Orange is the New Black: Not Representative of All Women in Prison (NND3 Final)
For many people, what they know about women’s prisons comes from the popular Netflix show Orange is the New Black, which is based on a book of the same name by Piper Kerman, who had a year-long sentence at a women’s federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. However, the show differs from the book in many ways, creating a version of prison that romanticizes lesbian relationships, for instance.
Cecily McMillan, activist and former New School student, spent 58 days at Rikers. Rikers Island was on Mother Jones’ list of America’s worst prisons in 2013, a year before McMillan was an inmate.
“Federal prison is like a fucking 5 star hotel compared to Rikers,” said McMillan when asked how her experience compared to what’s portrayed on Orange is the New Black.
According to an article from earlier this year by The Root, seven correction officers (COs) were accused with raping and abusing multiple female inmates. NBC New York reports statistics from a 2013 Bureau of Justice survey that states, “5.9 percent of Rikers inmates housed at the all-female Rose M. Singer Center said they were assaulted by staff compared to a national average of 1.8 percent for all jails. An additional 5.6 percent of inmates at a second Rikers facility alleged staff sexual misconduct.”
McMillan claims that female COs also disclosed to her that they had been raped, coerced, and otherwise abused by the men working at the facility. “COs surrounded me telling me, ‘you have to help us,’” McMillan recalls. She notes that many of the COs have been in jail before, and have similar backgrounds as many of the inmates.
“The only people who think there are any difference between the COs and the prisoners, in terms of where they’ve come from, have never been to jail,” McMillan stated.
In 2010, the Bureau of Justice reported that 62% of women in federal prison have mental health problems. McMillan remembers seeing a lot of women with mental health issues during her stay at Rikers as well, and recalls that many of them were not treated for months and denied their medications. She even witnessed a woman go into liver failure while in a coma for having her medical condition ignored by the prison’s staff.
As Piper Kerman writes in her book, prison is “a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient.” Yet, the Netflix version of Kerman’s story only shows a few inmates with mental illnesses or other medical conditions.
McMillan is currently writing a memoir and hopes it is able to put a human face on prisons. “Despite all the journalism coming out about Rikers, it’s all spectacle, it’s all smut. It’s what people want to hear, it’s a good fucking story,” she said.
During her short time at Rikers, McMillan was able to interact with strong and inspirational women. These women put together welcome packages for new inmates, and were still organizing their families even behind bars. “They’re organizing whole worlds on the outside and whole communities on the inside.”
“They [the inmates] were more human in the most inhumane circumstances I’ve ever seen, and I wanted to show that in this book. It made me a better person, a better woman,” McMillan claims.
