ABSTRACT
While recognizing and engaging in critiques of the Orange Is the New Black franchise (including the memoir and the highly problematic marketing campaign for the Netflix series), this chapter argues that the connection between actual incarceration and a shift in freedoms in the “free” world drives this series to resonate with viewers powerfully. In a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, a country that was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2017, a country practicing family separation at the U.S./Mexico border, it’s fairly clearly that individual freedoms are not as readily available in this country as our national narrative would have the world believe. This contradiction crops up several times in this series. This blatant challenge to the idea of freedom, juxtaposed with the myriad other social critiques posed by this show, highlights the fact that what the characters in this series call into question is not just the rights afforded to incarcerated people, but the rights allowed to all citizens of the United States.
