When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman she'd been when she committed the misdeeds that would eventually catch up with her. Kerman spent thirteen months in prison where she met a varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances. Kerman tells the story of those long months locked up in a place with its own codes of behavior and arbitrary hierarchies where the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailer is constantly and unpredictably recalibrated.