If you’re a fan of Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black, chances are you’ve already gorged yourself on the 13 new episodes Netflix released on June 17. Season 4 is dark and dramatic. It begins with two of the inmates killing a guard, dismembering him, and burying his body parts under a bed of sunflowers. It ends with the tragic, if accidental, suffocation of one of show’s most lovable characters. And there’s a whole lot of drama in between. One inmate gets branded with a swastika; another attempts to get out of solitary confinement by cutting herself with the pages of a Newsweek; another confronts the guard who raped her; and, in the most disturbing scene of the season, an inmate is forced to eat a live baby mouse.
More than seasons past, Season 4 had me shielding my eyes and grimacing—in part because the show is continuing to push boundaries, which can make you feel as if you are more of a voyeur than a viewer, and in part because an uncomfortable question was lingering in the back of my mind: How true to life is Orange Is the New Black?
When I watched the first three seasons of the show last summer, I wasn’t asking that question. I was about to embark on a fellowship project related to incarceration, and I wanted to see how life in a women’s prison was portrayed. I enjoyed the show’s storytelling, the depth of its characters, and its smart dialogue, but I didn’t think too much about whether the situations the inmates at Litchfield faced were real.
Up until that point, I had never met anyone who had been in prison.
But when I watched the character coping with her time in solitary confinement in season 4 of Orange is the New Black, I thought of Tobias, a man I interviewed who went to prison for armed robbery as a teenager after getting caught up in Chicago gang activity. He told me that he went in and out of “the hole” during his three years in prison and that during one 14-day stint in solitary, he was so cold (having only been given a very thin blanket) that he could not even get out of the bed to eat.
“The penal system don’t care,” he told me. “People are there to babysit. There’s very little rehabilitation.”
And when I watched the Litchfield inmates sewing panties for the fictional Whispers company this season, I thought of Epi, who served 10 years for murdering an abusive boyfriend during her senior year of high school and who told me that at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York she worked as a call-center employee for a for-profit company earning only pennies an hour.
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Two days before Season 4 released, in New York City, I went to former criminal defense attorney Sara Bennett’s photography exhibit, “Life after Life in Prison,” which chronicles the lives of four women—Carol, Keila, Evelyn, and Tracy, all of whom served between 17 and 35 years for a violent crime at Bedford Hills—after they were released from prison.
After the exhibit, Bennett moderated a panel with three of the women, who shared their stories about the challenges of reentering society and also about their time inside. During the Q&A portion, a young woman in the audience asked how accurately Orange Is the New Black represents life in prison. Keila—who served 20 years for murdering a man who raped her when she was a young woman—answered: “I would say about 75 percent.”
75 percent. This is one woman’s estimate, of course, and some of the scenarios of Season 4 are pretty outrageous, but others are not at all far-fetched, especially instances of prison rape and abuse by guards. In a national inmate survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2011-2012, four percent of inmates in state and federal prisons reported that they had experienced one or more incidents of sexual violence by a fellow inmate or facility staff in the previous 12 months. More recently, Mother Jones published an extensive investigative piece by Shane Bauer, detailing his four months working as a private prison guard in Louisiana. Some of the things he chronicled in the article sound exactly like transgressions the Management and Correction Corporation (the fictional private company that owns Litchfield) would commit. Bauer said guards in Louisiana would vindictively tear up inmates’ beds during inspections, inmates sat idly around all day without work or recreational time, and one fellow guard advised him: “You just pit ‘em against each other and that’s the easiest way to get your job done.”
Since watching the new season, another question has been on my mind. Should conservatives—who have, up until fairly recently, been considered pretty tough on crime—care if Orange Is the New Black is true to life? “At the end of the day, it’s prison, not the Four Seasons,” as one MCC employee puts in one scene this season. It is this line of thinking that conservatives often tend to take — that prison is meant to be punitive.
But punitive should not be synonymous with abusive, nor is it mutually exclusive from rehabilitative. The theme song to Orange Is the New Black includes the lyrics, “The animals, the animals/ Trapped, trapped, trapped ‘til the cage is full.” If we have a prison system that treats people as animals rather than recognizing their dignity as human beings, we have failed. If we have a private-prison industry that is more concerned with a bottom line than tending to those in its care, we have failed. If corrections officers in the United States are committing suicide at two and a half times the rate of the general population (which they are), we have failed. If prisoners are living in fear of rape and abuse and without hope for a better tomorrow, we have failed.
Each year, 650,000 men and women are released from prison. If we’re serious about second chances and about reintegrating these ex-offenders into society—and as the land of opportunity, we should be—then we must start with improving life on the inside. Orange Is the New Black, although vulgar at times and heavy-handed at others, gives us a glimpse into life behind bars—a glimpse most of us would otherwise never have. It sheds light on issues that conservatives need to be considering, caring about, and acting in response to. The theme song ends: “And you’ve got time.” But we haven’t got time. The time is now.
Madison Peace is a freelance writer living in New York City. She recently completed a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship project considering the effects of incarceration on families.
