Kudos to Emmy Rossum for that incredible performance. I used her performance because you are forced to confront her humanity throughout the scene, her performance comes across to me as maintaining her dignity in the face of immense dehumanization and not as "prison porn."

While many of us did not "break down" like this when we were first processed (for fear of being treated like "Fat Fatass" in Shawshank Redemption) I suspect we all felt some variety of everything that shows on her face during that incredible scene.

Anyway, in entering jail or prison, you are purposefully stripped of all dignity and reduced to only the object of control and suspicion. A rogue vessel incapable of dignity, a mad sub-human being to control and tame (and sometimes abuse, insult, and degrade).

I remember having my plea bargain thrown out by the judge and being taken immediately to a cell inside the prison itself. I remember being bussed to the jail (where I stayed for about a month before being taken to prison) where I was searched in a similar manner to what you see in that clip.

After jail was Prison Quarantine, a facility where they spend another month evaluating what security level you should be placed at and what programming you will need before being eligible for parole.

When I first entered "Quarantine" seemingly 100's of us were "processed" again physically only this time inspected more like cattle in a pen before a show.

Later I was repeatedly groped by a prison doctor during my "physical" as he repeatedly told me that I was "not going to do well in prison."

When you are in quarantine, the central prison processing facility, in order to get you "prepared" for prison life you are treated like prisoners at the high-level detention facilities. Approximately 20 hours a day in a cell, exercise on the yard every other day for around an hour and treated to a constant stream of abuse by the guards 24/7.

On my last night in quarantine, a guard came to my cell to ensure that my duffle was correctly sealed, and he said that he saw that I "read lots of books" and he told me that I shouldn't be worried, even if people might violently extort me to make me get books for the other prisoners.

This was a pretty typical guard-prisoner interaction at Quarantine.

I remember another time, on the prison yard walking with another inmate who had been convicted of a Romeo and Juliet crime (a sex crime involving two consenting sexual partners who are not far apart in age but one is legal and the other is underaged) and hearing the guards call out what he had been convicted of to all the other prisoners on the yard (sex crimes make you a target for abuse in most prisons).

After quarantine, when we were moved from facility to facility (a process that happens on a semi-regular basis to almost all inmates in Michigan), we were all driven to a central transportation hub where we were literally kept in a series of dog pens, 20 to 30 in a pen shackled, with only Tupperware jugs standing in for a toilet and one bench for sitting.

Depending on when (or if) your transport arrived, you could stand (or sit) like human dogs in a kennel for hours. Only you are really treated worse than dogs because your hands and feet are shackled at the same time.

Anyway., the process of "becoming" incarcerated attempts to reduce you to ONLY to the worst moment of your entire life. To define you literally as only being capable of the worst things you have ever done.

The look on every face in that opening sequence screams in opposition to that idea.

You don't know us.

Fuck you.

And that also fully explains why I hate "prison porn."

Why is Orange the New Black?