48 pages • 1 hour read
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison
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Finding Community in Prison
Much of the memoir is about finding community while in prison. When Kerman first arrives at Danbury, many of the women come together to welcome her; they share comfort items with her, show her the ropes, and embrace her with warm hospitality. This initial hospitality eventually turns into friendship and community as the women share homemade food dishes, stories, clothing, and beauty trends with Kerman. While prison has the potential to make inmates feel isolated, the women in Danbury come together to create a sense of community.
One way that community forms in prison is through the development of mother/daughter bonds. On the outside, many of the women are mothers, daughters, or caretakers, and once in prison, they must translate these roles through a new lens. As Kerman notes in Chapter 9, many of the women break off into “mother-daughter pairs,” with the older women serving as “prison mamas” (131) who adopt the younger women. The mamas, many of whom have children on the outside, get to fulfill the longing they have to care for their children, while the young women look to their prison mamas for “advice, attention, food, commissary loans, affection, guidance, even discipline” (131). For many of these young women, their prison mamas provide care and support, something that many of them do not receive on the outside.
Another way that the women find community is through cultural/racial divisions. When Kerman first comes to prison, the white women are the ones that initially welcome her. This is something that happens continually throughout Kerman’s stay: The women break into racial groups known as “tribes” (49). There are three main tribes: white, black, and Latino. While the women break themselves into these divisions according to their race/culture, the prison perpetuates this division in the dorms: “the Suburbs,” “the Ghetto,” and “Spanish Harlem” (67). Formed around race/culture, these communities provide a way for new women to find immediate friendship and community when they first enter prison. When a disagreement happens between two women, they know that their respective tribe will most likely support them.
Sexuality and Power
Much of the memoir deals with the vulnerabilities of being a woman in prison; specifically, how women are under the constant threat of sexual harassment and mistreatment from the prison staff. Kerman explicitly states this idea:
It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint (129).
When this scenario plays out with a corrupt prison guard and a female prisoner, it can result in sexual abuse. While the prison staff never physically abuses Kerman, she feels violated on many occasions. DeSimon, her boss in electric, says sexually explicit things to her, making her feel humiliated and prompting her to seek a new job assignment.
A predominantly male staff rules the women’s prison, and these guards roam the halls at night, looking in a little too closely at the women in their beds. Kerman recalls feeling unnerved when she “would look up from changing after the gym, in shorts and a sports bra, to see the eyes of a prison guard” (130). However, for Kerman, it’s not just the male guards seeing women in little clothing that’s the most unsettling, it’s the fact that these men are seeing into the most intimate moments of a woman’s life: when she’s “changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying” (130).
However, the dynamic between a male prison guard and a female prisoner isn’t just fraught with the threat of sexual harassment—it can also result in an abuse of power. This happens to Kerman on many occasions. She feels powerless at the hands of the prison staff, for example, when she receives a gynecological exam from an older male doctor. The doctor is rough and insensitive, and when it’s over, Kerman feels “just like the prison system wanted [her] to—utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone” (191). Again, when a guard catches her in A Dorm without authorization, he yells uncontrollably at her, to Kerman’s horror:
If you are a relatively small woman, and a man at least twice your size is bellowing at you in anger, and you’re wearing a prisoner’s uniform, and he has a pair of handcuffs on his belt, I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, you’ll be fucking scared (239).
The Injustice of the Prison System
The injustice of the prison system is a major theme throughout the memoir. While this injustice takes many forms, the prison system’s lack of rehabilitation services for inmates and its unfair treatment of the impoverished are at the forefront. Most of the women in Danbury received convictions for drug offenses, yet very few women get into a drug treatment program. As a result, many released women return to the drugs that put them in prison in the first place and end up back in prison.
In addition, the prison doesn’t provide adequate opportunities for women to prepare themselves for life outside of prison. During the job fair, the women ask specific questions about how to find jobs and homes after release, but the officials simply tell them to use a computer even though the prison doesn’t provide computers. Kerman is quick to point out that this kind of incompetency is a prevalent part of the prison experience. More than a place to rehabilitate or train these women who are “poor, poorly educated, and came from neighborhoods where the mainstream economy was barely present and the narcotics trade provided the most opportunities for employment” (138), the prison merely serves as a holding pen for the women to live out their sentence.
Kerman is unlike many of the women in Danbury in that she’s educated, has money, and comes from a supportive family. Because of these things, her prison experience isn’t as bad as many of the other women’s experiences. Kerman always has new books and letters from friends coming in the mail, she always has visitors, her lawyer fights on her behalf, and she always has money in her commissary to buy whatever she needs. On the opposite end of this ideal are the women who have no family or friends on the outside as well as no money to buy creature comforts. These women also lack the education to read or write. Without opportunities in prison for these women to better their situation, their prison stays are incredibly lonely, and they are ill-prepared to succeed once they leave.
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