Fans of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black are about to get their wish for new episodes granted today. The wildly popular series, based on Piper Kerman’s non-fiction book of the same name, is a fictionalized account of women incarcerated at the Danbury Connecticut Prison Camp, where Kerman was incarcerated. The facility in the series, “Litchfield Penitentiary,” is as fake as most of the scenes.
While Kerman, a consultant to the show, freely admits that the series is meant to be entertaining, not factual, Reentry Central asks viewers to take a deeper look into the reality of the mass incarceration of women, the fastest growing segment of America’s prison population.
Reentry Central’s Managing Editor, Beatrice Codianni, who was incarcerated with Kerman, has been interviewed several times about the series and has been strongly critical of the way OITNB dilutes the seriousness of women behind bars and only touches on how children are the collateral consequences of parental incarceration. Read Codianni’s comments in the North Jersey Record here.
Now, others are finally realizing how OITNB misrepresents women in federal prisons. Amos Irwin, Chief of Staff at the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation and Assistant Training Director at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), wrote a powerful article that includes facts about women incarcerated in federal prisons that should be written into the script of OITNB so that the series can educate, not just titillate. Read more.
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