Seeing Orange

If one more person tells me that I must watch or read Orange Is the New Black, I fear my guts will explode. All summer people raved about both the hit Netflix series, created by Weeds’s Jenji Kohan, and the 2011 best-selling memoir by Piper Kerman. Those recommending the show insisted it was addictive, authentic, nuanced, and ironic; to wit, the black transsexual character, the black lesbian character “Crazy Eyes,” and the white, privileged main character used as “trojan horse.” Critics called it fresh, pulpy, and political but with a light touch, because god forbid you are political with any heft.

In one telling review in The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum writes,

But while the show touches on the grinding unfairness of the penal system, it’s never preachy or grim. It’s very different, in other words, from the Sundance series “Rectify” (which just completed its run), a more delicate prison-themed series that relied on poetry and philosophy. “Orange” embraces a pulpier approach . . .

The assumption that one should never be “preachy or grim” gives me pause.

But of course there is a deeper reason for my resistance: I have been to jail. I spent 749 days in the Texas criminal justice system following a 2005 arrest for felony drunk driving. Drunk on red wine, I ran a red light and crashed into three other cars at a busy Houston intersection. A woman in one of the other cars broke her leg and underwent multiple nightmarish surgeries three days before her wedding. It was wrenching to have caused someone that kind of pain, and to imagine it could have been worse. As it was, it was life-changing.

Life-changing because I saw injustice firsthand, though I don’t mean that my particular situation or outcome was unjust. On the contrary, my ultimate conviction of a lesser-included misdemeanor and 60 days in jail seemed exceedingly fair. But the experience gave me a window into the rampant racial disparities and the senselessness of drug enforcement that exist everywhere. The sum total of that experience, including two years of pretrial supervision and a five-day jury trial, left an imprint on me that would change the course of my life and leave me with the tattoo of incarceration.

At 2 a.m. on Easter Sunday in 2007, I was released from one of the largest and most fearsome county jail systems in the country, a place the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated for civil rights violations, including inhumane conditions and poor medical and mental health treatment, and which the DOJ and Harris County Sheriff’s office have investigated for sexual abuse. That Sunday I was dumped along with 30 or so other inmates onto a downtown Houston loading dock at a witching hour and left there, put out like trash.

Unlike many other inmates deposited into the eerie predawn wasteland of the country’s fourth largest city, I had people waiting for me—my brother and my now-husband—with a warm coat, a warm car, and cigarettes. Perhaps it is both a cliché and no surprise that I am white and most of my fellow released inmates were black, brown, or what was called “hillbilly white” in jail.

Though I lived in the Third Ward, a historically black and working-class neighborhood and the same from which many of these women hailed, we would return to our largely separate worlds—I to a life of privilege and they to another America. With only a misdemeanor conviction (secured by way of competent, expensive lawyers), a college education, employment opportunities (including employers who supported me through incarceration), and an opportunity to start fresh elsewhere, the world remained my oyster. If anything, I had taken a detour for some street cred...