Today is Independence Day, but I'm sure everyone has had their fill of that by now and frankly I don't want to talk about it.
I've decided to start anew. Once upon a time I fancied myself a writer, but as my life became both more busy and less interesting, I found myself less and less able to put words to the page. I attempted to talk about myself on a blog, but I quickly became bored with myself, and frankly, who really cares about me, anyhow?
The focus of this blog, therefore, will be less about me and more about the world around me.
I'd like to start with a topic I've been pondering for a few weeks now and would really like to share.
Sometime in the middle of June the newest season of Orange is the New Black was released on Netflix, and my wife and I watched all 13 episodes in about 4 days. It took us that long mainly because this season was more difficult for me to watch. Part of that is because of all the flaws that I'm sure you can read about on other sites where plenty of reviews exist, but the main reason I found this season so difficult was because of how much it illustrated the absolutely failed ideas of the federal government's criminal justice policies.
For starters, if you remember back to episode 1, Piper was imprisoned because she was involved in trafficking drugs across international lines...10 or so years prior. During this time, Piper did not actually hurt anyone or transgress against any other individual's rights. Since that event occurred, Piper had found herself "reformed" in society and was on her way to becoming a good taxpayer. Instead of allowing Piper to remain free and productive in society, our government instead chose to imprison her and send the bill to the taxpayers for her housing, food, and healthcare over the next 18 or so months of her sentence,
In season 3, Piper finds herself at the head of an illegal organization within the prison. We've progressed less than 18 months and suddenly Piper, who before was on the path to being a responsible adult, is now learning how to run a criminal enterprise. Now, don't get me wrong: I think it's also ridiculous that her selling used panties is considered a criminal activity. Frankly, I generally applaud the idea of a market that exists in defiance of the state's apparatus against such, but the point is whether what she was doing should be illegal, but simply that it was. We now find Piper willing to do things like commit a woman to solitary confinement for betraying her trust when just two seasons prior Piper was incapable of standing up for herself and ensuring that she be fed properly. The prison system has corrupted this otherwise reasonable individual and taught her how to be a better criminal. This is the sort of problem that advocates against stupid drug policies have been discussing for years, and there it is for all to see perfectly illustrated by a Netflix Original Series. Let's just send people to prison for non-violent activities and see if we can't make violent offenders out of them...
As I moved through this season, I saw all sorts of examples of how stupid the United States drug policies are. There was the quip when Nicky's mother was "Glad they didn't find any drugs on her" when she was caught burglarizing a house because then it would be "impossible to avoid jail time." You're telling me that breaking into another person's private property and stealing from them is considered less of a crime than the simple act of having drugs in one's possession?! What kind of idiotic law would make it more criminal to possess drugs that are completely non-harmful to any non-consenting adult than to break into another person's home and steal from them?
Then there was Leanne, who, like Piper, had decided that the path she was on was self-destructive and wanted to find her way back into the society that she had grown up in. She was reforming and moving on from her days as a drug addled youth, only to be thrown into prison because of a bag found with her ID and drugs. On top of that, she was asked to help imprison those people in her old community on similar charges in order to attempt to reduce her ridiculous sentence.
If we move on to Sophia, we see a complete mismanagement of her personal care from the beginning of the series. In season 1, the prison system reduces her hormones because the cost of them is "too much for the prison to bear" and they are deemed as non-essential. Finally, in season 3, Sophia is put into solitary confinement "for her own safety." This kind of garbage happens all the time in privately run prison systems. Sometimes a person's care is mismanaged so badly that they can die because of it. The prisons don't face any consequences for these mismanaged situations, either.
I'd like to wrap up with something from Taystee's story earlier on in the series. If you really want to see how prison destroys lives, look at what happens to Taystee when she is released. She has a very heart-wrenching soliloquy when she is returned to Litchfield in which see decides that prison is better for her than the world outside. If there is a better indictment of how awful our prison policies are, I've not seen it.
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