Transgender issues
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The “T” in LGBT
“Orange Is the New
Black” and transgender
issues in corrections
Photos courtesy JoJo Whilden/Netflix
By Christina L. Carpenter
Sophia Burset, played by transgender actress Laverne Cox, provides
an example of some of the issues and problems transgender inmates
face while incarcerated.
I
n February 2013, the popular DVDby-mail and online streaming
media service provider, Netflix,
began producing its own original
programming. With this, they introduced
the hard-hitting political drama, “House
of Cards,” starring world-renowned actor
Kevin Spacey. Following the success
of “House of Cards,” Netflix premiered
another original production in July 2013,
and it quickly became an international
sensation: “Orange Is the New Black”
(OITNB). Based on the memoir, “Orange
Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s
Prison” by former federal inmate Piper
Kerman, the show tells the story of Piper
Chapman, an upper-middle-class woman
convicted of felony money-laundering
charges years after the event took place.
They sentenced Chapman to 15 months’
incarceration at a fictional federal women’s
prison (Litchfield Penitentiary) in upstate
New York. Throughout her time in prison,
Chapman confronts numerous obstacles,
including her fiance’s infidelity with her
best friend, being incarcerated with her
former girlfriend and co-conspirator, and
navigating a complex web of friendships
and enemies, among others. In real life,
Kerman served only 13 months of her
15-month original sentence at the Federal
Correctional Institution in Danbury,
Connecticut, and married then-fiance,
editor Larry Smith, in 2006.
Throughout the course of its four
seasons, OITNB has become Netflix’s
greatest commercial success and most
watched original series. It has been
nominated for countless Emmys and
Golden Globes, and actress Uzo Aduba,
who plays the character Suzanne “Crazy
Eyes” Warren, has won two Primetime
Emmy Awards for her continued performance.1
Numerous sources claim that what puts OITNB
ahead of the competition and contributes to its
status as the most watched original series on Netflix
is the interweaving of the various storylines through
flashbacks as well as the way the show humanizes
prisoners. Seth Abramson, a former public defender
in the Northeastern region of the U.S., contributed
an op-ed piece to The Washington Post in July 2013,
shortly after OITNB premiered on Netflix. In the
article, Abramson called the show “a tutorial on
the prison-industrial complex disguised as a TV
dramedy.”2 A 2014 article in Bustle magazine begged
the question: “Has ‘Orange Is
the New Black’ changed the
way we think of prisoners?”
That article went on to claim
that “Orange gave inmates a
voice, humanizing them in a way
pop culture had so rarely done
before.”3
mafia, a methamphetamine addict who becomes an
unlikely religious zealot and proponent for protecting
the unborn, a Latino mother-and-daughter pair sent
to prison for assisting in a drug operation, and many
others. While all of these characters eventually
receive their own flashbacks, inmate Sophia Burset’s
backstory undoubtedly becomes one of the most
compelling and controversial.
Outspoken transgender actress Laverne Cox plays
Burset, a transsexual woman who runs the prison
salon. In flashbacks, the show reveals Sophia was
assigned male at birth and had been a New York City
firefighter named Marcus (played by Cox’s real-life
Sophia Burset’s backstory undoubtedly
becomes one of the most compelling
and controversial.
Sophia’s
portrayal
One of the numerous factors that make OITNB
such a resounding hit is the cast of characters —
women of all different ages, races, cultures, body
types and sexualities. To counter Piper Chapman’s
self-described white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
personality, the show introduced characters such as
an eccentric red-haired cook with ties to the Russian
identical twin brother, M. Lamar). Marcus, by all
accounts, was happily married to wife Crystal and
had a young son named Michael. However, Marcus,
struggling with gender identity, began wearing
women’s underwear and eventually women’s
clothing, changing her name to Sophia. Crystal
supported Sophia’s transformation as best as she
could, but the couple argued about her decision to
have sex-reassignment surgery — more specifically,
genital reconstruction. Sophia ended up
committing credit card fraud to finance
the expensive procedure. Unable to
fully understand how his father could
be a woman, Michael turned Sophia
into the police, and she was sent to
Litchfield Penitentiary for a term of at
least five years.
While in prison, Sophia endures
the odd glances and transphobic
comments of her peers and the prison
staff, often being called “lady-man” and
other slurs; throughout her sentence,
however, she still believes that she has,
in many ways, been accepted as “one
of the girls.” At the end of season three,
having angered another inmate after an
argument about their children, Sophia
Sophia Burset has become a crowd favorite among the characters on OITNB.
May/June 2017 Corrections Today — 33
finds herself targeted for transphobic comments
and eventually gets attacked in her salon. After the
attack is reported, Sophia threatens to sue for the
lack of protection afforded to her because of her
transsexual status. The new corporation that runs
Litchfield Penitentiary, referred to as the MCC,
places Sophia in the Special Housing Unit (SHU)
allegedly for her own protection. However, once
in maximum security, the staff treat Sophia as just
another segregated inmate and force her to spend
23 hours alone in her cell.
