Spoiler Alert.
This is a surprising season after the languid comedy of season 3.
Heck, I'm opting to write about this before I write about Game of Thrones Season 6... Go figure that one out.
A Growing Indictment Of The Privatisation Of Prisons
As unlikely as it seems, the the series based on Piper Kerman's time in prison which was 13months, has stumbled into its fourth season, awaiting the fifth. As the series has continued, the canvas of characters has also increased as we've gotten to know more and more the stories that led to the incarceration these women.
Needless to say, what started off as a character study of a female prison camp has turned into a vocal protest piece about the nature of incarceration in America. The very concepts that underlie the prison system in the anglophone world are on the whole antiquated. Some of these philosophical underpinnings on punishment date back to the eighteenth century which means we may as well be talking about the musings of Diderot and the Marquis de Sade, and seeing off convicts to a distant new world.
Still, this being America, there is an even nastier, modern, twist, and it takes the form of privatisation - Private companies that run prisons on behalf of governments in order to turn a profit. Naturally, the profit motive overrides any considerations for the welfare of ht prisoners, and all the malfeasances of the system then happen away from government scrutiny and responsibility. When these elements are combined, we get to witness a parade of the most egregious violations of human rights imaginable.
The privatisation of prison also raises questions about governments that think it is somehow wise to farm out the administration of prisons to private companies who seek to turn a profit from prison inmates as virtually-free labour. Who ever thought of this diabolical bit of privatisation needs to be hounded and persecuted. This is a travesty of justice. A simple logical analysis of branches of government tells you that if the government privatises any part of the criminal justice system, it is effectively forfeiting its right to call itself the government. Not surprisingly, private company-run prisons have been found to collude with judges to increase the prison labour force - i.e. compromise judges - so that they needlessly send people into prison to be slave labour.
The season climaxes with a riot, evoking 'Attica', but the prisoners themselves are hardly aware of the historic institution of prison brutality, because its so endemic and it goes back so far. The prison riot at Attica isn't even in the memory. It casts a long shadow asking the question of whether this is the way society should be going at all, if prison culture hasn't moved on since the nineteenth century.
This is still meant to be light comedy, but it's sure not funny when you think about why the stuff is going on.
Ignoring Mental Health Problems
Now, this is a drama series, so the characters in it are there for their ability to generate drama. Many of them would be people that would likely be diagnosed of one mental health condition or another. Some of the even seemingly function ones, look to be borderline personality disordered and narcissistic personality disordered. Other s seem to be genuinely clinically insane, wandering the confines of the prison in a mental state that cannot possibly described as well or healthy. You wonder if the point of incarceration is to make things worse for the mentally ill.
What is amazing is that there is only the lone counsellor who is emotionally inept, to look after the mental health of the inmates, and should he fail, they inmate is then sent to 'the Psych Ward' which resembles a nineteenth century asylum with screaming inmates strapped down in straitjackets. Yes, those asylums are gone today, they've simply moved those patients in to the psyche ward of prisons as felons.
There are inmates whose backstories seem to be more about mental health care gone wrong than actual premeditated criminality. Should Crazy Eyes Suzanne really be in prison for what she did and who she is? Should Lolly Whitehill? Lorna Morello? They're far more crazy than criminal, and clearly their criminal record comes out of craziness.
One wonders if this prevalence of crazy is a function of Piper Kerman's observations or whether prison populations really are endemic with mental health patients.
One of the more insightful moments in Season 4 comes about when putative protagonist Piper Chapman comes to the realisation that has been "trying to win (at) prison" (sic). Because of its antiquated system of brutalisation, the prison and survival therein becomes something to be gamed. Surely this is not the point of incarceration, to send a group of people on a kind of low-lethality Hunger Games outside of the purview of society. In a strange way, the personality disordered find a way to thrive in the conflict-ridden confines of prison life. That doesn't make it right.
Zimbardo, Milgram, And The Panopticon
Speaking of the mental health aspects of the story, the other thing that's been on my mind as I watch Season 4 has been the Zimbardo experiment thanks to 'The Stanford Prison Experiment' as well as 'Milgram's 37' thanks to a listen to Peter Gabriel's 'So'. Zimbardo's experiment essentially crystallises the psychological dynamic that gives rise to the institutional sadism of prison guards brutalising the inmates, while Milgram's experiment demonstrates that the guards over-step their mark and over-deliver on the discipline and punishment in a bid to please and appease their superiors. Whatever they do, they're not going under-do it.
Both experiments have been in the public domain for some time and one would think that governments would take note, but it appears that the public consciousness to do with incarceration hasn't moved on one bit. Prisons are assumed to be there to brutalise the inmates as punishment - which is the kind of criminal justice mentality more in common with say, the early colonisation of Australia than what modern psychology has to offer.
The series makes an interesting link between those who went to war in the wake of 9/11 and how they came home with de-humanised experiences, and the mental fitness of guards. Some of the scenarios the ex-military guards think up are straight out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Orange Is The New Black paints a picture where the institutional sadists are endemic because institutions are endemic. So many of these guards are people who have been enabled into exercising their worst behavioural instincts, backed by an imaginary authority that wishes to be not culpable.
You occasionally come across the critique about psychology and psychiatry that they attempt to medicalise the judicial problem too much. Season 4 leaves you with the distinct feeling that if that were true, it's been nowhere enough to protect the basic dignity of these people.
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