Piper Kerman, author: "Women come out of prison in worse shape than when they went in.".

• Author: Andrade, Jane Carroll
• Position: ON RECORD - Interview

Piper Kerman is the author of "Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison."

The best-selling memoir, which inspired the Netflix series, is about her incarceration and how that experience shaped her perspective of the criminal justice system. Kerman now serves on the board of the Women's Prison Association and teaches creative writing to prisoners.

What is your message for state lawmakers?

To seriously reconsider our reliance on incarceration as a way of solving problems in the community--problems like substance abuse and addiction, mental illness and a host of other things that we inappropriately respond to with confinement in prisons and jails. Many of these social problems--which are very serious, and we do have to figure out how to address them--are not addressed by incarceration.

We also need to invest more attention and care to accountability measures in the community that work. Holding individual people accountable for their transgressions against the community is very important. I pled guilty to my offense when I was indicted and owning up to the harm that I caused was a very important part of my own experience. That said, thinking about prison or jail as the only way to hold a person accountable is probably a big mistake. The costs of incarceration, whether economic, social or human, are very great. We have to think about what return we are really getting when we lock somebody up.

Which parts of the system do you advocate reforming?

It's really important to think about reform in terms of the whole criminal justice system. We have to think about policing, courts, corrections and reentry, a systemic approach. We need to think about the beginning, the middle and the end of those processes.

New Jersey and New York, which have reduced their prison populations by at least 23 percent, with even bigger reductions in violent crime, addressed sentencing, reformed parole systems and thought about ways people are diverted from the criminal justice system, like drug courts. Those are some of the ways they successfully reduced their prison population by big numbers with no impact on public safety.

What are your views on mandatory minimum sentences?

There is a great deal of consensus that the experiment with mandatory minimum sentencing has not been very successful. It has sent millions and millions of Americans to prison and jail and has saddled many Americans with a felony record. The truth of the matter is, especially when it comes to...