Famous Quotes & Sayings

Piper Kerman Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 91 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Piper Kerman.

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Famous Quotes By Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1070625

Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient - people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. — Piper Kerman

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From a young age I had learned to get over
to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. — Piper Kerman

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In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more. — Piper Kerman

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I was a well-educated young lady from Boston with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan. But I had no idea what to do with all my pent-up longing for adventure, or how to make my eagerness to take risks productive. — Piper Kerman

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A warm, squirming lapful of golden puppy, licking and biting and unabashedly happy, made despair dissolve no matter how hard you were hanging on to it. — Piper Kerman

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Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime - certainly my own - yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society. — Piper Kerman

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I imagined Martha Stewart trying to take over Pops kitchen. That would be better than Godzilla vs. Mothra — Piper Kerman

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do your time, don't let the time do you. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 2249331

Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey. We huddled together — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1269330

I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, "I don't eat iceberg lettuce!" Really? I asked myself. That's what you're going to throw down with? "I don't care what you eat, just don't be pickin' in there! — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1088171

Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country. — Piper Kerman

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Faggots make the best friends," she said philosophically. "They're very loyal. — Piper Kerman

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But time was a beast, a big, indolent immovable beast that wasn't interested in my efforts at hastening it in any direction. — Piper Kerman

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Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers
it was like Lord of the Flies on estrogen. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 150161

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. — Piper Kerman

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On the other hand, some people were way too comfortable in prison. They seemed to have forgotten the world that exists on the outside. You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It's not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it's hard to remember what it's like to be free, even after a few short months. — Piper Kerman

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Vanessa was deprived of her hormones in prison and thus retained several male characteristics that would have been less evident otherwise, most notably her voice. While she spoke in a high, little-girl voice most of the time, she could switch at will to a booming, masculine Richard-voice. She loved to sneak up behind people and scare the crap out of them this way, and she was very effective at quieting a noisy dining hall, roaring, "Y'all hush up!" Best of all were her Richardian encouragements on the softball field, where she was a sought-after teammate. That bitch could hit. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1467341

Every human being makes mistakes and does things they're not proud of. They can be everyday, or they can be catastrophic. And the unfortunate truth of being human is that we all have moments of indifference to other people's suffering. To me, that's the central thing that allows crime to happen: indifference to other people's suffering. If you're stealing from someone, if you're hurting them physically, if you're selling them a product that you know will hurt them - the thing that allows a person to do that is that they somehow convince themselves that that's not relevant to them. We all do things that we're not proud of, even though they might not have as terrible consequences. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1484596

Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants' attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the "real world" out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners. — Piper Kerman

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It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. — Piper Kerman

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I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges. — Piper Kerman

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I am confident that someday in the future The Rock, who was once a professional wrestler, will run for president of the United States, and I think that he will win. I have seen with my own eyes the power of The Rock. The Rock is a uniter, not a divider. When the BOP showed Walking Tall, the turnout for every screening all weekend long was unprecedented. The Rock has an effect on women that transcends divisions of race, age, cultural background - even social class, the most impenetrable barrier in America. Black, white, Spanish, old, young, all women are hot for The Rock. Even the lesbians agreed that he was mighty easy on the eyes. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1506175

So for all my scoffing at "holy rollers," was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves? — Piper Kerman

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All this freedom, but I still feel like I'm locked up. — Piper Kerman

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But I could see how awful and scary it was for my family to see me in my khaki uniform and get a tiny taste of what I was experiencing, surrounded by guards, strangers, and powerful systems of control. I felt terrible for exposing them to this world. Every week I needed to renew my promises to my mother and Larry that I was going to make it, that I was okay. I felt more guilt and shame witnessing their worry than when I stood in front of the judge - and it had been terrible standing in that courtroom. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1619635

How could I admit that the All-American Girl's force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn't working, wasn't keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away?

From a young age I had learned to get over - to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer. And when common, everyday survival in prison required getting over, I could do that too. This is what was approvingly described by my fellow prisoners as 'street-smarts,' as in 'You wouldn't think it to look at her, but Piper's got street-smarts. — Piper Kerman

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You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy. — Piper Kerman

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Memoirs are often about difficult things in a person's life. In my situation, my story starts with about the stupidest, most immoral thing I've ever done, one with terrible consequences. — Piper Kerman

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D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Women — Piper Kerman

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Very close by the CMS shops, hidden about a quarter mile away in the woods, was the prison's rifle range. Correctional officers could spend quality time with their firearms down there, and the hammering of multiple rounds was typical background noise during our workdays. There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you. — Piper Kerman

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A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. — Piper Kerman

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No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn't deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind. — Piper Kerman

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I still don't believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person. — Piper Kerman

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The government's drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true. — Piper Kerman

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The advice I got from many quarters was 'do your time, don't let the time do you. — Piper Kerman

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I went back to work right away [after prison]. I was very lucky - a friend of mine created a job for me at his company. Most prisoners who come home face really significant challenges when it comes to finding work. It's very, very hard for most people who have a criminal record to get a job. I think the system is very wasteful of taxpayers' dollars. It's also very wasteful of human potential. I found that most people whom I was locked up with were, you know, good people who have skills and value. Prison is a missed opportunity to nurture those things. — Piper Kerman

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one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons. — Piper Kerman

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When I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1837396

