured to do it, Kerman agrees, thinking, “It’s probably the most important exam most of these women could have all year!” (191). However, the exam is a scarring experience for her. An old, grumpy man makes Kerman strip down and cover herself with a little paper sheet; the room is freezing cold, and so is the doctor:

Let me just say, it was horrible. And it hurt. When it was over, and the old man was gone, departed with a bang of the door, I was left clutching that paper sheet around me, feeling just like this prison system wanted me to—utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone (191).

While the work in construction is much more demanding than electrical, Kerman enjoys it. She’s growing physically stronger and likes her boss. One day, while preparing the new warden’s house, Kerman goes to the bathroom and locks the door. Enjoying the rare moment of privacy, she gets naked and looks at herself in the mirror:

Standing there naked in the warden’s bathroom, I could see that prison had changed me. Most of the accumulated varnish of the five unhappy years spent on pretrial was gone. Except for a decade’s worth of crinkly smile lines around my eyes, I resembled the girl who had jumped off that waterfall more closely than I had in years (192).