If I were being kind and assuming the point was to increase our empathy for Doggett, didn’t we already have that and did we have to see her degraded and treated like a piece of meat by donuts in the last episode and then brutalized over and over again during this episode?

If I were being cynical, I would wonder if it was intended to entertain, and that would just be sad and wrong.

Part of what is supposed to be, according to Jenji, the core mission of this show is to see prisoners as human beings and as more than their crimes. Part of seeing even fictional characters as human beings is to treat them with dignity. This doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen to them, but when these bad things happen it shouldn’t seem unnecessary or gratuitous.

I will say that I have a great deal of respect for Taryn Manning as an actor. These scenes were made even harder to watch by her incredible and courageous performance.

Between the Morello, Piper, Sophia, Daya, and especially the Doggett storylines in this episode it really made me question my support for this show (which made it even harder to have to watch the brutality again).

This is one of the few episodes which really made me deeply question my support for the show. If there had been many more episodes like this one I would have quit watching.

Wage Exploitation

By now, I suspect you know that prisoner’s get paid pennies an hour.

Last week I was responding to a post on Linkedin about a group of prisoner’s banding together to donate a pretty hefty sum to hurricane relief.

I said something like, “even more amazing when you remember they get paid pennies per hour.”

Like clockwork, someone chimed in with “I wonder how much their victim’s get paid?”

Sigh.

First of all, prison is a truly awful and brutal place, trust me, there is plenty of punishment to go around. For all of you folks who think that prison should be brutal, don’t you worry, it really is (also not everyone in prison has a victim or did something that would justify brutality even if you believe that an eye for an eye doesn't make us all blind).

I was at a low-security level prison and I saw stabbings and beatings at least once a week for most of my three years of incarceration.

Second, when asked, most victims of even violent crimes, are not huge fans of incarceration, as Danielle Sered (who was just lucky enough to meet last week) explains:

“The fundamental need for safety should not be equated with an appetite for incarceration. Even though incarceration provides some people with a temporary sense of safety from the person who harmed them or satisfies a desire to see someone punished for wrongdoing — or both — many victims find that the incarceration of that person makes them feel less safe. For some, this is because they fear others in the community who may be angry with them for their role in securing the responsible person’s punishment. For others, it is because they know the person who harmed them will eventually come home and they do not believe that he or she will be better for having spent time in prison; to the contrary, they often believe that incarceration will make the person worse. Many victims who live in communities where incarceration is common are often dissatisfied with its results. And even those victims who do want the incarceration of those who hurt them are often disappointed by what it delivers in practice. Many survivors seek incarceration only to find later that it did not make them safe and did not heal them in the way they had anticipated. Even in the context of what could be described as a four-decade media and public education campaign promoting incarceration, the number of victims who see it as an effective remedy is far smaller than public discourse reflects. When it comes to punishment, survivors consistently express a desire for options other than incarceration and an interest in them when they are available. Yet the criminal justice system rarely offers alternatives to prison as responses to violence.”

Third, incarceration doesn’t make us safer.

Let me repeat that...Incarceration doesn’t make us safer.

Don’t take my word for it, here is the evidence from one of the largest meta-analyses of the effects of incarceration ever completed:

"Drawing together the findings from this long journey of scrutiny leads to a surprisingly simple conclusion: the best estimate of the marginal impact of incarceration on crime in the US today is zero. The claims that increasing the severity of incarceration even mildly deters appear weak.After Effects appear to cancel out incapacitation in most contexts. But while zero is my central estimate, I do not view it as certain. On the one hand, the Georgia studies, as reanalyzed here, depart from the rest in not finding harmful crime aftereffects from incarceration. On the other, Mueller-Smith’s formidable study goes strongly the other way: aftereffects do not merely cancel out incapacitation but easily surpass it in magnitude, and mostly likely deterrence as well, so that incarceration increases crime at the margin. Meanwhile, all of the studies reviewed probably leave out most of the crime increase in prison that comes from putting more people there."

Fourth, why should these inmates be castigated for doing something positive either way?

So, given these findings, it seems more than a bit insane to throw around victim's rights as the reason to enforce slave labor wages and continued brutality for brutalities sake. It seems pretty clear that the best way to ensure victims safety is to do our best to train and equip incarcerated people for their return to society.