“Orange Is The New Black” was the right series at the right time. The Netflix show, which painted a portrait of largely nonviolent offenders who were certainly not psychopathic geniuses, arrived just as more of the country was waking up to the reality that lots of people pay deadly penalties for minor offenses.
A transgender inmate being denied her hormones is certainly not the same thing as a man winding up dead after the police come by to stop him from selling loose cigarettes. But the indignities portrayed on the show, and the deadly interactions between police and citizens that have dominated the news for the past several years exist as part of the same system, one that treats anyone who breaks the law, for any reason, as equally dangerous and equally disposable.
But if it’s despicable to treat anyone who has contact with the criminal justice system as garbage who deserves what’s coming to them, “Orange Is The New Black” could have overcompensated and fallen into an equally dangerous intellectual ravine. Plenty of people in jail have actually committed crimes, even if their sentences don’t exactly fit their transgressions. Lots of kinds of people — transgender people, people with mental illness, and children in the foster system — are over-represented in American prisons. But if membership in this group puts a person at risk for incarceration, it’s not the same thing as being fated to end up in jail.
We have free will. And the third season of “Orange Is The New Black” is concerned with the ends to which we use it. While the show never gives up its compassion for its characters, “Orange Is The New Black” is as complex and interesting as it remains in its third season because it extends that sympathy to people who are selfish, or irresponsible, or impulsive, or weak.
Sometimes, these bad choices and failure of character contribute directly to the characters’ crimes. In the backstory for Flaca Gonzales (Jackie Cruz), we see her as an impulsive teenager, frustrated with the sewing work her mother does for a living and too independent to take money from a boyfriend. Her solution is a seemingly harmless fraud with terrible consequences. As we learn more about Nicky Nichols’s (Natasha Lyonne) background, we see how this funny, charismatic woman blames her mother’s self-indulgences for the hole inside her that she fills up with heroin.
And in other cases, the only injuries the characters do are to themselves. In flashbacks to Big Boo’s (Lea DeLaria) childhood and adulthood before prison, we see how her parents’ resistance to her butch identity encouraged Boo to grow a thorny carapace. There’s no question that maintaining her integrity requires strength, but Boo’s rigidity leads her to hurt herself and others. John Bennett (Matt McGorry), the sensitive prison guard who began a romance with Dayanara Diaz (Dascha Polanco) in the show’s first season, is torn between his good intentions and his capacity to navigate Daya’s chaotic extended family.
Crime shows that treat criminals as geniuses may foster a certain amount of awe for the audaciously criminal. But they also tend to reinforce the idea that vigorous law enforcement is just and necessary and that prisons can’t be too secure in order to contain them.
“Orange Is The New Black” sees its characters as humans, rather than as supervillains. But their human weakness, and the relatively small scale of their crimes, forces us to question the conditions in which they’re incarcerated, and whether we’d prefer for them to be rehabilitated or the subjects of retribution. For all they’re merely human-size, “Orange Is The New Black” ends up giving the inmates at Litchfield much greater power to challenge the law enforcement system than a dozen smooth super-criminals.
Alyssa Rosenberg, The Washington Post
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