Orange is Our New Obsession
And all that of course, begs the bigger question of whether art, particularly when it depicts an environment that carries a great social weight –like prison–has an obligation. Should artists be responsible for informing the public accurately? or agitating for change? or even telling a representative story?
I’m still mulling a lot of this. But regardless of whether a show with bourgeois/hipster cred should be a catalyst for change in a perfect world, the attention it’s garnering presents a more pragmatic concern: can a show actually alter the way we look at crime and punishment? OITNB’s clear condemnation of such aspects of prison culture as solitary confinement (shown, correctly, as akin to torture) and the power guards have over prisoners is already having an effect on viewers: a colleague dishing on the show over lunch told me, “I love it, but it can be frustrating to watch because I just get madder and madder about the system.”
She was speaking of the prison system–itself an acute symptom of the racist, broken justice system. Interestingly, the show comes at a cultural moment when reform, in the tiniest of increments, feels possible. NYC’s discriminatory Stop and Frisk program has been overruled and challenged. Federal minimum sentencing for drug crimes has been halted by Attorney General Holder–mostly symbolic, but not insignificant. Now there remains a mountain of other goals to achieve: curbing solitary confinement, ending the shackling of pregnant inmates, curtailing the ability of guards to harass and retaliate against inmates and overarching all that, stopping incarceration for minor drug offenses. And then we and must can get down to figuring out what justice really ought to look like.
As OITNB acknowledges, progress in prison reform has been difficult because average American taxpayers aren’t overly concerned with the rights of felons, at least not in the abstract. But that state of indifference can be appealed to, perhaps–and maybe art is a good medium for a heart-changing effort. OITNB, after all, succeeds to the extent it does at showing how dehumanizing prison is because it acknowledges the humanity of those behind the prison walls.
