By Jane Carroll Andrade

It was hard to tell who was more enthusiastic about seeing whom at the “Corrections Reflections: A Conversation with Piper Kerman” session Wednesday.

Clearly, the standing-room-only crowd was eager to hear from the author of “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison.” Kerman, in turn, embraced the opportunity to talk to—and hear from—legislators who make the laws that run state criminal justice systems.

“I was delighted to be invited here and accepted instantly,” she said, “because for someone like me, someone whose life’s work is to dramatically reduce the American prison population, this is where the action is, here with you.”

Kerman grew up in a stable family and after graduating from Smith College, entered into a relationship with a drug dealer, for whom she transported a suitcase full of money. She was indicted years later and served 15 months in a federal women’s prison. Her best-selling memoir about her experience inspired the popular Netflix series.  

Kerman said the “great American experiment” of locking people up—especially nonviolent offenders—just isn’t working out, socially or financially. She pointed out that the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any society in human history and that there are 2.3 million Americans in jail or prison today, compared to 500,000 in 1980.

“You’ve watched state correctional budgets balloon, because state prisons are where we find the vast majority of people in prison,” she said.

She said society should look more closely at who it incarcerates and why. She told the story of a young woman she met in prison. Pom Pom (everyone has nicknames in prison and hers was due to an unfortunate hairdo) was asked by her boss in the prison garage, where she worked, if she’d had any relatives who’d served time there. “It turns out my mother worked for him,” she told Kerman. Kerman was stunned, and even more so when Pom Pom began questioning her boss about her mother, trying to learn more about a women she barely knew.

Kerman said she wrote her book because she wanted others to care as much about people like Pom Pom as she did. She said that no amount of incarceration or strip searching could take away her strong family-and-friends support system or her education. Most of her fellow inmates had no such advantages.

“When I think about Pom-Pom, or most of the women I did time with, I think about the incredibly heavy cost of the current status quo. Incarceration is very expensive intervention to crimes that are often driven by substance abuse, by mental illness, and sometimes by cycles of violence between family members. Locking someone up costs state taxpayers as much as $60,000 a year.”

Further, she said, the data show that the system has a disproportionate impact on poor people and communities of color, and that 80 percent of people accused of a crime can’t afford a lawyer.

“I often say that the most unusual thing about my story is not that I committed a crime. It’s that I was policed, prosecuted and punished with prison.”

Kerman praised states and lawmakers from all sides of the political spectrum for enacting reforms. She pointed to Washington’s full gender responsive policy and said states as diverse as California, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Texas have enacted sentencing reforms, mainly for drug offenders. Some of these states are saving money by keeping drug offenders out of prison with diversion programs like special drug courts, and some are experiencing reduced recidivism with more effective reentry and parole programs, for example.

She cautioned lawmakers to consider the system as a whole. “There is no such thing as ‘prison reform,’ because prisons are just one segment of the criminal justice system,” she said. “Policing, dysfunctional criminal courts, prisons and jails, parole and probations policies all feed mass incarceration. It’s essential, as legislators make reforms happen, that police, prosecutors, judges and wardens all understand that their jobs are changing.”

Jane Carroll Andrade is communications program director at NCSL. Email Jane