Piper Kerman, who has a career, a lover, and a loving family, bears little resemblance to the rash young woman who brought a suitcase full of drug money ten years ago. Her history, however, has caught up with her. The well-heeled Smith College alumnus was convicted and sentenced to fifteen months in the infamous federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut. She is now inmate one of the millions who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American judicial system. Kerman learns to negotiate this odd environment with its rigidly enforced standards of behaviour and arbitrary restrictions from her first strip search to her final release.
