WASHINGTON -- Orange Is The New Black author Piper Kerman, whose book on her stay in a federal women's prison was adapted into a popular Netflix series of the same name, is testifying before the Senate on Tuesday about the use of solitary confinement by the federal Bureau of Prisons.
In an interview with The Huffington Post ahead of her testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Kerman said that BOP's operations deserve a "high level of scrutiny," noting that the agency's operations often aren't looked at as closely as state and local prisons. While the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division often analyzes the operations of state-level prisons, it doesn't take on BOP, which also falls under DOJ's umbrella. The Civil Rights Division declined to send a representative to the Senate hearing on Tuesday.
"It is often hard to hold corrections systems accountable and it is particularly hard to hold the BOP accountable for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that the BOP has much deeper pockets than state correctional systems often do and their budgets are in some respects far less scrutinized than state budgets are," Kerman said. "State lawmakers are really, really on the hook when it comes to expenditures that are made to maintain our enormous prison system, and I think that you see the fruit of that when you see some of the state reforms."
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