Whereas Cox’s character helps boost the show’s
popularity and has become a crowd favorite, the
distinct limited nature of her presence in season
four captured viewers’ attention most significantly.
In season four, many characters mention Sophia,
but the audience only sees her a few times before
the end of the season. In some of Cox’s most
memorable scenes to date, the audience comes
across Sophia with very short, mangled hair and a
sorrowful, dejected look — the exact opposite of
her usual appearance. After pleading with Warden
Joseph Caputo to remove her from protective
custody, and after Caputo claims nothing can
be done, Sophia flushes her own clothing down
the toilet in an effort to flood the cell and the
building. When this attempt proves unsuccessful,
Sophia ignites a toilet paper roll so that she can
be removed from her cell. At one point, the staff
Transgender inmates
face innumerable
problems during
incarceration,
including physical
and sexual assault
command another SHU inmate — Nicky Nichols
— to clean the cell Sophia was moved into, where
blood stains cover the wall and floor, indicating that
Sophia had attempted suicide. Crystal, still legally
married to Sophia, becomes a recurring fixture on
the show and in Caputo’s life as she desperately
attempts to obtain information about Sophia’s
condition. The prison, however, insists that Sophia
is not in the SHU and cannot give out information.
In accordance with his conscience and believing
Sophia’s treatment to be inhumane, Caputo snaps a
photo of Sophia in her cell in the SHU. By the end of
34 — May/June 2017 Corrections Today
the season, staff return Sophia to Litchfield to avoid
a scandal and begins the process of repairing her
life inside of the prison.
Entertainment
versus real
problems
While often dramatizing prison events for
entertainment, OITNB portrays Sophia’s character
as one of the most real and unforgettable portrayals
in the show. The treatment she endures is not
unlike that of hundreds of transgender inmates in
federal and state prisons and jails every day. OITNB
has renewed not only the conversation about
transgender issues within correctional settings, but
also has led the general public — the consumers of
the show — to become involved in the conversation
as well. While transgender characters have
appeared in other shows, Laverne Cox’s portrayal
highlights the issues transgender inmates face
instead of highly dramatizing the character like
other shows have done in the past.
Transgender inmates face innumerable
problems during incarceration, including physical
and sexual assault, a lack of medical support, and
transphobic slurs and discrimination. In 2015, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results
of the National Inmate Survey and found that
transgender inmates are nine times more likely
than the rest of the prison population to suffer
from unwanted sexual advances and assault
within their first year of incarceration.4 The 2003
Prison Rape Elimination Act sought to eliminate
this aspect of prison. The PREA statute lays out
specific guidelines on how to appropriately handle
transgender inmates. For example, contrary
to what is often displayed on OITNB, facilities
cannot legally perform cross-gender searches on
inmates unless exigent circumstances exist. In
other words, male correctional officers can only
search male inmates, and female officers can only
perform searches on female inmates. Specifically
for transgender inmates, PREA statute 115.15(e)
states that a facility cannot “search or physically
examine a transgender or intersex inmate for
the sole purpose of determining the inmate’s
genital status.” Further, 115.15(f) states that the
correctional agency must train security personnel
in how to appropriately “conduct cross-gender patdown searches, and searches of transgender and
intersex inmates, in a professional and respectful
manner, and in the least intrusive manner possible,
consistent with security needs.”5
Another difficult aspect of Sophia’s time in prison
revolved around a common issue for transgender
inmates: hormone replacement therapy. During the
first season, Sophia is told she can no longer access
the estrogen treatments she needs to maintain
her feminine characteristics. While speaking with
Counselor Sam Healy, Sophia describes all of the
adverse effects which are possible if her hormone
treatments are discontinued — regrowing facial hair,
sagging skin, etc. After being told there is nothing
that can be done, Sophia swallows a bobblehead so
she can be taken to the prison infirmary, where she
is again denied her hormone treatments. In February
2015, a transgender inmate named Ashley Diamond
filed a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of
Corrections (GDC), claiming they violated her Eighth
Amendment rights against cruel
and unusual punishment by
denying her hormone therapy,
which she had been taking
for 17 years prior to her
imprisonment. This led the
Department of Justice to issue
a statement two months later
declaring that the GDC had
violated her rights and that
inmates “should continue to
receive the same medically
necessary health care” that
they had received while still
residing in the community
prior to incarceration.6 They
eventually released Diamond
from custody in August 2015, and in
February 2016, the Georgia Department of Corrections
awarded her an undisclosed financial settlement.7
These are but a few of the issues transgender
individuals face every day when confronted with
incarceration — issues prevalent outside jails
and prisons as well. Transgender individuals face
enormous public scrutiny and risk the loss of their
family and friends who are unwilling to accept that
they are trapped in the wrong body. This can lead to
feelings of depression and perhaps suicidal ideation.
