“Orange Is the New Black” and the Difficulty of Portraying Prison Religion

This Friday, Netflix is going to drop 13 new episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” in our queues, and we’ll find out if Piper killed Pennsatucky after beating her to a bloody pulp outside a Christmas pageant in the first season’s final episode. If you’ve been reading casting news, of course, you already know. 

As with all of the Netflix original shows, many viewers raced through the last season, some binge-watching the entire thing in a couple of days, a factor that worked in the writers’ favor as they stirred the prisoners’ racial, religious, and personal tensions to the point of open war. Litchfield Prison is a place where arbitrary-seeming rules are determined by an absent and invisible Warden, a collection of petty tyrants trade official and unofficial power, and the residents—some of whom are violent or mentally unstable—navigate as best they can with people they’d ordinarily be able to avoid. 

According to the show’s creators, that fractious intermixing is meant to simulate something of real life. Jenji Kohan, the executive producer and creator of the show, said in an interview with NPR, “We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it’s a mosaic. There’s all these pieces, they’re next to each other, they’re not necessarily mixing. And I’m looking for those spaces where people actually do mix— and prison just happens to be a terrific one.” 

In response, the writers have given us an entire gallery of portraits of deep feeling and frailty: the trans woman, Sophia, who loses access to her hormones while in prison and whose son won’t speak to her; Tricia, a homeless girl with a drug problem who loses her friends in their misguided attempt to get her clean, and who later dies of an overdose; Miss Claudette, a woman who was sold into slavery in the U.S. to pay off a family debt; Taystee, who gets out on parole only to find out she has no family or friends outside of jail and reoffends in order to come back to the only place that feels like home; and Yoga Jones, tortured by the neighbor child she killed, thinking she was shooting a deer. One gets the feeling, watching the show, that each of these characters has been created to show a particular truth about the difficulty of escaping painful and unchangeable circumstances. Culture, race, gender, poverty, family: each pulls with its own type of gravity. 

Yet one of the primary vectors of this pluralistic world—indeed, the nominal reason for the cliffhanger of that final episode—has been painted with the crudest brush strokes. It’s a curious thing: in a show meant to portray the richness and diversity of the American experience, why is the show’s only serious religious character a whackadoo murderess? 

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