It's sardine time,” says Aleida Diaz (Elizabeth Rodriguez), scanning the overcrowded cafeteria at Litchfield Penitentiary in the Season 4 premiere of “Orange Is the New Black.” “We a for-profit prison now. We ain’t people no more. We bulk items.”
When the series, created by Jenji Kohan and based loosely on Piper Kerman’s memoir, debuted on Netflix three years ago, interest in subjects like the privatization of prisons was largely confined to academics, activists and journalists.
Not anymore. The dramedy, which returned to Netflix on Friday, has turned once-obscure policy issues into binge-watching fodder. The series has racked up four Emmys, four SAG Awards and a Peabody, and reliably lights up social media when each new season drops en masse.
The show and its popularity reflect a growing public awareness around the problems of mass incarceration (2.2 million people behind bars in the United States, according to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics), and its disproportionate effects on communities of color.
Last July, President Obama visited a federal prison — the first sitting president to do so — for “Fixing the System,” a special about mass incarceration for HBO’s “Vice” series. Two months later, Pope Francis blessed inmates at an overcrowded Philadelphia jail.
[For more of this story, written by Meredith Blake, go to http://www.latimes.com/enterta...0616-snap-story.html]
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