Thoughts on "Orange is the New Black" Netflix series

Mr. Sax and I just devoured the first season of the hit Netflix series, “Orange is the New Black,” starring the actress Taylor Schilling playing the character Piper Chapman, an educated, upper middle class white woman in her 30’s who finds herself sentenced to 15 months in prison after being convicted of a decade old crime she committed while in her 20’s, transporting money for her drug dealing lesbian-lover girlfriend. For reasons obvious and not so obvious, everything about the show pushed all my buttons why I had to see it. I was really missing that great 2004 Showtime series, “The L Word,” which was about a bunch of beautiful LA lesbians.

“Orange is the New Black,” is based on a memoir, called “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” by Piper Kerman. The book was adapted and brought to the screen by Jenji Kohan who you might recall wrote, produced and directed the Showtime hit, “Weeds,” which was about a soccer mom pot dealer. The book details Kerman’s real life experience transitioning from a woman with a career, a Smith College education, and a nice boyfriend, to a life behind bars. The show does not deviate far from this theme, and although I have yet to read the book, I have a feeling it’s pretty faithful to what Kernan put on the page.

And real.

Very real.

And I can say this because for years, I worked at a women’s prison.

In the fall of 2009, I began teaching a class called English Composition 109 at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills. The class was for college credit and was offered under the auspices of Mercy College. Overall the class went well, and most of the ladies who took it passed and received college credit. The women were grateful for the opportunity to further their educations, most of them having only just gotten their G.E.D. while incarcerated.  But there was a lot of crying and pressure and tension involving papers and exams, and after that semester, I decided teaching English Composition wasn’t really for me. What I wanted to offer the ladies was creative writing, so I switched up the game plan. For the next four years I taught 8 week creative writing classes in the spring, the summer, and the fall.

In the show, as was true for me when I started working at Taconic, at first the women seem to fall into stereotypes. There’s always one woman everybody else calls “Crazy Eyes.” There’s edgy Latinas, feisty black chicks, tough older broads you don’t want to mess with, scary looking butch lesbians. There are junkies, and angry, religious women who won’t quit talking about the sword of Jesus. And just as is true on the outside, caged behind bars there are strong women, passive women, manipulative and subversive women, the occasional woman who used to be a man, and prey and their predators.  

Just as I discovered while teaching at Taconic, these stereotypes gradually gave way to individuals who I came to know and love. It’s been a few years since I worked inside the prison, but I still remember many of their faces, their stories, their laughter, and their tears. I saw how they formed bonds with their own tribes that were more important than any other bond. “We stick with our own kind,” one of the inmates advises Piper in the TV series, and she means it. In prison, where you sit in the mess hall is extremely circumscribed.

The major theme in the show as is true in real prison, is female relationships. Friendship in prison is all about survival because if you don’t have friends, you’re dead. Piper is advised by her so-called counselor the first day she arrives to mind her own business, keep to herself, and above all, not to get involved with lesbians. That counselor turns out to be one of the most dangerous and corrosive personalities Piper encounters. Because she is in jail with the woman who gave her up to the authorities and who was once her lover, it’s not much of a surprise when she can’t stay away from that woman, who is exceptionally charismatic. When the two fall back into their old attraction, that counselor, who is a prison officer, illegally punishes Piper by throwing her in “the shoe,” which is slang for solitary confinement.

If you’re interested at all in female relationships, or what life would be like behind bars, I recommend the series, which is on Netflix. I don’t understand how we watched it ourselves. It has something to do with Roku. Don’t ask me how that works. I still have a dumb phone.

I will close with this thought. Possibly jail is the last place in America where older women have cred. Maybe it has something to do with being post-menopausal. If you’re bleeding, you’re vulnerable. Behind bars, achieving crone-dom is a valuable asset.