Six shows to watch if you are an 'OITNB' fan
Orange Is the New Black, one of Netflix's noted Original series, chronicles the lives of incarcerated women in a minimum-security federal prison, later shifted to a maximum-security one. It dealt with many things: LGBTQ issues, corruption inside jails, and death of inmates due to negligence, among others. If you're itching for more such similar shows, here are the top 6 series you can catch.
A life in jail is anyway tough to imagine, but if it's in a foreign country, it's a different torture altogether. Netflix's Inside World's Toughest Prisons takes us through the insides of the world's most volatile jails, like Danli Prison in Honduras, the murder capital of the world, Piotrkow Prison, Poland, El Hongo maximum security prison, one of Mexico's toughest jails, and the likes.
This documentary, having 47-minute-long episodes, started on April 20, 2016. The Season 1 was presented by Irish investigative journalist Paul Connolly, while the next two were hosted by Raphael Rowe, also a scribe, but a former convict too, who was accused of murder and multiple robberies. When you finish all the spine-chilling episodes, you realize prisons/prisoners would never look the same to you.
Another Netflix documentary, lasting some 57 minutes, talks about Halden Prison in Norway, where the focus is solely on rehabilitation and normalcy. Its warden, Jan Strømnes, takes a tour of Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York, which "breeds a dysfunctional person," he says. Observing this, he urges the authorities to adopt a different approach, by not compromising on humanity.
Described as "Orange Is the New Black for a 13 Reasons Why generation," by Nick Rigg, executive producer of docu-series, Girls Incarcerated talks about young girls who are behind bars in two juvenile correctional facilities in Indiana. Having a lot of teenage drama, this one shows how these girls are trying hard to turn their lives around, alongside battling their own demons.
For die-hard Orange Is the New Black fans, Women Behind Bars will be a treat, and a repeat of their favorite show. It follows a woman who gets jailed after being framed for shoplifting, and it is here that she meets a former prostitute, and an African-American who has murdered her abusive husband. The 1987 sitcom ran for 13 episodes, and just one season.
Another TV docu-film, Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail showcases the Miami-Dade County jail system. Presented by British journalist Louis Theroux, it shows us how inmates, when held up in cage-like dwellings, turn out to be literal beasts, and start believing that in the end, sheer brute force wins the day. About his experience, Theroux had said, "It's a bit like walking through a zoo."
Fox's uber-popular television serial drama, Prison Break revolves around two brothers, Lincoln Burrows and Michael Scofield, with the latter trying to break Burrows from a jail, as he believes in his innocence. It ran for five seasons, and covered many aspects of jail life: Bitterness and inter-personal relationships among inmates, sexual abuse by senior prisoners, gang war, jail construction, investigations, and jailbreaks, among others.
