Orange Is The New Black Cast Guards

One key reason that OITNB has been able to create a nuanced environment is the time that a long-running series has to develop characters and ideas, compared to the short running length of a movie like Caged. But time can be a double-edged sword, as multiple seasons also encourage writers to search for increasingly shocking, entertaining or surprising twists in order to keep audiences engaged in the story. As the show has progressed, some of its depth and realism has been sacrificed for sensationalism. This is a noticeable break from Season 1, which featured a guard who used inmates to smuggle drugs, a woman who gets pregnant while in prison and one inmate's attempt to murder another on religious grounds. In the fourth season, it is revealed that her father was a drug dealer who cared for her enormously in the early years of her life.

She first met Yadriel when she saw him throwing his drugs into a bush while being pursued by the police, and later returned them to him. Their subsequent relationship angered her father, both because Maria was effectively dating his competition, and because, as an intensely patriotic Dominican, he did not approve of his daughter dating a Mexican. In the present, Maria began to organize a new gang amongst the other Dominican inmates, in order to fight back against the overt racism of the guards. After attempting to get involved in Piper's business, Maria was angered by her rude response and formed a rival business of her own, which immediately snapped up many of Piper's employees. When Piper blows the whistle on her, Piscatella tells Maria that he will recommend that three to five years are added to her sentence. As a result, Maria responds by having her gang seize Piper, take her to the kitchen and brand her with a swastika, which also serves as retaliation for her accidental creation of the white supremacist gang.

Maria's gang start distributing drugs instead and secures her a position of power in the prison. However, as the guards begin to get increasingly violent and draconian, Maria starts to use her power to help protect and rally the other inmates. Upon the discovery of Aydin's body, she is separated from the other inmates, along with Ouija and Blanca, for further questioning.

She is initially amused by Officer Humphrey's prank on Kasey Sankey but is shocked when he then escalates it into a fight between Suzanne and Maureen Kukudio. When Suzanne becomes unhinged and almost beats Maureen to death, Maria finally has enough and, with Ouija's help, manages to pull Suzanne off Maureen and comforts her. She was incarcerated for helping her boyfriend Cesar with his drug dealing business and taking the blame for him. In flashbacks, it is shown that she had little concern for her children and was obsessed with her boyfriend. She says during a visitation that she is upset that he will not visit her. She treats Daya rudely in the prison, and goes so far as to attempt to seduce Bennett to make Daya angry.

She later shows a softer side and advises Daya to have her baby, even going so far as to concoct a plan to allow Bennett to keep his job. She also finds herself competing with Gloria to care for Daya during the more difficult times of her pregnancy, finally forcing her to take on a maternal role in her daughter's life. During the second season, she battles with Gloria to be a mother to Daya, and manipulates Bennett to bring in contraband from the outside hidden in his prosthetic leg. During the third season, she attempts to convince Daya to give her unborn child to Pornstache's mother Delia so that she would have a better life and to get a monthly payment from her. Later, she decides that it would be better for Daya to keep her baby and tells Delia that Daya's baby died during childbirth while in reality Cesar picked up the child. During the fourth season, Aleida is informed that she is eligible for parole and she asks Gloria to watch over Daya after her release.

While in a restaurant, Margarita tells her that Cesar got her pregnant, and after becoming upset at the revelation, she yells at a man she believes was profiling her. She gets into an argument with Margarita in a clothing store after finding out that she was not planning to stay faithful to Cesar while he was in prison, and walks out on her. Later that day, after finding out that her cousin Jazmina spent her money sock on bail and an ER visit, she goes back to Margarita's apartment and states that she has nowhere else to go.

At the end of the season, she is watching the press conference announcing the death of an inmate with Margarita, and becomes concerned for Daya's well-being since Caputo did not mention the deceased inmate's name on the air. When the guards stated frisking the Latino inmates for contraband, she discovers that the guards would not frisk her if she stank, and as a result, the other Latina inmates would follow suit. Officer Stratman orders her to bathe, and when she refused he ordered her to stand on a cafeteria table for several days. During flashbacks, she was working as a carer for Millie, an old woman, who misread her name as "Bianca" and continued to address her by that name. While working for Millie, she met her boyfriend Diablo, who was working as Millie's gardener. After their relationship started to grow, Millie fired Diablo, stating that she thought he was a distraction for Blanca.

