Prestige Television and Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Crossing the Borders of Queer TV: Depictions of migration and (im)mobility in contemporary LGBTQ television

“…The series emphases the link between the prison system on the one hand, and the detention system on the other, utilising the fictional PolyCon Corrections company to comment on how privatisation has affected both of these sectors. Through PolyCon, Orange is the New Black further develops its already pronounced critique of the prison industrial complex (Bryan, 2019), again mimicking numerous reports of for-profit detention centres in the United States, with real companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group deriving anywhere from 20 (GEO Group) to 25 per cent (CoreCivic) of their profits from ICE, their biggest client (Kassie 2019). As Emily Kassie (2019) reports, this amounts to over 250 million dollars spent by ICE in 2018 on its GEO Group contract, revealing the extent to which the immigrant detention system currently functions as a for-profit industry.…”

“…Rachel Lewis notes that ‘while a number of countries (for example, the UK, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Australia) have recently rejected the ‘discretion’ requirement, or the notion that LGBTI asylum applicants can return to their country of origin and be “discreet” about their sexual orientation or gender identity, a growing number of lesbian and gay asylum claims are now being refused on the grounds that the applicant’s claimed sexual orientation is disbelieved’ (2014: 961). Examples of this vary from a 2010 UK Supreme Court decision concluding only homosexuals ‘who choose to “live openly,” constitute a particular social group for the purposes of the refugee convention’ (Lewis, 2014), to a more recent example of an asylum seeker’s claim being rejected by a UK judge because he was not ‘“effeminate” enough’ (Bulman, 2019). Consequently, while such cases not only contradict UK law as well as United Nations refugee guidelines (Lewis, 2013: 961), it is clear that misconceptions about what being an LGBTQ asylum seeker means pervade the UK judicial system.…”