When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman shed been when, shortly after graduating Smith College, shed committed the misdeeds that would eventually catch up with her. Kerman spent thirteen months in prison, eleven of them at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, where she met a surprising and varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances. She tells the story of those long months locked up in a place with its own codes of behavior and arbitrary hierarchies, where a practical joke is as common as an unprovoked fight, and where the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailer is constantly and unpredictably recalibrated.
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