Orange Is the New Black

Larry’s office. “I need to find a pay phone.”
    “Honey, what the hell is going on?” he said. He looked exasperated, worried, and a little annoyed.
    “I really don’t know. I gotta go make this call. I’ll come back and find you.”
    Later, when he heard a condensed (and probably less than coherent) explanation of the situation, Larry was uncharacteristically quiet. He didn’t yell at me for not telling him I was a former criminal before we combined our lives. He didn’t chastise me for being a reckless, thoughtless, selfish idiot. As I emptied my savings account for lawyer’s fees and bond money, he didn’t suggest that perhaps I had ruined my life and his too. He said, “We’ll figure it out.” He said, “It will all work out. Because I love you.”
    T HAT DAY was the beginning of a long, torturous expedition through the labyrinth of the U.S. criminal justice system. Wallace helped me find a lawyer. Confronted with the end of my life as I knew it, I adopted my standard pose when in over my head and scared: I closed myself off, telling myself that I had gotten into this mess and it was no one’s fault but my own. I would have to figure out a solution on my own.
    But I wasn’t in this alone—my family and my unsuspecting boyfriend came along for the miserable ride. Larry, my parents, my brother, my grandparents—they all stood by me the entire way, though they were appalled and ashamed by my heretofore hidden criminal past. My father came to New York, and we spent an excruciating four hours driving up to New England, where my grandparents were spending the summer. I wasn’t feeling hip, cool, adventurous, counterculture, or rebellious. All I felt was that I had willfully hurt and disappointed everyone I loved most and carelessly thrown my life away. What I had done was beyond their comprehension, and I sat in my grandparents’ living room rigid with shame at the emergency family meeting, while they questioned me for hours, trying to make some sort of sense of what was happening. “What on earth did you do with the money?” my grandmother asked me finally, mystified.
    “Well, Grandmother, I wasn’t really in it for money,” I answered lamely.
    “Oh, Piper, for heaven’s sake!” she snapped. Not only was I a shame and a disappointment, I was an idiot too.
    She didn’t say I was an idiot. No one actually said I was a shame or a disappointment either. They didn’t have to. I knew it. Incredibly, my mother, my father, and my grandparents—all my family—said they loved me. They were worried for me. They would help me. When I left, my grandmother hugged me hard, her tiny arms circling my rib cage.
    Although my family and the few friends I told took my situation seriously, they doubted that a “nice blond lady” like me could ever end up in prison, but my lawyer quickly impressed upon me the severity of my situation. My indictment in federal court for criminal conspiracy had been triggered by the collapse of my ex-lover’s drug-smuggling operation. Nora, Jack, and thirteen others (some of whom I knew and some I did not), including African drug lord Alaji, shared my indictment. Nora and Jack were both in custody, and someone was pointing fingers and naming names.
    No matter how badly things had ended between us, I never dreamed that Nora would turn me in to try to save her own skin. But when my lawyer sent me the prosecutor’s discovery materials—the evidence the government had gathered against me—it included a detailed statement from her that described me carrying cash to Europe. I was in a whole new world, one where “conspiracy charges” and “mandatory minimum sentencing” would determine my fate.
    I learned that a conspiracy charge, rather than identifying individual lawless acts, accuses a group of people of plotting to commit a crime. Conspiracy charges are often brought against a person just on the strength of testimony from a “coconspirator” or, even worse, a “confidential informant,” someone who has agreed to rat out others in exchange for immunity. Conspiracy charges are beloved by prosecutors, because they make it much easier to obtain indictments from grand juries and are a great lever for getting people to plead guilty: once one person on a conspiracy indictment rolls over, it’s pretty easy to convince their codefendants that they won’t stand a chance inopen trial. Under a conspiracy charge, I would be sentenced based on the total amount of drugs