Critical Mass

American TV goes to prison

Dascha Polanco stars as Daya Diaz in Orange Is the New Black.
Dascha Polanco stars as Daya Diaz in Orange Is the New Black.

We put a lot of people in prison. The American Civil Liberties Union says the United States is the world's largest jailer, in numbers (we lock up more people than China) and per capita. Americans make up about 5 percent of the world's population, but keep 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 1 (actually 0.94) percent of Americans were incarcerated in 2011. That's the highest rate we've ever had. (Our prison population has increased more than 700 percent since 1970.) Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I'll leave to another time and another section of the newspaper.

But it makes me wonder about some things.

Consider this: There are about twice as many people in prison in this country as are in the military.

Now consider that there are more than twice as many people on probation or parole as are in prison. So we have slightly more than 3 percent of our population under some kind of correctional control. The odds are very good that you know someone who has experienced arrest, conviction and incarceration, although you might not know it.

Still, if you're poor, black or Hispanic, you're much more likely to know people who have been processed by the judicial system. While white Americans constitute the majority of the population and commit crimes at comparable rates of other populations, they make up only about 40 percent of our prison population. One in nine young black men is in prison. We incarcerate Hispanics at nearly twice the rate of white folks. Again, we can talk about the reasons why this is at some other time in some other venue; my point is if you're white and affluent you're much less likely to have any experience with prison than if you're not.

Piper Kerman was white and affluent. In 2004 she went to prison after pleading guilty to money laundering charges (connected to drug smuggling). She served 13 months of a 15-month sentence at a minimum security federal prison in Danbury, Conn. When she got out, she a wrote a ­memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, that was published in 2010 and sold well. It was adapted by Jenji Kohan, the show runner who created the Showtime television series Weeds, into a series for Netflix. Taylor Schilling, a blond actress who looks alarmingly like Jared Leto (and more than a little like Kerman), was chosen to play the WASP-y main character, named Piper Chapman.

The first season of Orange Is the New Black was released in July 2013. The second season was released June 6. Contrary to what you may have read on Facebook, it has not been canceled. On July 10, it received 12 Primetime Emmy nominations; Netflix has ordered a third season.

I watched the first season and liked it well enough. Most TV series are, to one degree or another, about family. OITNB presented us with an array of (literally) colorful characters who orbited (and occasionally collided with) the fictionalized Piper, who was trying to maintain her relationship with her free-world fiance. Complicating matters was the arrival of her former lover (played by Lauren Prepon), a drug smuggler who had lured Piper into a life of crime, into the facility.

There was an easy lope to the series as Piper learned to adjust to the banal indignities and tiny horrors of being locked up. The series was different from most fictional depictions of prison; it insisted on the humanity of all those behind bars, even the guards. But I didn't really believe in it until the season finale when a stressed-out Piper nearly murdered her chief antagonist (Tiffany "Pennsatucky" Doggett, portrayed by Taryn Manning) as a corrections official, who had engineered the confrontation, looked on. It was a shocking, brutal ending to what had been a rather light (and I imagined fairly realistic) depiction of the incarceration experience. The violence punctuated the season and OITNB pivoted from a comedic soap opera into something freighted and aware. It became a show willing to acknowledge the savagery of which we're all capable, as well as the decency we can achieve and the love we can muster.

One of the more engaging side plots involves a gentle romance between inmate Daya Diaz (Dascha Polanco) and guard John Bennett (Matt McGorry). But the sweetness of this relationship is undercut by a cruel pragmatism. After John impregnates Daya, the inmates conspire to frame another guard -- a sadistic and corrupt one -- for sexual assault. Prison cannot support a fairy tale.

This season -- I haven't watched it all, I've resisted bingeing -- the series has moved even farther from the realm of situation comedy. Piper is a less privileged character in that she's no longer center stage for most of the episodes, which have instead invested more and more into what we had imagined were meant to be peripheral, recurring characters. Suddenly, the comic-relief diesel dyke, the broad-shouldered transsexual, the redneck methamphetamine addict were being presented as real people with motives and psychologies and mysterious appetites and ways. From the beginning, every episode highlighted one of the inmates, filled us in on the back story and brought us up to speed on how they became the sort of people who might end up in prison. In the second season, it has become clear they're the point of the series, that it is their stories and voices to which we're supposed to attend.

OITNB hooked us with Piper's misadventure. But the real meat of the series is not her highly anomalous stint in prison but the stories of the sort of people (poor, black, Hispanic) we send to prison. As in real life, drugs figured in most of the inmates' histories. Some were desperate, others were simply stupid and some of them, including the two most affecting characters -- the heartbreaking Lorna Morello (played by Australian Yael Stone) and Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren (Uzo Aduba) -- are mentally ill. None of them are innocent, just like the rest of us.

...

On the other hand, Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is innocent. At least I believe he's innocent.

The second season of Sundance Channel's Rectify hasn't provided incontrovertible evidence yet (although we surmise that the group of "witnesses," led by Sean Bridgers, seems very nervous) and even suggests that Daniel is capable of dark acts.

Daniel was released after 19 years on Georgia's death row when his murder conviction was vacated on vague technical grounds having to do with DNA testing that I don't think has been fully explicated. The first season -- which was really more like a half season -- followed him through his first six days of freedom as he re-experienced the outside world, bonded tenderly with his religious sister-in-law and ended up in a coma after being beaten by vigilantes in a cemetery.

Those six episodes were more elliptical and poetic than anything I'd ever seen on television. (Before I go further, I should say that I consider Ray McKinnon, the creator of Rectify, a good friend. We've had a few conversations about writing. I can recognize Ray's voice in Daniel's mouth and that's probably one of the reasons that I love the show as I do.)

The second season, which I'm also just in the middle of, continues to insist upon small moments, gentle arcs and little blooms of grace. The pace seems to have picked up slightly. I don't think they're still following the one-episode-equals-one-day formula of the first season. I think Daniel's coma took a couple of weeks to resolve and maybe he healed up a little bit before heading up to Atlanta on a bus for the day. But I guess I could be wrong.

The writing remains almost perversely good, challenging the audience to keep up with Daniel's evolving philosophy. Someone equated the character to David Bowie's alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth. That's not a bad thought, only Daniel's not learning how to be human so much as how to survive the onslaught of humanity. If prison has toughened Piper and taught her how the world works, Daniel's stay on death row, isolated in a whitewashed cell that visually suggests a kind of minimalist joke about heaven, insulated him from a world that might have caressed and roughened him, educated him in the ways of its creatures. He has emerged vulnerable, sensitive to light and poetry, a finer but less capable creature than he might otherwise be.

It seems interesting that two of the best things on American TV are about prison and its aftermath. Other than HBO's Oz (about which I must confess ignorance), I can't think of another series set in a correctional facility. (OK, Fox's Prison Break -- which I also never watched. And Hogan's Heroes.) Maybe we are becoming more used to unorthodox families; maybe something really is happening.

Of the two series, I don't doubt that OITNB more accurately portrays what prison is like for most of the people we lock up. It's undoubtedly terrible, but it's something most of us acclimate to if necessary. Daniel survived through existential measures -- at one point he tells his death row friend through the grate that separates their cells that he "doesn't do time," by which I think he means he divorces himself from all that's impending. That's what it means to live in the moment, a phrase that usually feels empty and self-congratulatory but, in this context, might be the only way to hold onto sanity.

Rectify doesn't feel like a screed against capital punishment but like a whispered prayer, a wish for kindness.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 07/20/2014

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