66 Quotes by Piper Kerman

Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.

I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

I imagined Martha Stewart trying to take over Pops kitchen. That would be better than Godzilla vs. Mothra

In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.

Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country.

Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right for the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night.

Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient-people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled.

Don’t tell me what to do – you have eight numbers after your name just like me.

From a young age I had learned to get over – to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve.