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Author of Orange Is the New Black Testifies Before Congress

The author of the bestselling memoir Orange Is the New Black, now a hit TV series, Piper Kerman, gave testimony before a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in Washington on August 4, telling members that the female incarceration system is in need of an overhaul.

Addressing the Senate panel, Kerman, who charted her own year in prison in the book, said, “It is hard to believe that there was a lot of social benefit to the community drawn from my incarceration.”

“If any member of this committee had the opportunity to meet the hundreds of women that I did time with, you would probably walk away from getting to know those women with a deep feeling that their confinement in a prison cell was just a colossal waste, and not an appropriate way in intervening in the things that put them in the criminal justice system,” Kerman said. Credit: YouTube/C-SPAN