"How 'Orange Is the New Black' Misrepresents Women's Federal Prison and Why It Matters"

"while it may not make for an exciting backstory, six in 10 women in real federal prison are there for nonviolent drug crimes. For every woman who has committed murder there are 99 drug offenders. Almost none of the 99 are international drug smugglers like Alex Vause; most of the women incarcerated for crack cocaine or methamphetamine were caught with less than 100 grams, the weight of an average bar of soap. Many sold small amounts of drugs to support their own addiction or, like Taystee and Daya, worked as a low-level assistant in a relative's operation...

We only see a couple of mothers on the show, but in real federal prison four in five women have children, and over half have kids under 18...

While Crazy Eyes, Jimmy and Lorna are the only characters who display any mental health issues on the show, in reality 62 percent of all women in federal prison suffer mental health problems...

women's prisons barely existed 30 years ago. There are 10 times as many women in prison today as there were in 1980, an explosion twice as large as that of the male prison population. With one twentieth of the world's population, we now have a quarter of the world's male prisoners and a third of the world's female prisoners"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amos-irwin/how-orange-is-the-new-black-misrepresents-womens-federal-prison-and-why-it-matters_b_7547334.html

Prison reform prison reform whyyy