Spoiler alert: if the following questions intrigue you, you are caught up on Netflix's Orange is the New Black – and you're probably as excited as I am that season two has finally arrived.

Did Piper kill Pennsatucky? Has her fiancé really left her for good? Will she get back in bed with Alex and, if she does, to whom will Nicky turn for solace? Will Pornstache try to take Daya's baby? Will Taystee ever make it on the outside? If Piper really did kill Pennsatucky, will the time added to her sentence mean we'll soon be looking forward to a season three?

Reality alert: the United States female prison population has increased 800% in the last three decades. During that same period, the male prison population also exploded, but only at half the rate of the female one. The result is that today, the US imprisons more women than any other country in the world, two-thirds of whom are low-level, non-violent offenders guilty of crimes of poverty and addiction. They are our real-life Taystees and Pousses and Dayas – small-time offenders who rob stores, or forge checks, or use or sell drugs to feed a habit or feed their kids – and their languishing costs you hundreds of millions of dollars.

So let's all emerge from our binge-watching and ask a different question: what, exactly, are we achieving with America's great experiment in mass incarceration?

To which you might ask: what about the psychopaths and the murderers and the child abusers?

For now, prison may be our best available option to deal with these kinds of criminals. But when you consider the life circumstances of the women who tend to get locked up – 57% have a history of sexual or physical abuse, 64% do not have a high school diploma, 74% regularly used drugs, and they're 16 times more likely than the general population to have a mental illness – adding a prison sentence to the mix doesn't just seem cruel, it's downright stupid.

There is a better way.

The Women's Prison Association is a New York-based advocacy group that recently developed an incarceration alternative called "Justice Home", which is designed to help female offenders address the underlying issues that led them to commit their crimes, instead of simply packing them off to prison. The impetus behind this and other WPA programs, its executive director Georgia Lerner told me recently, is that prison is simply a way-too-expensive non-solution to very real social problems:

Prisons were designed to confine people and keep them alive, and not much else. We lock people up, strip them of all authority over themselves, disempower them in a very real way – and then expect them to be able to function in the community after they are released. It simply doesn't work.

Indeed, if the intention really is to "correct and rehabilitate" our female prisoners, then we might as well be flushing taxpayer money down the toilet. In New York alone, one-third of women released each year are back in prison within three years.

Just take the case of Bridgette Gibbs, a veteran of the US criminal justice system whose story would work neatly as background for many of the characters in Orange is the New Black.

Gibbs was molested as a child and physically abused as an adult. She turned to drugs to ease the pain. Her subsequent addiction led to a prison sentence, and that sentence exacerbated her addiction. When she was released after serving nearly three years in upstate New York, Gibbs found herself on the streets with no job, no money and no more custody of her four children. She turned back to using again - so much for correct and rehabilitate.

Desperate to get her children back, Gibbs managed to kick her habit. But as long as she was unemployed and virtually homeless, no judge was going to return her kids. The WPA and other city agencies assisted her in finding suitable housing and a job and, although it took several years, the Gibbs family finally reunited.

I met Gibbs recently on the university campus where she is now studying for a bachelor's degree. "I like this life better," she told me. Because she eventually got the help she needed – counseling, therapy and some financial aid - her story had a happy ending. But how much more efficient would it have been – how much more humane – if she had gotten that help before prison, instead of all those years after her release?

Orange is the New Black is fascinating because of the intrigue of a fish out of water, a woman coping with an alien environment – plus maybe the lesbian sex. But it also manages to communicate the central message of the real-life Piper Kerman's memoir upon which it's based: that while prison may make some offenders regret their wrongdoing, it only exacerbates the circumstances that led many of them to offend in the first place. It's offensive that it takes a TV show to remind us.

Real prisons weren't designed to accommodate white, upper middle-class ladies with college degrees like Kerman. A new report out last week found that 59% of the US prison population is black or hispanic, despite those ethnic groups making up 29% of the population. And while Kerman's very middle class-ness may have made her prison experience that much more challenging, it provided her with a support system that made her post-prison life a whole lot easier.

The vast majority of Kerman's fellow inmates – real and fictional – have no such support. They are even more disadvantaged when they get out than prior to their incarceration. Now that we're sending so many hundreds of thousands of women to prison ever year, this isn't just a problem that belongs in society's margins – it is an epidemic that affects us all.

So I don't mind paying a small subscription fee to watch a semi-autobiographical, Netflix-ized version of the chaos that is our misguided prison overcrowding and re-entry morass. But when it comes to the real world, I'd rather not be paying my taxes to ruin someone else's life.