Philosophical Musings on Orange is the New Black

Like the average female college student that I am, I gulped down the entire first season of Orange is the New Black on Netflix in the span of about three days while lounging in my bed at home over the summer. I loved it. The drama! The intrigue! The crazy incarcerated lesbians! Cute prison guards! Taylor Schilling being a badass! Donna from That 70s Show officially destroying my childhood! WHEN DOES SEASON 2 COME OUT?!


Lots of excitement.


Anyway, I recently read the book and was completely floored by the differences between Piper Kerman's real life experience with incarceration, and the Netflix original series. While the show is entertaining, intriguing, and pretty great, the book is something else entirely.


Piper Kerman focuses on things like, "We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer." 


Wait. Pipes. I thought prison was kinda glamorous, right? And dramatic? And entertaining? 


The fact of the matter is this: Orange is the New Black is actually pretty deep.


Kerman's views on life in the prison system actually reflect a deeper truth about handling difficult situations with grace. Her experiences with her fellow inmates reveal exactly how little we think about who we deem "dangerous" or "punishable". Kerman isn't trying to claim that every woman in the Danbury Correctional Facility, including herself, is blameless or innocent, but she makes a fair point: we waste time, resources, and a whole lot of money trying to "reform" through punishment.“In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.”  


Frequently, Kerman points out that most of the women incarcerated in the facility are there because of drug related crimes. Usually not because they are addicts, but simply because they didn't know how to get a job in society. They were not educated. They were not given opportunities. They did not have access to learning a trade or obtaining a skill set. "Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled.”


The education system in prison, as detailed by Kerman, is severely lacking. One example is the re-entry education which is meant to prepare women to re-enter society and get a job. “Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.” 


What usually occurs after being released from prison, is that women end up in homeless shelters, jobless, and hardened. The set of circumstances that landed them in jail still exist: they still do not have access to housing or a steady job. In fact, they are even more hindered in their search for work because of their label: "convict". 


The following quote from Ms. Kerman sums it all up: “Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right for the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night.” 


Not all of Piper Kerman's book is gloom and doom about the system, though. She details some of the incredible women she met, how was able to find inner peace and tranquility through yoga (woohoo!) and exercise, the love and support that she experienced from her family, and the insight that she gained into the lives of women she never would've met. 


Overall, both the Netflix series and the book, Orange is the New Black, provide a view into a world that I never would've seen, an opportunity to understand how the poor and disadvantaged are treated, and the reassurance that it is possible to be Glam Zen, even in an orange jumpsuit.