A compelling, often hilarious, and unfailingly compassionate portrait of life inside a women's prison<br><b> </b><br>When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman she'd been when, shortly after graduating Smith College, she'd committed the misdeeds that would eventually catch up with her.Happily ensconced in a New York City apartment, with a promising career and an attentive boyfriend, she was suddenly forced to reckon with the consequences of her very brief, very careless dalliance in the world of drug trafficking.  <br><br>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. In <b>Orange Is the New Black</b>, Kerman 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. <br><br>Revealing, moving, and enraging, <b>Orange Is the New Black</b> offers a unique perspective on the criminal justice system, the reasons we send so many people to prison, and what happens to them when they're there.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>