I was scrolling through Facebook Reels and saw a bunch of Orange Is the New Black clips. I’ve watched the whole series before, so I know the backstories.
And I noticed something that hit me different this time…
Almost every major female character had a man in their backstory — as if that’s the real reason they ended up in prison.
A cheating boyfriend
An abusive partner
A manipulative guy from their past
Or, “I only did it because I was in love”
Even Piper — who literally smuggled drug money — gets framed like she was just a naive romantic swept into trouble by her girlfriend’s “dangerous lifestyle.”
Now sure, a handful of characters really did have messed-up situations where someone else’s actions pushed them into crime. But the pattern was clear:
The writers wanted almost every woman’s crime to have an external villain. Rarely was prison portrayed as the direct result of her own bad choices.
Here’s the problem with that narrative — and it’s not just TV:
In real life, a lot of inmates (men and women) rewrite their history the same way.
“If it weren’t for them…”
“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time…”
“They pushed me into it…”
When your story makes you the victim instead of the decision-maker, you avoid the very thing that rehabilitation requires: taking responsibility.
Prisons already fail at rehabilitation for a lot of reasons — lack of education programs, toxic environments, overcrowding. But when someone’s mindset is, “I’m here because of someone else,” they leave with the same patterns that put them there.
So maybe Orange Is the New Black wasn’t just entertainment. Maybe it accidentally showed us one of the biggest reasons people leave prison unchanged.
The question is: Was the show reflecting reality… or training the audience to excuse it?