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BOOK
REVIEW
WOMEN IN PRISON
Two books with little in common
By Fred H. Olin, MD
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison by Piper Ker-
nans and The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver have
only one thing in common: they each involve an incarcerated
woman. Otherwise, they couldn’t be more different.
It’s likely that you have heard of Orange is the New Black, as it was
the inspiration for a series that has appeared on Netflix. I’ve never seen years, living through a series of unsuccessful appeals. She was con-
the TV show, but I’ve been told that it isn’t particularly true to the
book. Ms. Kernans is an upper-middle-class Smith College graduate
who, after graduation, fell in with an older lesbian woman, Nora, a
minor drug runner. One time only, Kernans ferried some money back
from the Far East for Nora. She then dropped back into both senses
of the straight world; she moved to San Francisco, started dating the
man who would ultimately become her husband, and went to work.
Many years after she committed the offense, someone (probably
Nora) ratted on her and she was arrested, tried and sentenced to 15
months in the women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Her tale
from prison combines character studies of her fellow inmates, stories
about her interactions with them and discussions of her activities:
among other things, she is assigned to the electrical shop where she
learns how to be an electrician.
She discovers that others who didn’t have access to private counsel
and had to depend on public defenders were serving much longer
sentences for offenses of even lesser severity than her own. She realizes
that she was part of her colleagues’ problems: “[F]or the first time I
really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suf-
fering. I was the accomplice to their addiction.” She continues: “A
lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the out-
side would probably have driven the same truth home and been a
hell of a lot more productive for the community. … Instead, our sys-
tem of ‘corrections’ is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution.
Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than
when they went in.”
The last part of the story is different. She is moved via “ConAir”,
the federal government’s prisoner transfer air service, to Oklahoma
City, which is sort of a prisoner movement hub, and then to the
Chicago federal holding facility to participate in a trial of another of
Nora’s accomplices. These two places make Danbury seem pretty
good to her. While in Chicago, her sentence ends, with time off for
good behavior. She is released onto the street, where her fiancé meets
her and takes her home.
The above is a really superficial review: the book is beautifully
written, full of interesting details and observations, hard to put down
28 San Antonio Medicine • January 2016
and worth your time.
Now, on to a totally different sort of story.
The Execution of Noa P. Singleton is an intensely moving novel.
The first-person narrator of much of the story is Noa, a 35-year-old
woman who has been on death row in a Pennsylvania prison for 10
victed of killing Sharon Dixon and her unborn child. That child’s
father is Noa’s ex-con father, Caleb, a totally worthless sort of guy.
No one disagrees that Noa shot Sharon, not even Noa. However, as
the book progresses, this reader, for one, began to wonder exactly
where the truth lay. There is not one really likable or admirable char-
acter here: not Noa, not Sharon, not Caleb, not Sharon’s mother
Marlene, a high-powered lawyer, or Marlene’s sidekick, Oliver
Stanstead, a young English law graduate.
The story starts six months before “X day,” which is what Noa
calls the proposed date of her execution, and progresses one month
at a time. It is a tale of maternal neglect, maternal dominance, in-
trospection, lack of introspection, memory and amnesia. Oliver’s job
is to draw out Noa’s life story, ostensibly to help Marlene get a
clemency order from the governor, allowing Noa to serve a life sen-
tence without possibility of parole… but it was Marlene who insisted
on the death penalty at the time of Noa’s trial. She says that she’s had
a change of heart, but one wonders.
Interspersed between chapters of Noa’s narration are letters written
by Marlene to her dead daughter, who had been a classmate of Noa’s
at the University of Pennsylvania. As the story progresses, the plot
weaves back and forth in time, and we learn more about Noa, Caleb
and Sharon, and what someone once described as “the real realism
of the real reality” becomes more and more obscure… and clearer
all at the same time. There’s even a bit of an advantage in the story
for those us with medical knowledge: Did the “fatal” shot really kill
Sharon? We may never know.
The author, Elizabeth Silver is a lawyer and has degrees in creative
writing. One of her jobs included working for the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals on death penalty cases. She admits that she always
wanted to be a writer, and she has succeeded admirably with this
first novel. It was chosen as “Best Book” of the year by several or-
ganizations and very definitely deserved the honors.
Fred H. Olin, M.D., is a semi-retired orthopaedic sur-
geon. He has never been either a woman or in prison. Per-
haps that’s why he was so taken by these books.