Orange is the New Black

The first three episodes of Orange is the New Black definitely has aspects of traditional media representations of prison life and corrections systems. The show complicates the trends and issues that both Surette and Rafter describe.

Surette described, that in correctional institutions females tend to suffer degradation, sexual assault, and harassment. The main character Chapman experienced all of these. In the first episode, everyone in the correctional institution was very mean to her. It degraded her as a human. They did not care about her or what she wanted. There was only one nice man and he gave her tips on how to help her through her process here in prison. Everyone else was very mean. She made fun of the food saying it was disgusting in the first episode and the cook stopped feeding her. She didn’t eat for like a week. This is harassment. They starved her because of something she said. There was also several examples of sexual assault. Especially in episode three, the wardens watched the women shower and change and bribed them with food if they would give him oral sex. They never did in the first three episodes but he did it often and when he talked to the other warden he degraded all the women in the prison. There was also a woman who wouldn’t stop following Chapman around and called her, her “wife.” I see this eventually turning into some sexual assault in the next few episodes.

Surette describes, the correctional officers as being brutal, incompetence, low intelligence, and indifferent to human suffering. This show, makes the correctional officers seem to have low intelligence and indifferent to human suffering. They do not care what the prisoners want and they do what they want. Because of this, it makes them see to have low intelligence because they don’t care about anything but themselves it seems like. They are not physically brutal, but could be brutal through words. They are not nice and do not talk nice about the prisoners in this movie.

Rafter talked about the fantasies of sex and rebellion in prison films. There is a little bit of fantasies of sex throughout this show because there are many lesbians. The officers tell Chapman to stay away but the film shows that it is still going on all the time in prison.

Chapman starts to make some friends throughout the show and it begins to start looking like the participation in perfect friendships like Rafter explained. This did not happen in the show yet but it did seem like friendships were growing and that it might happen in the future.

Rafter explains the stock plot of control. There seems to be a lot of control throughout the prison. Chapman gets advice on whom she can talk too and whom she can’t. There seems to be a lot of control between the people because some people are not nice. For example, Chapman was told she has to sleep on top of her bed not in it. She was starved because of something she said. There seems to be many rules and control throughout the episodes and it is definitely a theme throughout it.

Overall, the first three episodes seemed to fit into categories that Surette and Rafter talked about. There is a major difference that they didn’t talk about though and that was the female prison. In both of the articles, they seemed to talk primarily about males and that females rarely appeared in traditional prison films. This is one major difference from Orange is the New Black and traditional prison films.