Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

“Shoot.”

“You know I’m in the college class, right?”

The class was a basic business course, taught by a pair of professors who came in from a nearby accredited college. It didn’t mean much in terms of getting one closer to a college degree (for that you needed to pay for correspondence courses), but it did count toward “program” credit with an inmate’s case manager. The case managers were tasked with managing the completion of our sentences, which meant recalculating our “good time” (we were supposed to serve only 85 percent of our sentences if we earned good time), collecting fines from our inmate accounts (if you couldn’t pay fines, you wouldn’t get good time), and assigning our “program” activity, including mandatory reentry classes. The “programs” available to Campers were feeble and few. The college class was one of the only options, but after reading over and helping to revise a number of women’s homework assignments, I was skeptical about the class’s usefulness. Camila’s business plan for a Victoria ’s Secret competitor, for example, was entertaining but highly hypothetical and totally unrelated to what she might be doing when she got out of this human warehouse in five years.

“How’s it going, Mrs. Jones?”

She explained that it was not going so well. She had received a bad grade on her business plan. The OG was worried. “I need a tutor. Will ya help me? We have a paper due on a movie we saw. I’ll pay you.”

“Mrs. Jones, you will not pay me anything. Of course I’ll help you. Bring me your stuff, and let’s look at it together.”

When I agreed to help the OG, I had in mind a typical student-tutor relationship; I would talk to her about her assignments, ask thought-provoking questions, and review and correct her work. She came back with her notebook and papers and a book that she put on my bed: Managing in the Next Society by Peter Drucker.

“What’s this?”

“Our textbook. Ya gotta read it.”

“No, Mrs. Jones, you have to read it.”

She looked at me, anguished and pleading. “It gives me a headache.”

I remembered that in addition to being nutty from having been locked up for well over a decade, Mrs. Jones was reputed to have had a few screws knocked loose by her abusive husband.

I frowned. “Let’s take a look at your paper that’s due, the one about the movie.”

This provoked another anguished look. “You need to write it, I can’t do it! They didn’t like my last paper,” she said, pulling out her business plan, embarrassed. She had received a poor grade in big red pen.

I flipped through it. Mrs. Jones’s handwriting was hard to read, but I realized that even if her penmanship had been flawless, the contents of the paper made little sense. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I might be a convicted felon, but as the daughter of teachers, I had a strong aversion to cheating on tests.

“Mrs. Jones, I shouldn’t write your papers for you. And how am I going to write a paper about a movie I didn’t see?”

“I took notes!” She thrust them at me, triumphantly. Oh, great. It appeared that the movie had had something to do with the Industrial Revolution.

Was it better to let Mrs. Jones fail on her own or to help her cheat? I knew I was not going to let her fail. “OG, why don’t I ask you questions about the movie, and I’ll help you do an outline, and then you can try writing the paper?”

Mrs. Jones shook her head, stubbornly. “Piper, look at my business plan. I can’t write it. If ya won’t help me, Joanie in A Dorm said she would do it, but you’re smarter than her.”

Joan Lombardi was hardly a rocket scientist, and I knew she would charge Mrs. Jones for her “tutoring.” Plus my ego was involved.

I sighed. “Let me see your notes.” After extracting a few context-free specifics about the movie from her, I set to work writing an incredibly generic three-page paper about the Industrial Revolution. When I was finished I walked the neatly handwritten paper over to the OG’s cube in A Dorm.

She was ecstatic. “Mrs. Jones, you are going to recopy this paper so it’s in your handwriting, right?”

“Nah, they’ll never notice.”

I wondered what would happen to me if her instructors caught this. I didn’t think I’d be sent to the SHU or get expelled from prison.

“Mrs. Jones, I want you to at least read the paper so you know what it’s about. Do you promise me?”

“I swear, Piper, on my honor.”

Mrs. Jones was beside herself when she got her paper back in class. “An A!! We got an A!” She glowed with pride.

We got an A on the next film summary as well, and she was jubilant. I couldn’t believe that her teachers had no comment or questions about the difference between these papers and her previous one-right down to the different handwriting.

Now she grew serious. “We gotta write the final paper. This is fifty percent of the grade, Piper!”

“What’s the assignment, OG?”

“It needs to be a paper on innovation, and it has to be based on the textbook. And it has to be longer!”

I moaned. I desperately wanted to avoid reading the Peter Drucker book. I had spent my entire educational and professional career avoiding these types of business books, and now they’d caught up to me in prison. I didn’t see any way around reading it if the OG were to pass her class.

“Innovation is a little broad, Mrs. Jones. Any ideas on a more specific topic?”

She looked at me helplessly.

“Okay, how about… fuel-efficient cars?” I suggested.

Mrs. Jones had been locked up since the mid-1980s. I tried to explain to her what a hybrid car was.

“Sounds good!” she said.

Larry was perplexed when I asked him to put in the mail some basic Web articles on hybrids. I tried to explain about the OG’s term paper. He was totally swamped, having just started a new job as an editor at Men’s Journal. Part of his job negotiations had included securing permission to work a half-day every Thursday or Friday, so that he could visit his girl in prison. I tried to imagine what exactly that conversation had been like. The lengths he went to for me were amazing. Soon I got a packet of information at mail call and started to slog through Managing in the Next Society.

AMONG THE last prisoners to show up in May, before the Camp was “closed” to deflect Martha Stewart to another facility, were three new political prisoners, pacifists like Sister Platte. They had been arrested and sent to prison for protesting at the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army training center for Latin American military personnel (read: secret police, torturers, and thugs) located in Georgia. These special newbies were pretty much central-casting leftists, earnest palefaces who were willing and eager to sacrifice for their cause-and to discuss it ad nauseam. One of them looked like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, all watery blue eyes, bad posture, and Adam’s apple, and she seemed irritated by her situation; the other was like a young novice in a convent, with shorn hair and a perpetually surprised expression; then there was Alice, about five feet tall with the thickest Coke-bottle glasses I had seen in a long time. She was as friendly as the dogs in the Puppy Program, and as garrulous as her partners were withdrawn. Sometimes they would all join us for yoga class.

These three made a beeline for Sister Platte and followed her around like ducklings. I thought it was cool that Sister had a posse of pacifists in prison-yes, the government wasted millions of taxpayer dollars prosecuting and locking up nonviolent protesters, but here on the inside the political prisoners now had a community of like-minded folks. Sister certainly enjoyed their company, discussing theories and tactical strategy for bringing the military-industrial complex to its knees for hours on end in the dining hall. Alice and her codefendants managed to get jobs teaching in the GED program, the gig I had previously longed for but that didn’t interest me any longer.