"Orange Is The New Black" is a beautifully scripted show that follows the life of fictional character, Piper Chapman, as she serves a prison sentence due to drug related charges. The show does not only follow her storyline, but it also goes in-depth and humanizes the inmates. The Management & Correction Corporation (MCC) brings in hundreds of new inmates in their attempt to pack the prison and expand. MCC’s prison-packing scheme is designed not to improve the well-being and lives of the inmates, but it is to profit solely off of them.
Joe Caputo, the Warden or “Director of Human Activity” of the prison, was hopeful when MCC bought the prison as it meant that he did not have to relocate all the inmates at the time. With the prison now being private, he hoped to initiate programs for the inmates such as legal counseling, GED classes, and workforce training. MCC rejected the idea as their main goal is to meet their sales quota by the end of the quarter and these programs would only spend money not make it. The prison industry is not concerned with what will better inmates; they only look at people as property and how that property will generate revenue. By going off of this, one can argue that the prison industry is not willing to let go of their capital and that they will avoid programs that will deter convicts on re-entering prisons. Prisons not only do not want to let go of their “money farms” but they also believe that if they truly rehabilitate convicts, then there will be fewer criminals entering the prisons in the future. Also, private prison corporations have relationships with lawmakers and they fund campaigns for re-election. The writers of the show are able to creatively bring attention to serious issues that are facing the American criminal justice system through telling stories.
Not only does the show address the growing epidemic of the privatization of prisons and the monetization of inmates, but it also highlights institutional racism and racial profiling. In the show, inmates of Hispanic or Latin origin are targeted because Piper said that they were starting a prison gang. Even after people are caught and punished for this, the women are still being stopped and searched. Prison guards these days are increasingly profiling inmates on the basis that “inmates have a criminal record and any assumptions made can be defended under that statement.” People like Judy King are given special privileges as she is famous and might threaten to sue the prison when she is released. It can be argued that this parallels when Martha Stewart was sent to prison, no one truly knows what her sentence was like, but I can certainly assume that it was nothing like what Blanca Flores had to endure.
