66 Quotes by Piper Kerman

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more producitve for the community. But 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 to the people they have harmed.

I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone.

Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world? The vilest thing I had located, within myself and within the system that held me prisoner, was an indifference to the suffering of others.

If he is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.

Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

I certainly didn’t look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs.

Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?

What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?

It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard.