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Prison Life

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The Reality of Prison Life

Orange Is The New Black is a new hit tv series presented by Netflix. The show is about a young woman named Piper Chapmann, who has been sentenced to jail for fifteen months for being an accessory to a drug cartel with her former girlfriend, Alex Vause, who is an international drug smuggler. Ten years later, after committing the crime, Chapmann lives a normal life with her soon to be husband, Larry Smith. The series conveys Chapmann’s life in the first season, and in the second season, the show reveals the characters’ background and why they were sent to prison. The show frequently features flashbacks to demonstrate some of the bad decisions that caused the diverse group of women to be sentenced to a New York prison, …show more content…

Sophia Burset, previously known as Marcus Burset, is a transgender woman represented in Orange Is The New Black. In season one, episode three, Sophia is given a lower dosage of her hormones than she was originally prescribed due to a funding cut in the prison system. She went to Sam Healy, a corrections officer and inmate counselor, and complained to him about her situation. He brushed it off and told her it was prison and she will only be taken to the doctors if it is an emergency. Sophia then took the head off of his bobble head and consumed it and said “It’s an emergency”. Transgender people who have obtained surgery for their preferred gender are housed based on their new gender while transgender people who have not acquired surgery are housed based on the gender they were born with. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is responsible for providing hormones for inmates at the level that was maintained before imprisonment. Some prisons do not provide hormones, and if they do, there is no assurance that the inmates will be getting the correct dosages. According to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, “It is arduous for transgender people to document their dosages due to their imprisonment it is often difficult for transsexual prisoners to document a prior prescription for hormones, either because of the practical difficulties and limitations imposed by incarceration, or because many transsexual prisoners are indigent and do not have private physicians willing to advocate for them.” When transgender inmates contribute their documentation, the prison officials may violate or even defy the

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