The following article is re-posted from OZY
Americans love their prison entertainment. How could they not lap up the best moments of Orange Is the New Black, what with the lesbianness and the realness … the prison wars, the guards’ criminality, the racial commentary and, um, the lesbianness.
Sure, it feels authentic, but how would the audience know? Safe to say that few of OITNB’s millions of fans have spent even a moment in a lockup — although probably half are engaged in the illicit sharing of Netflix passwords. Remote and security-sensitive, prisons aren’t exactly accessible to the general public. States consider visits a privilege, doled out for the incarcerateds’ good behavior. To enter, one must be on the prisoners’ approved visitor list or in an organized volunteer program. Even the Supreme Court has come down in favor of strict visitation policies.
This is wrongheaded. We believe every American should be required to visit a prison. After all, some two million of their fellow citizens are incarcerated — that’s almost 1 percent of the population. For the most part, those on the outside ignore this significant minority: Inmates don’t much figure into discussions about policy, which is one reason it took decades for politicians to start dismantling mass-incarceration policies that had long ago been deemed expensive and ineffective. Isn’t it weird that the first sitting president to visit a federal prison was … Barack Obama, in the last year of his second term? While there, he was surprised to discover that three fully grown men were housed in a minuscule 9 x 12 cell.
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