The Jailers Play Fantasy Inmate, Just Like Politicians

The sixth season of “Orange Is the New Black” is exceedingly difficult to watch. But that’s because any realistic presentation of prison life is painful (several prison guards have told me it is real enough to qualify as realistic).

No one really wants to think about prison. It’s easy to put out of one’s mind, unpleasant to look at. It’s been this way since the ancient world, and hence the exhortation of Jesus not to forget about them, which is what we are inclined to do.

Orange is a powerful show, but it’s not entirely easy to account for its popularity. It very well could trace to our current reality. Families deal with sons and daughters, nephews and cousins, in prison. Friends have friends in prison. If any country in the world could qualify as Prison Nation, apart from outright totalitarian states, it would be the US.

US incarceration rates have declined a bit from a decade ago, but are still the highest in the world – 0.7% of the population and a quarter of the world’s prisoners. These days almost everyone knows of a case of tragedy resulting from a loved one who has gotten mixed up with the criminal justice system.

Season Six

[What follows might contain what are called spoilers. I’ve never been a good judge of precisely what those are. I’ve done my best not to reveal plot twists that rely on surprise.]

Now, in its sixth season on Netflix, each has provided an insight into power relationships that have implications for life on the outside as well. I’ve marvelled at how the show portrays the capacity of people, even in prison, with the whole of their lives scripted and dictated by overlords, to figure out how to create complex patterns of social interaction and personal relationships. It’s such a remarkable tribute to the power of the human mind to resist power, and a tribute to how power itself can never fully control even a small-scale society such as one finds in prison.

Past seasons have also shown us the path to the ascendancy of power within the prison population itself. Hierarchies will always be with us, even among imprisoned equals. Conflicts begin. An authoritative figure shows up to solve them through a combination of blackmail, bribes, promises of security, and overall fixer-style gravitas. People acquiesce and submit. The abuse begins. The plot to overthrow the leader does too.

There is a sense in which the entire show isn’t really about prison. It is about us and our political and economic relationships. Here is where the newest season really excels.

The backstories of the prisoners have tended to make the prisoners extremely sympathetic. You gain the impression that society as a whole would be vastly better off if none of these people were here but instead were out and about doing work, caring for families, and living good lives. What put them in a cage was a combination of temporarily poor judgment plus bad luck. There but for the grace of God go I.

However, that outlook is too simple. This season opens in the aftermath of a prison riot begun and ended in the last one. Just as the modern state cannot tolerate fundamental challenges to its power, and must rain down hell on movements that pose a real threat to power, so too it is with prison riots. They must be punished else the entire prison industrial complex is in danger.

They are all transferred from a low-security prison to a maximum security prison, and here we meet the people we all think of as deserving of prison, if not for justice then at least to protect society from unhinged malice. Thus are these women, mostly guilty of low-level crimes, exposed to some of the baddest of the bad. The backstory of the two sisters killing a younger sister – a young women of such great achievement that she entices envy among the siblings – is one of the most horrifying I’ve seen on film.

It’s so terrible that I wish I could unwatch it. And it really does raise the question: what is society to do with such people? You come away from the show with a profound awareness of the corruption of prison life, but we are not really given a sense of what the alternative would be. What’s fascinating, however, is the unfolding of the plot that shows that even in prison the worst really do rise to the top, not only among prisoners but also among guards.

Fantasy Inmate

The great achievement of this season is an extremely clever device dreamed up by the producers to gamify the daily grind of the correctional officers in the maximum security prison. The officers start a game called Fantasy Inmate, obviously based on fantasy sports games. The idea is to regard inmate behavior as a sport. You choose teams. Every infraction leads to points for the players.

A series fan site lists the rules follows. All point-earning events must be witnessed by a third party in order to count. All mid-season trades must be approved by the commissioner. You can’t wield overt interference, Influencing, coercing, manipulating inmate behavior in order to gain points. But this rule is obviously flexible. Guards want to win.

The scoring is based on misbehavior of some sort: sexual, emotional, and physical. If your team member gets bulimia, you get 1 point per vomit. Nighttime crying is 2 points. A failed suicide attempt yields 10 points. A successful suicide is 20 points. Gang altercations yield 10, murder 30 points, escape is 40 points, pregnancy is 9 points, and so on.

Yes, it is ghastly, and not unrealistic. What’s the point? Entertainment, to be sure. Guards are also people and they have found themselves in a pathological environment. They are looking for something interesting and competitive to give their lives meaning.

But there is more to it than that. At one point, a guard explains, and I’m paraphrasing. Have you noticed that no guards at this institution have been harmed much less killed? Have you not observed that the guards are not aggressively disobeyed or threatened? There is a reason for this. Because of Fantasy Inmate, he says, they have figured out a way to keep the prisoners turned against each other, organized in tribes, internally focussed on their own conflicts, he says. So long as this is true, the guards and the prison management is safe. Keep the prisoners turned on each other and away from the real problem of their captors and they are not a threat to the overall system.

Wow.

The Racket Revealed

At one point, an inmate discovers the scoring sheets for the game. She tries to reveal them to the other inmates and show that all the divisions between them are being constructed to feed into this elaborate and sick game being played by the correctional officers. She tries to alert others, but she is found out by a guard and put into solitary confinement for a period of weeks.

Now, I’m used to watching Orange with an allegorical eye. All the major themes in this show are not really about prison life but rather about our lives in a society ruled by power.

What does Fantasy Inmate say about our political system? We are bombarded daily with reasons why should fear our fellow citizens and foreigners. We are sliced and diced by the political class according to race, gender, heritage, geography, religion, and another hundred traits of human life. We are encouraged to tribalize according to these traits. This is bleeding into our social media and our private lives.

Divided by Politics

This tendency is getting worse with each election. We choose the media we watch based on our personal identity while demonizing the other. The tendency is as bad on the left as it is on the right. Every group today has its litany of good guys and bad guys based on political allegiance.

Does it have to be this way? We are all captive of an elaborate game of Fantasy Citizen. In this game, the political parties pick their teams, foment conflict, reward points for infractions and altercations, and walk away with the spoils. What if instead we suddenly realized that sociology of conflict has all been orchestrated by our overlords? What if we stopped being manipulated we could get along, find value in each other, cooperate together, and find ways to make life better rather than always treating life as a zero-sum game?

Now, I’m pretty sure the following paragraph is a spoiler.

United by Peaceful Games

The guards have played this game so well that the entire prison has become tribalized by arbitrary geography (a basis of nationalism): cell B vs. cell C. It’s utterly absurd but very real. The plan, hatched by captains of the teams, was for a kickball match (a normally peaceful and fun game) to become the final violent showdown.

Then a beautiful moment occurs. One inmate mixes up the teams, confusing people about their loyalties. A ball is kicked and flies into the air. An outfielder has a choice to pull out a knife and rush a teammate or drop the knife and catch the play and have fun. She chooses to catch the ball. She chose fun over blood, cooperation over conflict, life over death.

That scene alone made the whole season worth the absurd amount of time it takes to watch a series like this. It is such a beautiful tribute to the liberal vision. We can all put down our weapons, and refuse to be used as team members in someone else’s game, and just have fun while finding value in each other. If we did that, what are our social correctional officers going to do? As Etienne de la Boetie said, their power over us evaporates.

Season six of Orange is painful but doesn’t disappoint. It once again shows itself to be one of the great allegories of sound political economy and libertarian sociology available on new media today.

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