Orange is the New Black

Orange is the New Black, the women's prison series, started out with promise: a good story, a well-acted cast of fascinating people. By the last episode in the first season, everyone was a murderer, a psychopath, a lesbian, or all three.

According to Elizabeth Cunningham, Piper Kerman's memoir (same title) is very different, more like both our experiences of people in prison. We volunteered and I taught at several maximum-security New York prisons. I learned to respect and like a good number of inmates. One of the things about Orange… that rang true in the earlier episodes--was the range of attractive characters of every color: from flamboyant to wooden and from highly rational to incoherent.

Why did Netflix squander such a promising series to the point where the main character becomes a violent maniac, and everyone else, including administrators, is corrupt, a murderer, violent, deranged, or a sexual predator?

The last episodes went downhill quickly; they brought to life all the prison stereotypes--of vicious, lying, lusty lesbians. But their actions leading to the horrifying last scene make no sense in terms of the characters as they were initially portrayed. Elizabeth suggested the writers opted for sex and violence; maybe, Netflix pressured them to make it more sensational, i.e. commercial.

What's lost here is any real exploration of a major American problem: the exploding prison population and the growing proportion of incarcerated minorities and immigrants. We imprison more of our people per capita than the worst dictatorships, except for China. Even nations like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia imprison fewer than we do.

Prisoners, like the characters in the earlier scenes of Orange …, are real people with real quirks, stories and heartaches. Some are bad, most aren't. I encountered one man, famous for a terrible murder, who clearly belonged in prison. I was glad to have a prison guard right outside the partially open door. But he was the exception.

I learned from my 13 year experience teaching college courses there, that a lot of the people in prison were "inside" because of one bad choice in lives that offered many, and that most of them were as decent human beings as the people I encountered "outside." Many, perhaps most, would not have been in prison if they had been white, and living outside of ghettos. And most of my students were handicapped by terrible schools--not the faults of teachers, but of being crammed into classrooms and neighborhoods with too many kids with too many problems. While their command of written English was often spotty, most were bright, interested and motivated.

The waste of a promising venue for prison reform in Orange… parallels the human waste our criminal system imposes on American society: all the energy and talents of real people thrown into the garbage. Their loss reflects our increasingly unequal society, in which our "Roman Senators" accumulate increasing wealth and power at everyone else's expense.