'Orange is the New Black' author to speak at OCU

Since her release from federal prison in 2005, best-selling author Piper Kerman has been working to promote prison reform and criminal justice reform.

She became well known around the country when a Netflix original series adapted from her memoir "Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison” became a cultural phenomenon.

Kerman will visit the Oklahoma City metro area on Tuesday to give a free lecture at Oklahoma City University's Freede Center. She'll sign copies of her book after the presentation, which is part of OCU's Lemon Lecture series.

Kerman's memoir shared her story about the 13 months she spent in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, for money laundering charges.

In a recent telephone interview, she discussed the popular Netflix series based on her book, plus her views on the current trend toward effective criminal justice reform occurring in some states.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q: Obviously, many people know of you from the Netflix series based on your book. Does Netflix's “Orange Is the New Black” bear any resemblance to what you really experienced?

A: Well, the show is obviously not a biopic and it's not a documentary. Realism is not really what the show is doing in terms of our common understanding of that but the show is very truthful. Even in the very first season in the first episode, the show began to make very big departures from the true story that is told in the book. And that's OK. The story lines in the show are not identical to what people will find in the book, by any stretch of the imagination, but the fundamental themes and issues that the show grapples with are the same. So I think the show is being very truthful even though it doesn't follow the book word for word.

Q: What does it say about Oklahoma that the state leads the nation in female incarceration for more than two decades?

A: Oklahoma is very very wedded to punishment and to punitive responses to problems in the community. Oklahoma is not the only state that that's true of but again, when we look at women and girls and we see the fact that they tend to incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and sometimes for very low level ones, we have to ask ourselves what that punishment is really accomplishing.

When we look at women and girls, again we see different pathways into the criminal justice system than we sometimes in men and boys. For example, we know that women in prison or in the criminal justice system suffer from higher rates of mental illness, higher rates of substance use disorder and addiction and exceptionally high rates of being victims of sexual abuse of physical abuse prior to being incarcerated.

So the reasons that women are incarcerated are rooted in these very difficult personal histories. In Oklahoma, we have to take step back and say what does anyone in your community, judges, prosecutors or any member of the public think the punishment system delivers to the public in terms of public safety, in terms of justice, in terms of healing, in terms of rehabilitation? Because I have visited a lot of prisons and jails all over this country. American prisons and jails are very good at punishing but they do not do a good job of rehabilitation.

What we see typically is that rehabilitation works best when it happens in the community, when it doesn't involve banishment or exile from the community.

Q: What is the difference between the public's perception of a woman in prison and an actual woman in prison?

A: I think that the public assumes usually that anyone in prison, whether it's a man or a woman or a child, is there because they committed a very, very serious violent offense. When we look at women or girls in prison, we see immediately that that public idea is a misconception and is not accurate because two thirds of women who are incarcerated are there for a nonviolent offense, generally a drug offense or a property crime. Only about one third of women who are incarcerated are there for a crime that involves violence at all. You certainly see that in Oklahoma which incarcerates women more than any other place in the country. Even women who are serving life sentences, even women who are convicted of the most serious crimes, tend to be coming out of situations that involve domestic violence and other extremely difficult and violent situations that they navigated before they committed their offense.

Q: You've been working toward criminal justice reform for quite a while now. What has it been like watching as it has become politically more palatable to change our approach to the justice system?

A: I think that's encouraging, of course, to see the public dialogue about these questions and he issue shift and change and evolve and become, I think, more accurate and more involved. It's good to see more people out there with a more accurate idea of what the criminal justice system does and does not do.

I came home from prison in 2005, so I've been home for a while and I definitely think particularly in the last 10 years or so, that we have seen some really important shifts. A majority of states now have passed some form of criminal justice reform. Some of those reforms have been very ambitious in places like New York, New Jersey, California, South Carolina, Texas. Some of the states that have passed the most ambitious reforms have reaped the benefits of those reforms.

Some of those states have reduced their state prison populations by more than 20 percent, which is a huge reduction. And of course that is not only fewer of our own people going into prison and jail but also it's a huge savings to taxpayers. So that's encouraging.

Not all states have sort of gotten on the reform train and that's unfortunate. We see states that are moving in the right direction which is reducing the number of people in their prisons and jails. Others are either staying the same or even becoming more punitive, which is a mistake. The data shows clearly that incarceration is not the best intervention in most cases when it comes to drug offenses, when it comes to property crimes. Even when it comes to violent offenses, long prison sentences are often counterproductive.

It's very important for everybody to remember that almost every person that we choose to send to prison or jail is going to come home and they're going to come to the community. We have to think long and hard about what we think the benefit of that prison sentence really is.

Q: In your work, you've met quite a few people who have been incarcerated. People like Anthony Ray Hinton who served time on death row for a crime he didn't commit, and Ramona Brant, who was pardoned by President Obama but then she died two years later. What was that like for you?

A: It is so humbling to me when I meet someone like Ray Hinton or Ramona Brant — people who clearly suffered from a grave injustice at the hands of the justice system.

Ray Hinton is a very obvious example. He was literally sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit while the real perpetrator went free for decades. He is a truly inspiring person.

We have had a great number of exonerations from death row and people serving life sentences in this country. We know that the criminal justice system does not always work in the way that we expect it to work and the way it was intended to work so we always have to have a healthy skepticism about the way the justice system is working. We need to hold the people in charge of operating that system accountable.

I met Ramona Brant at the White House immediately after she had been granted clemency by President Obama. Ramona Brant was incarcerated in the exact same prison where I did my time but I never met her because she was serving a life sentence so she was held in the higher security setting and I was held in a low security setting.

Ramona and I both were sent to prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense but I am blonde and blue eyed and I come from an upper middle class household and I was able to afford to hire an attorney to represent me.

Ramona Brant is African American, she was a victim of domestic violence and she was sentenced to life in prison for a very similar offense to mine. When we look at the situations and examples like mine and Ramona Brant's, I think it becomes really, really clear that not all Americans are being treated equally and fairly by the criminal justice system.

And it's not something that anyone in the country should stand for. I was so thrilled to meet Ramona Brant and it just broke my heart when I learned that she had passed. I'm glad that she got those few years of freedom but I just feel like Ramona offers us this powerful example of why reforming this system is so urgent.

It really is a matter of life and death, of justice served and not served.