Women Doing Time Part 2: Pam's Story

"Orange Is The New Black" is a hit Netflix series about women in prison. Some say it glorifies something that is actually a nightmare.

In this four-part series, WWJ's Jackie Paige talked with three women who served time … and they say there is nothing glamorous about doing time. Catch up on yesterday's story about Ivy HERE.

In part two, Pam was convicted of armed robbery after grabbing a purse off the floor of a woman's car at a local Meijer, and said after serving five years she would never return to a life of crime.

"I had no criminal history prior to that, no juvenile record, anything like that," she says.

Pam says she was a single mother of two small boys, in a controlling relationship, and when she ran out of funds for the week, stealing made sense to her at the time.

She was carrying a two-inch knife at the time of the theft, Pam concedes, though she says she never used it to threaten her victim.

She threw the purse from her car window, and was somehow later caught by police and convicted of the crime.

"When I tell this story in prison, the girls thought it was funny, I didn't think it was funny," she said, adding her victim had two grandchildren in the car and they were all frightened by her action.

Pam says she served five years for the crime.

Her worst prison experience came when she was beaten by another inmate who had a lock in a sock, and suffers injuries from the attack to this day. It was a hard lesson.

"There are so many things that I took for granted, and that will never happen again," she told WWJ's Jackie Paige.