User:JSRcarleton/sandbox

My sandbox page on OITNB

Two summers ago, I took the train from Washington to Staunton, Va., to go to a wedding. The woman sitting next to me was from Maine, and she was on her way to report for a relatively short prison sentence (her crime was embezzlement, I seem to recall), at the same federal prison in West Virginia “where Martha Stewart went,” she bragged, the way freshmen talk about their college choices. Once in a while, I wonder how it all worked out for her.

If you know anything about the American penal system, then you know it was probably not the calm retreat she had hoped for. As made perfectly clear in Jenji Kohan’s magnificent and thoroughly engrossing new series, “Orange Is the New Black” (available for streaming on Netflix), prison is still the pits. But it is also filled with the entire range of human emotion and stories, all of which are brought vividly to life in a world where a stick of gum could ignite either a romance or a death threat.

US women's prison's Together, these women and their stories form a sad and strange tapestry, but “Orange Is the New Black” is by no means a female “Oz.” And although there are unwanted advances from unctuous guards (including Pablo Schreiber as Officer Mendez, a.k.a. “Pornstache”), it has little use for our culture’s exploitative and outdated “Caged Heat”-style excitement for the notion of women doing time together. As in “Weeds,” Kohan and her writers are obsessed with the million little details that form a believable and unembellished realm. Each episode contains fascinating revelations about the prison world, almost like a documentary report from within.
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