In some cases, dealing with these issues requires
a length of time in a psychiatric facility. Upon
admission into psychiatric facilities, however, many
transgender people face a continuing lack of support.
Psychiatric facility personnel often woefully lack
sensitivity training. In many cases, a new employee’s
orientation barely touches on the topic of respecting
a person’s chosen pronouns (i.e., he, she, ze, etc.)
and the process of performing a search on a new
patient often comes down to a person’s genitals
rather than gender identity.
What comes next?
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice decreed that
transgender individuals could not be placed in a men’s
or women’s prison based solely on their biological
sex (i.e., genitalia). They suggested each case be
individually accessed before suitable placement in
a correctional facility is determined. Naturally, this
poses concerns. For example, staff might think of a
biological male who dresses and seeks to live as a
woman, but has not had sex-reassignment surgery,
as too much of a risk to be placed into a woman’s
prison due to fear of rape initiated by the inmate or
even consensual sexual intercourse. Placing that
inmate into a men’s prison is also a risk because being
non-masculine could be seen as a sign of weakness,
making the individual an easy target
for violence. With this argument in
mind, many facilities choose to
place transgender individuals
into solitary confinement,
presumably for their own
protection. However, placing
an individual in solitary when
they have not committed any
additional crime and have
done nothing to deserve extra
punishment has been found to
be “cruel and inhumane.”
So what is the solution?
Transgender inmates, such
as Sophia Burset in OITNB,
are a special population. With
placements subject to interpretation
— usually based on genitalia rather than gender
identity — and medical treatments frequently in
jeopardy due to declining budgets or the belief
that their hormone treatments are unnecessary,
facilities often take away the relative freedom of
these individuals as they consider it the only way to
“protect” them. OITNB has helped in showing the
human side of prisoners, but it also has highlighted
the real-life issues faced by inmates. The audience
witnesses their vulnerabilities, and in some cases like
Sophia’s, the audience is challenged to discuss these
issues and to formulate solutions to deal with them.
In the correctional community, it’s cringe-worthy
to hear a patient request to be called by a certain
pronoun and to hear support staff state aloud, “I’m
not doing that! She’s a girl! I’m not going to call her
something else!” Addressing these issues through
sensitivity training aimed at assisting personnel
in knowing exactly what being transgender means
moves the facility one step in a positive direction in
dealing with transgender inmates/patients. Numerous
people in the correctional profession do not know
OITNB has
helped in
showing the
human side of
prisoners
even a basic definition of transgender or transsexual
or gender non-conforming. While there will certainly
be some level of ignorance among some members,
even just the simple act of informing personnel
about the condition and approaching it from a
respectful perspective could help to prevent possible
harassment and violence.
Correctional officers are charged with the duty
of protecting the individuals in their care from
themselves and others. Despite their crimes, inmates
are human beings who deserve respect and do not
deserve to be punished again within the facilities.
OITNB, though meant as a form of entertainment,
has essentially reopened the conversation about
transgender rights. It is finally time the nation
listens and works toward new solutions to handle
transgender inmates.
ENDNOTES
3
Simon, R. (2014). Has ‘Orange Is the New Black’ changed the way
we think of prisoners? Former inmates say no, but there’s progress
ahead. Bustle. Retrieved from www.bustle.com/articles/28263-hasorange-is-the-new-black-changed-the-way-we-think-of-prisonersformer-inmates-say
4
Kinsey, J. (2015). Survey: Transgender inmates more likely to be
victims of sexual assault. CBS News. Retrieved from www.cbsnews.
com/news/federal-survey-transgender-inmates-more-likely-to-bevictims-of-sexual-assault/
5
National PREA Resource Center. (2016). Prisons and jail standards.
Retrieved from www.prearesourcecenter.org/training-technicalassistance/prea-101/prisons-and-jail-standards
6
Kellaway, M. (2015). DOJ tells state prisons: Denying trans inmates
hormone therapy is unconstitutional. The Advocate. Retrieved from
www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/04/08/doj-tells-stateprisons-denying-trans-inmates-hormone-therapy-uncons
7
Southern Poverty Law Center. (2016). Settlement reached in SPLC
case that highlighted plight of transgender prisoners. Retrieved from
www.splcenter.org/news/2016/02/12/settlement-reached-splc-casehighlighted-plight-transgender-prisoners
1
Littleton, C. (2016). ‘Orange Is the New Black’ renewed
for 3 seasons by Netflix. Variety. Retrieved from variety.
com/2016/tv/news/orange-is-the-new-black-renewed-3-seasonsnetflix-1201698227/
2
Abramson, S. (2013). How ‘Orange Is the New Black’
humanizes inmates. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-orange-is-the-new-blackhumanizes-inmates/2013/07/26/d1559bac-f3e5-11e2-943460440856fadf_story.html?utm_term=.b823a8e71454
Christina L. Carpenter is a doctoral student
at the University of Louisville and works as
a correctional officer in a state-sponsored
psychiatric hospital in Kentucky.