What incarcerated writers’ voices illustrate is that the American criminal justice system does not solve the problems - violence, mental illness, addiction - that it claims to address. My students’ stories bravely reveal difficult personal truths and bring to light much wider realities in a way that only lived experience really can. I know this not only from being incarcerated, but also from teaching nonfiction writing classes in state prisons. The reach of the American criminal punishment systems stretches to clutch far more people than many imagine. ” The title is not only a sarcastic joke about orange jumpsuits, but also a reference to the fact that the population of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people in the United States has exploded: We lock up more of our own people than any other nation in history, and beyond the 2.3 million people confined on any given day, more than 73 million American adults have some sort of criminal record. In 2010, I published a book about my experience, “Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. More than a decade later, I was sent to federal prison for 13 months for that crime - a first-time drug offense. When I was 22, in the early 1990s, I committed a crime.
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