Friendship and betrayal are central themes in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, which takes place in a women’s prison where the environment is a lot like an all-women’s college. The female prisoners, the show suggests, are “just like us,” worried about interpersonal relationships as much as they are about survival.
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But the show seems to rely too much on stereotypes about women living in close quarters—that they’re concerned with appearance, catty, and often manipulative.
At the same time, OITNB gives a woman’s version of the prison narrative, a genre that has its roots in social protest, and the show, along with the author of the titular book, Piper Kerman, uses the soap-opera format to persuade viewers that reforms are needed because we certainly wouldn’t want to live as the characters do in the show. We are implicated because of the familiarity.
Perhaps the show struck such a popular chord because the mass incarceration of women is a relatively new phenomenon. According to The Sentencing Project, the number of women in prison rose 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, 1.5 times the rate of men over the same period.
The same report notes that these women differ from their male counterparts: women tend to be convicted for nonviolent offenses.
Women are much more likely to be the primary caretakers of children as well as victims of sexual abuse before and during incarceration. While the debate over women’s experiences of incarceration appears contemporary, this question is embedded in old debates about femininity and the causes of women’s “criminal” behavior. These gendered assumptions about what the model woman inmate should be have caused both substandard conditions and a greater emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment.
During the early 19th century, the paucity of female prisoners meant that most states didn’t have separate female facilities. Before the 1820s, most prisons resembled classrooms where inmates lived in large rooms together like a dormitory. The newer prisons of the era, like New York’s Auburn Prison, shepherded men into individual cells at night and silent labor during the day, a model that would prove enduring. Women at Auburn, however, lived in a small attic room above the kitchen and received food once a day. The conditions were so terrible that a chaplain famously noted, “To be a male convict in this prison would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict, for any protracted period, would be worse than death.”
In addition to receiving subpar resources and attention, female inmates were actually considered more trouble than men even though their crimes were often less violent. As inspectors of an Illinois prison wrote in their official report from 1845, “[From] past experience, not only in our own State, but in others, one female prisoner is of more trouble than twenty males.” L. Mara Dodge, writing for the Journal of Social History, explains this common attitude derived from the idea that women needed individualized attention: “Because women were viewed as being more pure and moral by nature than men, the woman who dared to stray or fell from her elevated pedestal was regarded as having fallen a greater distance than a male, and hence as being beyond any possibility of reformation.”
As Nicole Hahn Rafter details in her article for Crime and Justice, separate women’s prisons didn’t appear regularly until the 1870s and were focused on making their residents “true” women while men were required to do the more masculine task of manual labor. The women were taught to sew and cook and most were released on parole to work as domestic servants, where it was assumed that the master of the house would take over the charge of ensuring good behavior.