Circa 2,4 milioni di persone negli Stati Uniti, più di uno per cento della popolazione adulta, sono attualmente incarcerati. Entro la fine del 2011, circa 7 milioni di americani (uno su ogni 34 adulti) erano o nelle prigioni federali, statali e locali  o in libertà vigilata su parole. Se questa infelice “popolazione” fosse uno Stato, sarebbe il tredicesimo più grande negli Stati Uniti, oiù di b Washington o del Massachusetts.

Gli Stati Uniti hanno il più alto tasso di carcerazione del pianeta. le autorità americane imprigionano 17 volte  più persone di  Islanda, 12 volte  più  del  Giappone e quasi cinque volte di più di  Inghilterra e Galles. Con meno del cinque per cento della popolazione mondiale, gli Stati Uniti hanno il 23,5 per cento della popolazione in galera . Dal 1980 la popolazione carceraria americana è quadruplicato.

L’élite al potere negli Stati Uniti, non  può o non vuole offrire una risposta progressista ai problemi della povertà, senza fissa dimora e  disuguaglianza sociale, trova una “soluzione”, nel suo modo tipico stupido, crudele e miope, imprigionando le persone in numeri da record.

Il cosiddetto “sistema di correzione”, questa vergogna nazionale, rappresenta senza dubbio una caratteristica essenziale della vita americana, e come tale è destinata a trovare espressione nella cultura popolare in una forma o nell’altra. Tuttavia, con poche eccezioni,  la cultura, in particolare la televisione e il cinema, descrive i detenuti come animali pericolosi selvatici, e le guardie, poliziotti e pubblici ministeri come i protettori giusti dei normali cittadini rispettosi della legge.

……

La grande forza di Orange è la sua volontà di umanizzare un ampio segmento della società che è stato spinto  fuori sia dalla società ufficiale che dai media. Il successo della serie sta nel rappresentare queste donne espressi-off, le loro imperfezioni, le loro istanze di compassione e genuinità. In questo , arancio rappresenta una tendenza positiva. Si spera p meglio per approfondire le situazioni dei personaggi, e in  meno banalità, nella terza stagione, attualmente in produzione,

Netflix’s Orange is the New Black: Humanity inside a US women’s prison

By Ed Hightower
20 June 2014

Some 2.4 million people in the United States, more than one percent of the adult population, are presently incarcerated. By the end of 2011, some 7 million Americans (one out of every 34 adults) were either in federal, state and local prisons and jails or on probation and parole. If that unhappy “population” were a state, it would be the thirteenth largest in the US, just ahead of Washington and Massachusetts.

The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. As a proportion of the population, American authorities imprison 17 times as many people as Iceland’s, 12 times as many as Japan’s and almost five times as many as authorities in England and Wales. With less than five percent of the world’s population, the US has 23.5 percent of the global prison and jail population. Since 1980 the American prison population has quadrupled.

The ruling elite in the US, unable or unwilling to offer any progressive answer to the problems of poverty, homelessness and social inequality, finds a “solution,” in its typically stupid, cruel and shortsighted manner, by locking people up in record numbers.

The so-called “correctional system,” this national disgrace, unquestionably represents an essential feature of American life, and as such is bound to find expression in popular culture in one form or another. However, with few exceptions, that culture, especially television and film, depicts prisoners as dangerous wild animals, and the guards, police and prosecutors as the righteous protectors of normal, law-abiding citizens.

(One can hardly keep track of the number of television shows featuring police, federal agents, detectives and prosecutors as heroes, not infrequently placed in a positive light for playing fast and loose with civil liberties, beating confessions out of suspects etc.)

Standing in sharp and creditable contrast to this is the Netflix original drama Orange is the New Black, based on a memoir by former inmate Piper Kerman, who acts as an executive consultant for the show. The show was created by Jenji Kohan (born 1969), best known previously as the creator of Weeds (2005-2012), featuring Mary-Louise Parker as a middle-class, suburban housewife who becomes a marijuana dealer to maintain her lifestyle.

