Suffering at the Margins: (Re)Centering Black Women in Discourses on Violence and Crime

The explosion in the American prison-industrial complex, and the fate of prisoners trapped within it, has generated a substantial rise in public and scholarly interest in more recent years. Activists, scholars, teachers, community leaders, and students alike continue to forge dialogues on the current realities and the possible endless future of mass incarceration. Amid these conversations the fate of black boys and black men fueled into the carceral pipeline remains the primary focal point. Yet recent trends in popular culture—specifically Orange Is the New Black—have begun to signal new directions, effectively overturning the privileging of male narratives by offering a visual entry into the world of women and prisons. In much the same way, academics are similarly engaging the gendered and social landscapes of the carceral system, evidenced through the recent works of Angela Davis, Beth Ritchie, and Jill McCorkel, who lend intellectual strength to this important and national introspection on prisons. They each lay bare contemporary narratives of structural racism anchored amid the U.S. rise of the prison-industrial complex, which—far from rehabilitative—is hinged upon the cyclical mass movement of people of color and the poor into institutional captivity.

Digital media by way of the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black provides the first real exposure through an online platform for both national and international audiences to consider the often-marginalized lives of women jailed for various crimes. Described by the network’s CEOs as “our most watched original series ever,” Orange relies on a widely popular 2010 memoir to dramatize the story of a young, middle-class white woman forced to serve fifteen months for a crime she had committed years before. Through thirteen episodes and countless comedic moments, viewers follow how the pampered yet witty main character, Piper Chapman, navigates and thus survives regimented prison life alongside women from differing lines of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and mental well-being. On the one hand, Orange overturns the exclusion of women in discourses on criminality and prisons. But, on the other hand, closer engagement with the racialized narratives of other characters’ arrest, their experiences in the legal arena, and the cumulative effects of imprisonment are creatively sidelined through Piper’s story. Therein, personal favors, romantic and sexual flings, and unending threats of revenge acted out through different episodes superficially expose constructed codes and commonly agreed rules among all the inmates and officers. However, Orange invariably presents a particular idea of prison life centered on white femininity that not only reinscribes stereotypes of criminal behavior among people of color but also, in an effort to make incarceration more palatable for a wider viewing audience, makes the physical and psychological toll of prison life appear far less harsh than it is.

In stark contrast to the rather semicomedic tone Orange takes toward prison life, Angela Davis in The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues provides a compilation of hard-hitting philosophical speeches centering the very real convergence of political, economical, and social forces that, in her estimation, fuels an ever-expanding system of prisons aimed at constraining the lives of diverse individuals. Davis’s speeches, spanning from 1994 to 2009, reveal the evolution of her passionate ideological perceptions related to the drastic economic boom achieved through the rise of and governmental reliance on the construction of prisons, including “supermaxes,” in the global prison-industrial complex. She astutely shows how societal structures and legislative mandates, virtually hidden in plain sight, play upon everyday fears of crime through the media while covertly tightening resources that would be accessible to poor communities of color, making informal economies the only means of survival. The longevity of this enterprise, she argues, emerges from the normalizing of surveillance tactics...