Okay, so if you still haven’t gotten around to watching the new season of ‘Orange Is The New Black’, probably click out of this story now, yeah? It’ll spoil some shit for you. SOME REALLY REAL SHIT. For real. Okay? Alright.
If you have, you’ll know that in order to solving some much-needed staffing issues, Litchfield‘s chief warden Joe Caputo agrees to hire veterans as the newest batch of correctional officers.
This goes terribly, terribly wrong. For so many reasons. Most of the new guards are violent and aggressive, with one in particular being scarily vicious and manipulative, seeing the inmates as play things.
At the end of the season, one of the new CO’s tells young officer Bayley, who mishandled and pinned down Poussey which [SPOILER] resulted in her death, about some of the things he did while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan:
“Listen I don’t know if this will help or not, but in Afghanistan I killed some people. Some innocent people.So much time spent chasin’ after the bad guys, and then you don’t get ’em, and then they blow up your friends or shoot up your convoy, and you just get so mad, tired and bored.So you just grab a farm kid from a grape field, and you make him juggle live grenades until one of them blows up. And then you shoot him because you don’t want him to grow up without arms or tell on you.Or maybe you just strangle a girl that you’ve had sex with in a small village because her family’s gonna kill her anyway, right? And you just gotta get over it.You have to get over it. You got so much of your life to live, and we’re so young. We can’t let things like this fuck up the rest of our long lives.”
This is just one example of the kind of characters the veterans/new COs are – and real-life veterans in the United States aren’t happy.
Leading veteran groups such as The Veterans of Foreign Wars and Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans Of America say the show is “offensive”, that it will further stigmatise veterans, and Disabled American Veterans said the show is out of the touch with the reality of the veteran experience.
Dan Clare, the spokesperson for DAV and an Iraq War veteran himself, has spoken out about the series, saying that it airing at a time that vets are coming back from war means it will hinder their transition back into civilian life, especially with finding work.
A young air force veteran, Tahlia Burton, wrote an opinion piece about the show for a military culture website, Task & Purpose. In it, she explains she’d been a huge fan of the show, but after watching season 4, she was “appalled” because veterans are shown as “bloodthirsty, heartless killers and sexists”.
The 27-year-old woman said she doesn’t believe veterans deserve hero status, but should not be portrayed “as a group of monsters”:
“Orange is the New Black had the opportunity to portray veterans in a way that shed light on an identity that’s widely misunderstood.But instead, the show fed into the very worst stereotypes that we’ve been working so hard to overcome.”
Calls have been made from veteran groups from an apology from the show’s writers and producers. Currently, there’s been no response from Netflix or the show’s creators.
Source: Fox News.
Photo: OITNB.
