Orange Is the New Black opens Goodreads in a new tab

My thoughts

2/5 stars While this book did teach me a lot about American prison life, the author's story is coming from an extreme position of privilege. As a white university-educated upper-class woman, Piper is completely unrepresentative of the general prison population. For example, while other women worry about where they are going to live when they get released, Piper's fiancé is buying an apartment in Brooklyn. She somehow manages to make prison life sound pretty good- a place to make good friends with a bunch of women making the best out of a bad situation. Which jbtw is so only because of her privilege and "good looks" as we are reminded of so many times throughout the book? But do we actually delve deeper into the problems the general prison population faces? Do we take more than 2 lines to talk about it? No. We just talk about how everything is rainbows and sunshines for Piper because of her fancy lawyer and bundles of money. Maybe it was my fault to go into this book thinking it was gonna be anything close to the title "My year in a women's prison" but this was nothing short of a disappointment. We have a racially biased justice system that over punishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer. Book Trigger Warnings- Drug sales, Lesbophobia (brief), Prison