Inmate tells girl his story to scare her out of misbehaving. Credit: AETV

There’s no doubt: we love our crime shows.

Law & Order, Cold Case, CSI, Beyond Scared Straight, Orange is the New Black.

But have we made it a point to rely on pop culture too much to define our views of prison? And what happens when we don’t try to fill in the gaps left by pop culture?

We’ve been told to take everything on TV with a grain of salt, and yet incarceration is a structure shrouded in so much mystery that a grain of salt isn’t nearly enough to keep us from forming destructive ideas of the system and the people in it just by looking at what is portrayed on TV.

I spoke to my friend a few days ago about Orange is the New Black and she commented about how free the inmates on the show are. They roam about the facility, allowing them the freedom needed to enact revenge and begin and maintain relationships.

What most viewers don’t know is that Piper Chapman is in a minimum security facility. And this isn’t part of the summary on IMDB or even the show’s summary on its home network, Netflix. And so we begin to think that inmates have a lot of freedom. Perhaps not to the extent the characters on the show enjoy because they understand everything on TV is exaggerated, but we think it’s a lot more freedom than inmates actually get.

Screenshot of the show's profile on Netflix

For instance, on the show the inmates interact regularly with each other, moving between floors and dorms, and even entering the kitchen at will. In most jails, the structure is more regulated. At just the county jails, where inmates haven’t even been sentenced, every inmate is accounted for at all times. There is no wandering because it’s a safety hazard for other inmates and for the guards.

In Law & Order and Cold Case, most judges and guards are corrupt. Judges earn money from sending inmates to certain prisons and guards routinely abuse inmate. Yet, most facilities see a sexual abuse rate of 4.4% and jails see 3.4%, both of  which are 4.4% and 3.4% too high, but not nearly as common as these shows demonstrate.

Finally, there are shows like Beyond Scared Straight, which prey upon our fear of the violence in prisons, using it to scare youngsters into behaving correctly. But are these facilities as violent and are the inmates truly that barbaric, regardless of whatever crime they committed to land them there? According to statistics, about 83,000 jail inmates reported being injured, 7% by fight. Inmates under age 24 were twice as likely to report an injury.

The media plays a big role in shaping minds, whether it wants that responsibility or not. But we also have to understand that these shows are meant to entertain and ensure that they go no further and don’t inform. Although they should be factually correct, they aren’t so we have to make sure that we don’t allow these shows to shape our views of prison.

Instead, we should allow them to raise question and begin a national discourse. Incarceration is a shadowy structure which allows biases prejudices and misinformation to flourish. However, every lie has a bit of truth and we should focus on what we can do to help the system. For example, that 4.4% sexual abuse rate: how can we lower it?