Plan of Action for the ACLU of Ohio Piper and the ACLU of Ohio are in this fight together. She teaches nonfiction writing at the Marion Correctional Institution and the Ohio State Reformatory.She testified in front of congress on the negative impact of solitary confinement.She dialogues on the issues of mental health and mass incarceration – as well as – girls’ and women’s rights on her Twitter.

She serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association in New York City.Piper is an activist, and is using her newly found notoriety and success in all the right ways. Piper’s Impact Piper has taken her real-life experience in prison, engrained it into the American people’s psyche, and now everyone is paying attention. Get a copy of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Woman’s Prison and watch the show “Orange is the New Black.” For more information on prisoner rights, visit our issue page. Visit our event page for further details and to RSVP. The event is free and open to the public. Engage with Piper and hear her discuss her personal experiences, as well as relay stories and insights into the issues surrounding women’s prisons, mass incarceration, and solitary confinement. for the 2015 Ed Likover Memorial Lecture, with our special guest Piper Kerman. Piper is not just the inspiration behind the show, she is the real life hero tackling issues surrounding prison. In fact it is based on the book, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Woman’s Prison, the memoir of Piper Kerman. Their stories raise issues of friendship and family, mental illness, the odd cliques and codes of behavior, the role of religion, the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailor, and the almost complete lack of guidance for life after prison.Ĭompelling, moving, and often hilarious, Orange is the New Black sheds a unique light on life inside a women’s prison, by a Smith College graduate who did the crime and did the time.Prison is not the easiest topic to make entertaining, but The Washington Post called “Orange is the New Black” “ the best TV show about prison ever made.” Of course “Orange is the New Black” is not all entertainment, and not entirely fiction. Happily ensconced in a New York City apartment, with a promising career and an attentive boyfriend, Piper was forced to reckon with the consequences of her very brief, very careless dalliance in the world of drug trafficking.įollowing a plea deal for her 10-year-old crime, Piper spent a year in the infamous women’s correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, which she found to be no “Club Fed.” In Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, Piper takes readers into B-Dorm, a community of colorful, eccentric, vividly drawn women. When federal agents knocked on her door with an indictment in hand, Piper Kerman barely resembled the reckless young woman she was shortly after graduating Smith College. Orange Is The New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison

Piper kerman book