There has been an increase of 650 per cent of incarcerated women in the US over the past 35 years. She realised that being “truly connected” is the best way to fight intolerance. As time went on, she sought common ground with those around her, most of whom were from very different backgrounds. Her lawyer had warned her not to get close to anyone, but friendships kept her going, she said.

Kindness was one thing she hadn’t been prepared to find behind bars.

This was the “welcome wagon”, created by inmates because the system doesn’t give prisoners basic essentials when they arrive. To her surprise, they offered her toothpaste, soap, shampoo, instant coffee and shower shoes because of the fungus in the bathrooms.

For one thing, she was dressed in canvas slippers, while the women approaching her wore big, black, steel-toed boots. The middle-class blonde, whose on-screen alter-ego Piper Chapman is played by Taylor Schilling in the popular series, noticed immediately how much she stuck out. “You go through those three gates alone,” she said. The 46-year-old is now campaigning for justice for those prisoners, many of whom became her friends. “They’re treated differently just because that’s the system, because of their lower socioeconomic status or the colour of their skin.” “It’s hard to believe their crimes were worse,” she said of fellow inmates with far longer sentences than her own. With indigenous people making up just three per cent of the general population, but half of the prison population, Ms Kerman compared their situation to that of black Americans. She’s campaigning to improve the prison system in the US, and yesterday told a packed Sydney Opera House that Australia faces many of the same issues. It’s now a familiar story, after Kerman turned her experiences into a bestselling memoir Orange Is The New Black - My Year in Women’s Prison, which became the hit Netflix show.īut the writer isn’t done yet. She was indicted for money laundering and eventually served 13 months in jail at the age of 34, more than a decade after her crime. The college graduate had been having a wild time with her older female lover in “unimaginably exciting” locations from Bali to Zurich, but she knew she’d gone too far.įive years later, with her life back in the realm of respectability, her past caught up with her. WHEN Piper Kerman carried a bag of drug money from Chicago to Brussels, she knew she’d crossed a line.

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