Had a great time at the Michigan Counsel for Prison Reform legislative day in Lansing May 11th. Thanks to Representatives Ronnie Peterson and Dave Pagel (and their excellent staffs) for allowing me to discuss criminal justice reform with them.

S2 E4 "A Whole Other Hole" is about:

* The story of how Morello (Yael Stone) came to prison (one of the most heartbreaking stories IMHO).

* Red's attempt to create a new base of operations for her and the Golden Girls.

* The start of a contest between Big Boo (Lea DeLaria) and Nichols (Natasha Lyonne) to see who can have sex with the most inmates at Litchfield. In case you were wondering about how much Piper (Taylor Schilling) has accepted her dark side, she engages in trying to trade SoSo (Kimiko Glenn) to Boo for a blanket.

* Vee's ongoing attempts to build her team to take over the block. In particular, after Poussey (Samira Wiley) refuses to go into business with Vee (Lorraine Toussaint) selling hooch, Vee turns Taystee (Danielle Brooks) against Poussey.

* The introduction to Rosa's story. Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat) is driven to get cancer treatments at a hospital outside of Litchfield and starts to make friends with a young man getting chemo sitting next to her (Rosa robbed banks).

* Sophia (Laverne Cox) gives the girls a lesson in human anatomy.

The title "A Whole Other Hole" refers to the fact that there are both a vagina and urethra in a woman's anatomy.

5. Mirrors

Morello checks her makeup in the decorative set of mirrors near her bunk.

Fun fact:

Inmates don't have real mirrors in prison because they could break the mirror and use the mirror glass as a weapon.

Instead of real mirrors, you have terribly dull "mirror substitutes" that hardly provide you with a reflection at all (they are particularly terrible for shaving).

4. "I Moved Twice, She Always Found Me"

Poor Morello, she is a nice person (most of the time), but a nice person with a fatal flaw.

I cannot tell you how many people I met in prison like Lorna Morello, people who are perfectly nice human beings except when they come up against whatever their fatal internal defect is. Usually, the fatal flaw is an anger management problem but with Morello, it seems to be tied up in delusions, hallucinations. and serious boundary issues.

You have to be really careful around people with extremely short fuses and learn to read the signs that they might be getting irritated.

When I reflect on these folks now, I feel so bad for them, they were just built poorly for living a peaceful life. It always amazes me how cruel we are to people who seem to be built with or who have found mental illness.

For some reason, we treat them as if they are to blame for conditions that are clearly beaten into them, learned from birth, or genetic. I get that we might need to lock some people up for the safety of society, but I don't get why we treat them like animals for conditions that they are just as confused and sad about as anyone else is.

One thing I do have to complain about here, there is no way that the CO's would just leave Morello in the van while Rosa was getting her treatments (literally zero percent chance). In fact, there is no way Morello would be driving the van to the hospital in the first place.

Could Morello drive on the complex, or with supervision immediately outside the complex? Yes.

Could she drive to the hospital? No way. There is just no way that this could happen and if it did, there is absolutely no way she would be left alone in the van for hours.

Prison administration does, however, take inmates to a hospital who are dealing with things for things that they cannot handle within their own medical system (I had a friend who had an eye surgery at an outside facility).

Oh, and by the way, even if Morello had been able to drive off with the van, she would clearly have been caught. Not only did she leave a prison van outside of Christoper's house, and leave prints everywhere (most likely), but she also did stuff that only she would do (stealing the bridal veil etc.).

And when she was found out, Officer Fisher (Lauren Lapkus) would have been fired and Morello would have been charged with about ten new crimes including attempted escape, she most certainly would not have been returned to a low-security facility.

3. "No Programs for Those Put Out To Pasture"

There were actually gardening programs at the prisons I was incarcerated in (and some even had greenhouses).

As I mentioned in Season One, sometimes this even allowed us to have freshly grown vegetables periodically (and even some hot peppers every once in a while). Not that we were supposed to have them but people on the grounds crew would occasionally smuggle vegetables into the unit and sell them to us.

One of my gripes in prison was that they would allow the gardening program to grow vegetables but not for prisoner consumption (they sold the crops to food banks). I am pretty sure that they could have reduced the prison medical bills by allowing us to eat vitamin-rich foods.

2. "Everyone In Here Is In Such A Bad Mood All The Time"

During Season 1, Piper starts to accept that she was responsible for her crime and that she belongs in prison.

At the end of Season 1, Piper starts to believe that she is, deep-down, criminal minded. In other words, Piper used to think that she was a good person caught in a bad situation and now she is starting to believe that she is a bad person who just happened to get caught.