Sometime after Diablo was fired, Blanca had sex with him while Millie was in the same room watching helplessly. At the end of the season, she represented the Latina inmates in expressing condolences for Poussey's death to the black inmates. Throughout most of the fifth season, she teams up with Red to try and take down Piscatella by exposing the details of reports that he murdered an inmate at the male prison he worked at before transferring to Litchfield. The two devise a plan to lure Piscatella into the prison during the riot to try and torture information out of him but she is caught and subdued by him and held hostage along with Nicky, Big Boo, Piper, and Alex. She and the rest of the group are forced to watch Piscatella physically and emotionally torture Red but are saved by Frieda and the rest of the women hiding in the abandoned swimming pool. In the last scene of the season, she is seen with the remaining prisoners still inside the hideout as the CERT officers raid the building and blow the entrance to the hidden bunker.

At the beginning of the seventh season, she continues her relationship with Daddy, but she becomes upset when she walks in on her having sex with another inmate and then claiming that it was just business. Intending to teach Daddy a lesson, she gives her some bath salts under the assumption she would have a similar episode as Barb but she dies from an overdose instead. Immediately after Daddy's death, she takes over Daddy's gang and becomes even more ruthless in her methods. In an attempt to devise different methods to get drugs into the prison, she at one point threatens Elmer Fantauzzo, Tiffany's GED prep course teacher, by implying she would target his son if he doesn't smuggle drugs in for her.

At the end of the series, she reveals to Aleida that she got her little sister Eva involved in her drug smuggling operation and threatened to get the rest of her younger siblings involved. This revelation causes Aleida to punch Daya in the throat and begins choking her, fully intending to kill her. Nicky Nichols – A former drug addict, now Red's most trusted assistant, Nicky is witty and acerbic Jew from New York City, with a loud mouth.

She swiftly befriends both Piper and Alex, expressing curiosity about what happened between the two of them outside of prison. She is estranged from her mother, a wealthy but extraordinarily selfish socialite who now lives in Brazil. When she was a child, Nicky was raised by a nanny and lived in a separate house from her mother. Her father was always cheating on her mother when she was growing up, leading to a deep resentment between her parents and causing her father to almost never look after her. This estrangement from her parents was what initially led to Nicky's drug addiction. Upon arriving in prison, Red had helped her through her worst bouts of cold turkey.

For this reason, Nicky has disowned her mother, and now looks up to Red as a mother figure, to the point where she openly calls her "mom" in the presence of other inmates, and Red in turn openly treats her as if she were her daughter. Nicky was involved in a friends-with-benefits relationship with Lorna until Lorna broke it off, which Nicky is bitter about for some time, but she later develops a brief interest in Alex. Nevertheless, Nicky continues to make numerous attempts to get back together with Lorna throughout the series, suggesting that her feelings for her may be romantic. Nicky has a scar on her chest from having heart surgery as a complication of a bacterial infection in her heart, which came from using a dirty needle. Having been clean for two years, Nicky uses sex with the other inmates as a coping mechanism, becoming something of a nymphomaniac in the process.

During the second season, Nicky stages a sex-based point scoring competition with Big Boo, during which Nicky even makes advances on Officer Fischer. She gets revenge on Vee for Red's slocking by stealing her stash of heroin, causing her to again face her addiction. In the third season, she attempts to get the stolen heroin out of the prison. She decides to work with Luschek so he could sell it on the outside and split the profits with her. During a surprise inspection, drugs are discovered under Luschek's desk and he blames her for it, causing her to get sent to max.

In the fourth season, Nicky is surviving in Max, and celebrates three years sobriety. She is initially shown ending a fling with Stella Carlin after discovering that she is using drugs again, but shortly after, falls off the wagon and starts using them herself. She has also been sending Luschek hate mail, and angrily castigates him when he comes to visit her, attempting to apologize. Eventually, with the help of Judy King, Luschek secures her return to the regular prison, and she has an emotional reunion with Red and Lorna.

However, as a result of her relapse, she begins to steal from Red to purchase drugs from the various dealers across the prison, and at the same time makes numerous failed attempts to convince Lorna to restart their relationship. When Red confronts her and breaks down in tears at watching her adoptive daughter destroy herself, as happened with Tricia, Nicky reluctantly agrees to clean herself up again. Unbeknownst to her, Red uses her influence to get all of the prison drug dealers to cut Nicky off, while Pennsatucky provides her with emotional support. She concludes the season clean, but admits to Lorna that she is unhappy and a 'junkie addict liar'. Larry Bloom – Larry is a Jewish freelance writer trying to establish a journalism career, and Piper's anxious fiancé. He is blindsided at the beginning of the series when his then girlfriend Piper reveals to him her former life as a lesbian who smuggled cash for a drug cartel 10 years ago.