Orange Is The New Black

The protagonist in Orange is the New Black is a fictionalized version of Kerman, one Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a thirty-something, upper-middle-class free spirit who, ten years ago, in her “after college looking-for-adventure phase,” dated and assisted international drug runner Alex Vause (Laura Prepon, best known for her role in That Seventies Show ). Vause has been picked up by police, and snitches on Chapman in return for a lesser sentence. Chapman pleads to a lesser charge in exchange for a 14-month sentence. Chapman is preparing to report for her sentence as Season One begins, savoring the last hours of freedom.

Since her breakup with Vause, Chapman has attempted to settle into a life more typical for her social class, with some complications. She is trying to set up a boutique bath soap business with her best friend. She gets engaged to her understanding and likable boyfriend, an aspiring writer, played by Jason Biggs ( American Pie ).

Without recounting too many details, Season One of Orange had many characters and subplots portrayed in a generally realistic way.

A recovering heroin addict befriends Alex Vause, the former heroin trafficker. A transgender individual, who engaged in identity theft to pay for a sex-change operation, goes to jail only to be denied the hormones she needs to remain outwardly female. Her struggle to stay sane is genuine and heartfelt. A yoga instructor, we learn, carries enormous guilt, fighting for some peace of mind knowing that she accidentally shot and killed a young child years before. The stories may appear farfetched at times or perhaps even clichéd in some cases, but Orange wins the viewer over: these are real people living in a cage. The series deals with them as human beings in difficult circumstances.

Certain parts of Season One are memorable, such as when the protagonist confesses, “I consider myself to be more of a secular humanist,” as she refuses to be baptized by a methamphetamine addict turned abortion-clinic-shooting fundamentalist. The overtly critical approach to religion, alongside a sympathetic treatment of secularism, is as unique in America television as it is refreshing.

In short, season one was an achievement.

By the beginning of Season Two, Chapman has been sent for her second stint in solitary because of a fight with another inmate. The first episode of Season Two is remarkable for the sense of terror and uncertainty around solitary confinement and Chapman’s subsequent transport to a maximum-security facility. The plane ride makes a chilling reference to the US government’s practice of extraordinary rendition, i.e., flying supposed terrorism suspects to CIA-run “black sites” where they will be tortured or perhaps killed.

By and large, Season Two continues to underscore the same themes in a revealing, critical manner. With few exceptions, the characters—guards, inmates and those on the outside who are missing them—come across as real people. Season Two does not obsess over the protagonist, but uses her as a means of exploring the penal system and the lower tiers of the social ladder. Orange is not a show about one person’s miserable, terrifying experience. It is a show that brings prison to life, with all the good, the bad and the ugly.

Prison conditions feature prominently once again, highlighting the inescapable cruelty of a system obsessed with retribution and at best indifferent to human problems. One inmate, a cancer patient, dies because the prison system will not pay for her to have a double salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of the fallopian tubes and ovaries). A guidance counselor explains to her that the prison administration is convinced that chemotherapy is sufficient.

Shower drains repeatedly back up, sending sewage into shower stalls and bathrooms. In one episode, heavy rains flood the basement and first floor of the prison. Everyone is forced to sleep on the floor in a large room on one of the upper stories. In a humanizing moment, one inmate begins singing the 1990s pop music hit “Stay” by Lisa Loeb, and all the other inmates join in. Two prisoners rush to save the books in the library from ruin. In the vast majority of these women, and collectively too, there is a spark of life than won’t be snuffed out so easily, even in dreadful conditions.

In one of the more touching subplots in Season Two, a group of older inmates tries to protect one of their friends from becoming a victim of “compassionate release,” which is a euphemism for letting an older, mentally ill inmate onto the streets to beg and, sooner or later, die. “I give it a week,” one of the older women concludes as the friend is forced into a van and driven away, screaming.

