Our motivation for our website topic stemmed from our interest in women in the system of mass incarceration, a subtopic that is largely left out to the public conversation surrounding the American prison system. Although men are disproportionately represented in our prison system, the population of female prisoners has grown exponentially since the 1990s. Further, women are more typically placed in rehabilitation programs as opposed to traditional prison systems.

Given this larger context, we chose to examine two television shows: Netflix-produced “Orange is the New Black” and HBO’s “The Night Of.” “Orange is the New Black” takes place in a female correctional facility and follows Piper, a white middle class protagonist, who has recently been convicted of a drug crime she committed twenty years ago. “The Night Of,” by contrast, is an eight episode mini series in which we watch Naz thrown into a male prison after being accused of a crime he did not commit.