Image courtesy of www.mashable.com
June 6th marks the season premiere of season two of Orange is the New Black, and while you’ve been re-watching all the episodes of season one at rapid fire to prepare yourself, you’ve probably started feeling like you might actually be able to survive, should you ever find yourself incarcerated. Here are a few ways OITNB makes prison life seem very much like real, everyday life.
- Women’s prisons are like sorority houses. Unlike most other crime dramas, prisoners in OITNB live with a “cell mate,” but it’s really just a room where the women can move freely between cells.
- WAC (Women’s Advisory Council) is a lot like your high school student council. You hear about it a lot, the elections seem like a big deal, but they just seem to get perks that you don’t. In the end you realize it doesn’t really affect you.
- Everyone on the show has a skill they use to help them survive. Even if you don’t know what yours is, if Piper can survive in prison, you feel pretty strongly that you can too.
- Crazy Eyes is the equivalent to just about every guy you’ve ever met downtown. Aggressive, a bit strange, and able to come up with the weirdest pet names and pick up lines you can imagine. By now, you’re probably a pro at brushing off unwanted advances.
- Sam Healy basically embodies that thing your parents used to do to you when you were younger, where they’d pretend to ask you to do something when in reality you never had any choice, only in this case, you’re essentially already grounded without any privileges so it can’t really get much worse.
- Inmates seem to have unlimited access to phones, the showers and the yard. They get to throw parties and have movie nights. Prison is basically a fenced in area where you get to move about freely, and every once in a while a few dudes get to tell you what to do. On the plus side though you don’t have to pay for a phone bill, and you can trade chocolate bar for haircuts.
- You may have thought that in prison you could expect to be subjected to frequent random searches, and most other prison shows support this belief, but in OITNB we only ever see a few. Forget being sneaky; you can just leave things under you mattress or on your bedside table because, according to the show, you actually get one of those.
- Going to prison really just means you get to make at least one new best friend.
- Much like real life, gossip in OITNB spreads at an extraordinary pace. If you’re a gossip queen, this may actually pay off for you. Continue being the one delivering the gossip rather than the subject of the story, and you’re golden.
- According to OITNB, most inmates aren’t actually violent, they’re just kinky.
