In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners…

“I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules…

— Piper Kerman

“Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. But how to reconcile it with one's insatiable need for other people?”

— Piper Kerman

“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

“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…

— Piper Kerman

“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…

— Piper Kerman

“I had long recognized that faith helped people understand their relationship to their community. In the best cases it helped women in Danbury focus…

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

“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

“If you had the misfortune of having the government intimately involved with your life, whether via public housing or Medicaid or food stamps, then…

— Piper Kerman

“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…

— Piper Kerman

“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…

— Piper Kerman

“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…

— Piper Kerman

“The public expects sentences to be punitive but also rehabilitative; however, what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different…

— Piper Kerman

“Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen,…

— Piper Kerman

“According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like…

— Piper Kerman