OITNB S4 E8 “Friends In Low Places” was about:

* Piper coping with being an outcast and having been branded. Ultimately, she tells Vause, Nicky, and Red who end up altering her brand so that it no longer is a swastika.

Piper also finds out that her brother Cal is having a baby with his wife Neeri. It seems clear that while she is very happy for Cal, she wonders how her idiot brother has done so much better at the game of life than she has.

Piper seems ready to accept that she should never have tried to be a gangster (thank God). She also finds out that Vause murdered Cubra’s enforcer and tries crack with Nicky and Vause.

* Red getting many of her toiletries and her beloved mirror stolen. She eventually figures out that they were stolen by Nicky who uses them "in trade" to purchase drugs. Nicky shares her drugs with Vause and Piper and also goes out of her way to make Morello paranoid about Vinnie and infidelity (which is truly cruel given Morello’s history).

Morello talks her sister into going to check in on Vinnie (what could go wrong?).

* Yoga Jones turning into a Judy King parasite and, in the process, turning against many of her long-held values and beliefs in order to use Judy King’s celebrity to procure items from the prison administration.

* Judy King figuring out, with the help of Poussey, a way to obliterate the story of her racist past. She has a picture taken of her kissing Cindy on the lips for Taystee and her crew to sell to the paparazzi.

* More fun with “vocational training” as the women are induced to dig the foundation for the new prison building. Boo figures out she can use lesbian stereotypes to get out of work (she pretends to fix broken construction equipment (while everyone else works).

* Maritza wants to quit being the mule for Maira’s panty operation. She asks Maria if she can quit and Maria threatens violence against her if she quits. Maria takes over Sophia’s barber shop (salon) and uses it as a front for selling drugs.

At the same time, Aleida is attempting to use the salon as a place where she can hone her talents doing peoples nails (because she is due to be released soon). She gets frustrated that Maria is going to mess up her release with the drugs in the salon (Maria doesn’t care).

* Donuts apologizing to Doggett and telling her that he wishes he had not sexually assaulted her. As much as I believe in Restorative Justice (a mechanism for someone guilty of a crime to admit fault and apologize for what they did to a victim of a crime)...This was hard to watch (perhaps because there is still a massive power imbalance inherent in the discussion.

* Crystal Burset approaching Caputo at home (with Linda from purchasing). Crystal is begging for information on Sophia and Linda pulls a gun and threatens to shoot her if she doesn’t leave Caputo’s property. Caputo, in a sign of just how far he has fallen, says that Linda’s actions were “so hot.”

Caputo talks a good game about feeling guilty, but he is totally complicit in all of the bad things happening at Litchfield.

Private Prisons and FOIA

Crystal Bursett complains to Capito that MCC is using their status as a corporation to block her attempts to use the Freedom of Information Act to get information about Sophia’s condition in the segregated housing unit.

Unfortunately, this is also a real thing. Private prisons are not covered under FOIA which applies only to state entities. As Lauren Brooke Eisen explained in her 2017 book “Inside Private Prisons”

“One of the reasons we know so little <about private prisons> is because private prisons are far less transparent than their public counterparts. When things go wrong, private prisons have every incentive to cover it up. A public prison - no matter how horrible the scandal - will never lose a contract, a private prison will. Worse, perhaps, private prisons are not covered by FOIA and open records laws (except in a few states) as are functions of government. Without the ability to file FOIA and open records requests, the public cannot learn the most basic information about what life is like inside these facilities (p. 180-181).

When you consider that a private prison corporation literally holds the power of life and death over their inmates, granting them the power to literally have zero public accountability seems both incredibly irresponsible and hugely profitable for private prisons. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and private prisons are allowed to do whatever they want to inmates with almost no ability for the public to ensure that they are running these facilities in an ethical manner.