Which Is Worse: Litchfield or Real Life?
Think the for-profit prison company in “Orange is the New Black” is bad? Try comparing it to the real world.
By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project
EVERYONE KNOWS PRISON CONDITIONS were difficult to bear before the sale, but things went badly downhill after it was bought by a private, for-profit prison company.
The scenes that followed were depressing: Prisoners forced to defecate into plastic bags because the toilets had no running water. Drugs, alcohol, and other contraband ran rampant, with one prisoner dying from overdosing on heroin that had been smuggled inside. Severe overcrowding occurred. Longtime correctional officers laid off. Rehabilitation programs slashed. Violence skyrocketed.
No, these aren’t spoilers from season 3 of “Orange is the New Black” — these are descriptions of what actually happened in the first 18 months after the state of Ohio sold the Lake Erie Correctional Institution to the Corrections Corporation of America.
In fact, life in many real private, for-profit prisons is actually worse than how it’s depicted in OITNB when (warning: now the spoilers are coming) Litchfield gets sold to the for-profit “Management and Corrections Corporation.” Consider these few examples:
Undertrained guards and violence
In OITNB, a newly hired guard starts working after receiving almost no training at all. He pepper-sprays two prisoners for no reason, loses control of the canister after a more senior officer tries to stop him, and ends up spraying both himself and the senior officer.
In real life, guards at a Mississippi private prison attempted to quell a 2014 riot by launching a chemical grenade into the housing unit. But they were so inept that they accidentally discharged it inside their own control booth, forcing them to leave the room, which in turn allowed the riot to progress unimpeded. Things got so out of hand that a group of prisoners took turns urinating on another prisoner after beating him with a microwave oven.
Rape
In OITNB, a seemingly friendly guard befriends one prisoner but then uses his authority to coerce her into repeated sex acts. In real life, Donald Dunn, a Texas man that a private prison company hired to transport immigration detainees, pled guilty in 2011 to federal criminal charges for sexually assaulting the female detainees he transported.
According to law enforcement officials, Dunn’s modus operandi was to stop the van between the detention facility and the airport, order the women to exit, claim that he was conducting a routine body search, and then sexually assault them. The ACLU filed suit on behalf of three of his victims, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held last year that immigration officials could not be held responsible for failing to stop Dunn — despite the acknowledgment that letting him drive the women solo was a violation of the very policy that was designed to prevent such assaults.
Escapes
In OITNB, a prisoner is mistakenly released because of a computer error and inexperienced guards, followed by scenes of a stressed-out Caputo and his new corporate overseer trying to figure out how to get her back to Litchfield quietly.
In real life, three prisoners escaped from an Arizona private prison run by the notoriously mismanaged Management & Training Corporation in 2010, kidnapped and murdered an elderly Oklahoma couple in order to use their RV as a getaway vehicle, and ran free for three weeks afterward. A subsequent security audit at the Arizona facility found that false alarms were so common that staff frequently ignored them, while nearly 80 percent of the staff was new or newly promoted and as many as 75 percent of prisoners were allowed to walk around the complex without ID badges.
Disturbed, state officials removed 238 high-risk prisoners from the facility. The private prison company then threatened to sue the state for breaching its contract with the prison, which required state officials to keep the facility at least 97 percent full at all times. The state of Arizona settled the lawsuit by paying an additional $3 million to the private prison company.
Pepto pink walls!
Even what would appear to be an over-the-top laugh line in OITNB is sadly real. In the show, a private prison executive suggests that painting the walls in the maximum security prison pink would reduce violence — and thus save money by allowing them to lay off more guards. Although one of her colleagues points out that there’s no evidence to support the notion that pink walls would do this, the CEO praises the executive’s “innovative” thinking.
This is absurd, but it isn’t a figment of the screenwriters’ imaginations. I once visited a prison in Mississippi where the warden told me that he’d ordered the walls of one housing unit to be painted pink “to decrease aggression and increase calm” among the prisoners, who were locked in solitary confinement cells for 22 to 24 hours per day. Needless to say, painting the walls pink didn’t help; the warden would have been better served by paying attention to the emotional and psychological harm inflicted by solitary confinement.
Usually, television dramas like OITNB start with real life and then dial it up a few notches for dramatic purposes. But sometimes real life is so unspeakably horrible that it has to be dialed down to make believable television. That’s the case with the real-life for-profit prison industry — a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that depends on and profits from our national addiction to incarceration.
If the fictionalized version that you’re binge-watching on your couch isn’t enough to convince you that running our criminal justice system on a profit motive is a recipe for disaster, then just try a taste of real life.
