I thought that with this past week bringing the return of Orange Is The New Black to our lives, it would be a lovely time to switch around Villain Chat a bit. Rather than focusing on a person or people, OITNB gives us a great opportunity to shine the bad guy light on a place: Litchfield Prison. Litchfield is the prison in which OITNB takes place, and it gives me many, many reasons for my head to burst into flames in anger & frustration. Though this place is fictional, I think it gives a healthy dose of reality when it comes to the prison system of the United States.
There’s going to be a few small spoilers ahead in this article, Fangirls. If you have yet to complete some of the 2nd season, I suggest you read with caution!
Sure, this is a television show. A lot of the things happening, are not real, and are dramatized. But I want to take a moment to remind all you Fangirls that this is a show very closely based to a very real book. Orange Is The New Black was an incredible memoir written by a real life Piper, who’s experiences in a women’s prison inspire the happenings of our beloved Netflix series. The book mainly showcased the sense of community between the women of the prison, but of course, also exposed some hardships. The show, takes that to another level and shows us real problems faced by these prisoners.
Now, I have to set sort of a disclaimer for what I’m saying here. The things I’m talking about are issues in the show. In Litchfield prison, which is fictional. I want to talk about the problems with Litchfield, and what makes it so evil, not the American prison system in general. I don’t know enough to start that argument.
But seriously, Litchfield is fucked up, Fangirls. That’s really being emphasized in this new season. Episode after episode reveals the issues that this prison presents these women with. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars unaccounted for that’s meant to be going towards things like electrical problems and poor living conditions. A problem often discussed is the plumbing in the C dorm showers. Sewage comes up from the drain barely a minute after showing. It’s gross, and the prison doesn’t want to pay to do anything about it. Which is a common theme.
There’s a heart breaking moment in episode 8 of this new season. A much older inmate, Jimmy, who has been shown in many episodes experiencing something quite similar to Alzheimer’s. She’s been hallucinating past events and people, calling in mates or officers by names of old friends, or even her husband, Jack. It’s been awful to watch, though some of it is showcased as somewhat funny, it’s terrible to see someone totally slipping away from reality. Jimmy is imagining that she’s at the edge of a pool with her husband, discussing that she’s afraid to jump in because of the temperature. She goes for it and jumps right in. But in reality, Jimmy was on the prison stage, and just jumped the 5 -10 feet on to the ground. She seems to have broken an arm or something, and that seems to be the last straw for the prison. She is too much of a pain liability for the prison. They know she needs further, more attentive care for her mental troubles, and they’re not going to pay for that. So they give her something called “Compassionate Release”. Meaning, they drop her off at a bus stop and she’s on her own, no longer there problem. The other inmates no she’s too unwell to know how to care for herself in the world, without any family to contact or place to stay. They give her a week to live.
This is something that seems all to normal to Litchfield & the prison system. The inmates knew too much about what Jimmy’s fate would be, making me think that this is not a very uncommon thing. All because things are too difficult or expensive for the prison to want to deal with.
There is problem after problem because Litchfield doesn’t want to properly fix things. Women missing deaths of their parents, being there for their sick spouses, all because it’s too much work for counselors to grant their inmates FURLOW. Which is a program that allows an inmate to have 48 hours outside of prison to do something such as visit a dying relative or witness the birth of a special child in their life. Because the prison sets limitations on health care, Rosa, the older inmate with ovarian cancer must die because they prison will not allow for her to have the surgery necessary for her survival.
The prison might save money if so many of their inmates weren’t their for such small crimes. The amount of people in that prison for such small offenses is unreal. Most of them are there for involvement with drugs. If there was another, cheaper system for people with drug offenses to learn a lesson, rather than spend millions of dollars a year on keeping them in prison, they’d have money to treat the inmates as human beings, not just worthless criminals. But that, Fangirls, is an actual problem in the real world that we won’t get farther into. For now, let’s keep it more on the fictional side.
If Litchfield Prison was a person, I’d smack it right across it’s face. It does shit for the women there, and it paints a terrifying picture of what conditions of real prisons must be like. Orange is The New Black is a show, but you must remind yourself that they are drawing it’s content from reality. Litchfield is truly a villain, because it seems all too real.
If you haven’t read OITNB or watched the show, do so immediately. The show is highly addicting, and the book is just incredible. So get to it, Fangirls! Come along and hate Litchfield with me!
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