Season Two of Orange continues to use flashbacks to explain the inmates’ lives and reveal the circumstances that shaped them. As before, these back-stories tend to be the best portions of the show, making the inmates believable and sympathetic. The mentally ill “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo Aduba) is merely Suzanne, a little girl who was adopted, whose parents subsequently had the biological child they always wanted, and placed enormous pressure on her to be normal. It proved too much for Suzanne, despite her parents’ best intentions.

In the case of another inmate, Lorna (Yael Stone), the back-story reveals a young girl who was in fact never engaged, as she claimed, but rather obsessed with a man whom she stalked. In a convincing manner, Orange shows how Lorna was a victim of romantic comedies and other pop culture nonsense, which led her to obsess about the perfect love, perfect first date, marriage etc. As her friend succinctly puts it, Lorna is a victim of “the wedding-industrial complex.” To anyone familiar with American pop culture—perhaps the reader is aware of such “reality” shows as “Say Yes to the Dress”—Lorna’s plight rings painfully true.

To be sure, Season Two of Orange is not a dramatic masterpiece. At times the dialogue feels contrived, if not stereotyped. Worse, there are elements of the plot that strike one as altogether implausible. It sometimes feels as though the show’s producers were trying to trick audience members into watching the following episode, prodding them to wonder, “What’s going to happen next!?” The cliffhanger-driven parts of the plot are unnecessary and detrimental.

Still more problematic is the tendency to portray a central character in Season Two as a purely evil figure. The character, known as Vee (Lorraine Toussaint), is a career criminal who strives for power at the top of the inmates’ pecking order, a disgusting and pathetic undertaking. In her climb to the top, Vee exacerbates racial divisions, sows discontent among erstwhile friends and takes advantage of the weak, as seen in the case of the mentally ill Suzanne. For all her wretchedness, Vee has no back-story in Season Two, as opposed to the other characters, who by and large seem three-dimensional and lifelike.

The great strength of Orange is its willingness to humanize a large segment of society that is written off by both official society and the media. The show’s success lies in representing these cast-off women, their imperfections, their instances of compassion and genuineness. In this regard, Orange represents a healthy trend. One hopes for more probing of the characters’ situations, and less banalities, in Season Three, now in production.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/20/oran-j20.html

Carcere femminile
in Italia serie tv Usa

19/05/2014

Arriva a settembre in Italia su Mya la serie tv cult in Usa dal titolo ‘Orange Is The New Black’ che racconta, a metà tra dramma e black comedy, la vita in un carcere femminile statunitense.

Arriva a settembre in Italia su Mya la serie tv cult in Usa dal titolo ‘Orange Is The New Black’ che racconta,  a metà tra dramma e black comedy, la vita in un carcere femminile statunitense.

Si tratta di uno dei titoli seriali di cui la stampa americana si è occupata maggiormente nell’ultima stagione, sia per i temi affrontati che per l’alta qualità di messa in scena. ‘La serie indaga sull’auto-distruzione e sulla brutalità che si annida anche nell’animo femminile – ha dichiarato l’ideatrice Kohan – la prigione è solo un megafono di questo aspetto’.

La storia, ambientata all’interno di un carcere femminile, racconta le vicende di Piper Chapman, una donna del Connecticut che viene condannata a scontare 15 mesi nella prigione federale di Litchfield per aver trasportato una valigia piena di soldi per conto di una trafficante di droga internazionale un tempo sua amante. Guarda caso quest’ultima finisce nello stesso carcere di Piper.

Tra i riconoscimenti si contano un People’s Choice Award, un Peabody Award e il recentissimo GLAAD Award, l’Oscar assegnato dalla comunità gay. Jodie Foster dirige il terzo episodio della serie che in questi giorni è stata rinnovata per la terza stagione. Le due interpreti principali, la bionda Taylor Schilling e la bruna Laura Prepon, sono diventate in patria icone di stile e idoli della comunità lesbo. La serie vanta per la prima volta un transgender negli interpreti principali. Il tema musicale, ‘You’ve got Time’, è eseguito da Regina Spektor.

http://www.gazzettadelsud.it/news//92602/Carcere-femminile–in-Italia-serie.html