Why Policymakers Need to Watch 'Orange is the New Black'
By Devang Shah
Policymakers constantly battle with binaries like “good versus bad,” “short-term versus long-term,” “law enforcement versus justice,” “civilians versus criminals,” and “white versus black” while drafting policies that impact large, diverse populations. When the net is cast too wide, it leads to one-size-fits-all policies that inevitably fail to capture the nuances of its impact, the gray areas. Our narratives apply the same archetype to prisoners, which lead to counter-productive policies. Orange is the New Black, a web television series uses impactful storytelling to breathe life into the gray areas of prison life and illuminate why they matter.
The show’s exploration of the “gray areas” stems from extensive research of real-world problems and policies, which awards it with the gravitas needed for the viewers to have an entertaining yet impactful experience. As the show navigated through many such gray areas over a span of seven seasons, it is essential to learn about a few of them and the policies they hinted at.
First, the show explores problems caused by the lack of prison nurseries. Dayanara Diaz aka Daya (Dascha Polanco) is impregnated by a correctional officer who later abandons her and their child. Due to the lack of a responsible caretaker from Daya’s end, the child ends up in foster care. Daya never gets the chance to be a mother and is traumatized by the experience. She transitions from being an innocent girl who loved to doodle, to a stoic prison drug mafia boss who involves her teenage sister in the drug business. Critics of prison nurseries argue that it is unfair and unconstitutional to keep babies in prison. This is why the United States has just eight prison nurseries despite the 700 percent increase in the number of female prisoners since 1980. The number of women who gave birth during their terms is unknown. However, proponents of the program say it may reduce recidivism. Research about women who participated in a prison nursery program found a 28 percent reduction in recidivism and a 39 percent reduction in women returning to prison custody.
Second, it critiques privatized immigration detention centers. Even though the Justice Department declared its intent to end privatized prisons in 2016, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to contract private firms to operate detention facilities. This differential treatment of undocumented detainees is beautifully summarized in a dialogue by Maritza Ramos (Diane Guerrero). When she is accused by another detainee at the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) of tainting the Latina image by committing felonies, she responds, “I was born here. So I committed my crimes legally.” The satire exposes the biased nature of the American legal machinery. According to a surprise government inspection at the Adelanto ICE Processing Facility in California, detainees were subjected to significant health and safety risks, improper and overly restrictive segregation and inadequate detainee medical care. In 2017, the NGO Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) filed a detailed complaint regarding sexual abuse, assault and harassment in U.S. immigration detention facilities. It is vital to be reminded that immigration detention centers were meant to be holding facilities for civil matters, not prisons for melting out punishment. This begs the policymakers to rethink if the policy misfired or derailed from its original goal.
Third, it draws attention to problems related to reintegration. As the show came to its conclusion in season seven, the show’s lead, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schiling), is shown struggling after being released from prison. Despite belonging to a well-to-do family in New York, her status as an ex-felon makes it difficult for her to find a job. Furthermore, she has to pay her own probation and registration fees for her early release, which makes it difficult to get back on her feet. Despite the availability of many programs on the reintegration of former prisoners research conducted at Vanderbilt University argues that for the formerly incarcerated, unemployment ranges from 18.4 percent among white men to 43.6 percent among black women. Usually, criminal justice reforms take recidivism rates as a measure of the system’s success or failure. However, when it comes to reintegrating individuals with criminal records, society’s expectations and actions diverge. Society expects individuals convicted of crimes to find stable employment to support themselves to avoid committing further crimes, while in reality, people seldom hire ex-felons.
In the award-winning documentary Untouchable, Eric Janus, Dean of William Mitchel Law School says, “We tend to think that the people to whom these laws apply are monsters. They aren’t ‘us,’ they are the ‘other.’ But they are among ‘us.’ They are ‘us.’” This is echoed in the first season of the show when a correctional officer meets Chapman and says, “I want you to know, as far as I am concerned, you and I are the same. It’s just that when I made bad decisions in life, I did not get caught.”
All the time and money we spend on devising punishment mechanisms is time and money not spent on drafting more impact-oriented reintegration mechanisms. Shows like Orange is the New Black need to be lauded for not only picking up a complicated subject but also executing it artistically. It takes ingenious storytelling to begin a conversation from the other side. It forces the audience to come out of the binary trap to not just understand, but live the gray areas.
Devang Shah has worked as a documentary filmmaker in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. He has also worked as a broadcast journalist at Metro TV, Ghana and as a Parliamentary Monitor in South Africa. He spent the summer of 2019 working with Emmy Award-winning filmmakers at Transform Films in New York City. His work spans over a wide range of topics from tracing psychological impact on young minds in a conflict zone to investigating fake drugs market in Kashmir valley and being LGBTQ+ in Ghanaian society. He is on a constant lookout for new technologies of storytelling. Currently, he is exploring geospatial technology to bridge the gap between fictional and non-fictional storytelling of real-world issues.
“Prison Bound” is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Courtesy of Thomas Hawk