"Emeninemletters," Caucasian girls from the wrong side of the tracks with big mouths and big attitudes, who weren't taking shit from anyone(except the men in their lives). They had thinly plucked eyebrows, corn-rowed hair, hip-hop vocabularies, and baby daddies, and they thought Paris Hilton was the ne plus ultra of feminine beauty."
-Piper Kerman, page 137 — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1631822

Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. V — Piper Kerman

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What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? — Piper Kerman

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You're looking for logic in all the wrong places. — Piper Kerman

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If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot. — Piper Kerman

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Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me. — Piper Kerman

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In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price
widely variable
and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1737324

Wanted to be home desperately, and when I said "home," that meant "wherever Larry is" more than Lower Manhattan, — Piper Kerman

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I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others. — Piper Kerman

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A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always. — Piper Kerman

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Now I was a for-real, hardened con. I felt infinitely better. Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black, page 54 — Piper Kerman

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It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 674527

Box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too, — Piper Kerman

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As a child, a teen, a young adult, I developed a firm belief in my solitude, the not-novel concept that we are each alone in the world. Some parts self-reliance, some parts self-protection, this belief offers a binary perspective - powerhouse or victim, complete responsibility or total divorcement, all in or out the door. Carried to its extreme, the idea gives license to the belief that one's own actions do not matter much; we traverse the world in our own bubbles, occasionally breaking through to one another but largely and ultimately alone. — Piper Kerman

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We were never friends. Not for a second. I loved you. — Piper Kerman

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If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family's greatness. I had a lovely visit with my mother that — Piper Kerman

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I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I'd never heard against my brain cavity. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 573955

According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like this: In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 562797

How important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment. — Piper Kerman

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Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent? — Piper Kerman

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Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed - they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. — Piper Kerman

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I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive. Some people on the outside look for what is amiss in every interaction, every relationship, and every meal; they are always trying to hang their mortality on improvement. It was incredibly liberating to instead tackle the trick of making each day fly more quickly. "Time, be my friend," I repeated every day. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 693623

No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 238979

The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn't just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 226926

What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 182526

We'll figure it out." He said, "It will all work out. Because I love you. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 126394

A female prisoner who alleges sexual misconduct on the part of a guard is invariably locked in the SHU in "protective custody," losing her housing assignment, program activities (if there are any), work assignment, and a host of other prison privileges, not to mention the comfort of her routine and friends. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 112434

According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin or coffin nails, you be the judge. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 100233

In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. Stoicism — Piper Kerman

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Maybe if her mother had been put in treatment for her addictions (which were implicit) rather than in the garage in Danbury, Pom-Pom wouldn't be standing in his office today. — Piper Kerman

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It was more the idea that my intimate moments - changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying - were all in fact public, available for observation by these strange men. — Piper Kerman

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When you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1015040

One hobby I did not pick up was crocheting, an obsession among prisoners throughout the system. Some of the handiwork was impressive. The inmate who ran the laundry was a surly rural white woman named Nancy whose dislike for anyone but "northerners" was hardly a secret. Her personality left a lot to be desired, but she was a remarkable crochet artist. One day in C Dorm I happened upon Nancy standing with my neighbor Allie B. and mopey Sally, all howling with laughter. "What?" I asked, innocently. "Show her, Nancy!" giggled Allie. Nancy opened her hand. Perched there in her palm was an astonishingly lifelike crochet penis. Average in size, it was erect, fashioned of pink cotton yarn, with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1202795

I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules I didn't understand - laundry schedules, inmate appointments with various staffers, crochet permits, and the weekend movie schedule. This weekend's film was Bad Boys II. — Piper Kerman

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I guess trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness. — Piper Kerman

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The public expects sentences to be punitive but also rehabilitative; however, what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things. The lesson that our prison system teaches its residents is how to survive as a prisoner, not as a citizen - not a very constructive body of knowledge for us or the communities to which we return. — Piper Kerman

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If he is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so. — Piper Kerman

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I certainly didn't look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs. — Piper Kerman

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Maybe, because all these good people loved me enough to help me, maybe I wasn't quite as bad as I felt. Maybe there was a part of me that was worthy of their love. — Piper Kerman

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Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world? — Piper Kerman

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I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone. — Piper Kerman

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Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1086243

In order for prisons to truly serve the public, the people who run them would do well to aspire to the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, the storied warden of New York's Sing Sing Prison in the early part of the twentieth century, who vowed, 'We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 1235493

Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right for the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 980932

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 — Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman Quotes 924125

He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn't tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn't tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn't recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn't say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside. — Piper Kerman

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The female guard in R&D explained that they had no women's street clothes, so she gave me the smallest pair of men's jeans they had, a green polo shirt, a windbreaker, and a cheap pair of fake-suede lace-up shoes with thin plastic soles. They also provided me with what she called "a gratuity": $28.30. I was ready for the outside world. — Piper Kerman

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We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer. — Piper Kerman

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Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. — Piper Kerman

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Some of the faithful had a distinct aspect of roostering, loudly proclaiming that they were going to pray on any number of topics, how God was walking beside them through their incarceration, how Jesus loved sinners, and so on. Personally, I thought that one could thank the Lord at a lower volume and perhaps with less self-congratulation. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy, abundant evidence of which was running around the Dorms. — Piper Kerman

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About eighty percent of the women in U.S. prisons have children, — Piper Kerman

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I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know. — Piper Kerman

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I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn't terrified
really genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn't want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly. — Piper Kerman