Larry is initially vocally supportive of Piper, and proposes marriage to her before she goes inside. As the series progresses, he begins to lose interest toward her, becoming angry when he learns that Piper's former lover is in the same prison and that she did not tell him about it. Later on, he begins writing a newspaper article titled "One Sentence, Two Prisoners" about the experience of having a fiancée in prison.

This article is published in The New York Times and allows him to move up in the journalistic world. He is close to his parents, who are strongly opposed to his marriage plans. After a conversation with Alex, Larry's controlled anxiety gets the better of him, and he breaks off his engagement with Piper.

During the second season, he begins an affair with Piper's best friend Polly after becoming a more supportive partner than her husband, who was frequently gone for trips. Shortly after this, Larry and Polly reveal the affair to Piper and asked for her blessing in their relationship. At the end of the second season, Piper asks Larry and Polly to arrange for Alex to be thrown back in prison for violating her probation. Although Larry expresses doubts, Piper is able to appeal to Polly who agrees to help. While he did not appear in the third or fourth seasons, he appeared in a flashback during the fifth season, which reveals he has a tattoo of the Kool-Aid Man on his butt. When Piper mentions him to other inmates during the riot, one of them notes she's never heard his name and has no idea who he is.

He appeared as a recurring character in the seventh season, in which he is still in a relationship with Polly and helping raise her child. Piper, now released from prison, asks to have dinner and catch up with him and Polly. They briefly reflect on their relationship and Piper asks for advice on the next step to take in her own life. Larry tells her to "do what new Piper would do" and appears to have come to terms with the ending of their relationship and be genuinely supportive of Piper's path forward. In the fourth season, Piper has allowed the incident with Stella to go to her head, and she has become arrogant and overconfident, hiring her new bunkmate Stephanie Hapakuka as muscle. As a result, when Maria Ruiz tries to persuade Piper to recruit some of her new Dominican friends into her business, Piper is rude to her.

Faced with the loss of her business, Piper convinces the new guard captain Piscatella to let her start an anti-gang task force, but the women that gather at her meeting mistakenly assume that she wants to start a white supremacist group. During a meeting with one of the COs, the women bring the used panty businesses to his attention , resulting in Maria being caught and Piscatella stating that he would recommend that Maria gets three to five years added to her sentence. Despite her disgust with the white supremacist gang, she hangs out with them for protection from Maria's gang, but she is still kidnapped by Maria and branded with a swastika. She shows Red the brand while crying on her bed and later shows Nicky and Alex while smoking crack cocaine in the garden. While high, Piper discovers that Kubra sent Aydin to kill Alex and she killed him after he failed.

Later, she was able to get her swastika altered into a window, with the help of Red, Norma, and Alex, and she apologizes to Alex for not believing her during the branding. Piper tries to convince Piscatella to stop the increasingly draconian treatment of the other inmates by the guards, and when he refuses, she joins the protest to include standing next to Blanca Flores on the cafeteria table. When Aydin's remains are found, she tries to prevent Alex from confessing to Aydin's murder. After Bayley accidentally kills Poussey, she runs into him in the hall while he is trying to go to Poussey's friends to apologize. She tells him to let them grieve and that she will let them know he is sorry in order to prevent him from going to their cell block.

At the end of the season, she discovers that Alex has written several notes with Aydin's full name on it and spread it around the prison. She convinces her to gather them up so that they can burn them, but shortly after they throw them into a garbage can and set them on fire, women participating in the riot kick over the can, spreading the papers all over the floor. Galina "Red" Reznikov – Red is a Russian inmate who runs the prison's kitchen as the master chef and is the behind-the-scenes leader of the prison's white population. In her earlier life, she and her husband had migrated from Russia and ran a struggling restaurant in Queens, eventually getting involved with the Russian mafia bosses who frequented their establishment.

Red angered the mob bosses by punching one of their wives in the chest after being excluded by their group, but later impressed the same boss by offering sound advice that allowed her to swiftly climb the ranks of the organization. Red is feared and respected by most of the prisoners, and has a lot of influence with Healy. Out of all of the girls in her group, she is closest to Nicky, and loves her as if she were her own daughter. She is always accompanied by Norma and Gina, who cater to her needs and work with her in the kitchen. Red runs a smuggling business out of her kitchen, using a food company she helped the Russian mafia set up, but refuses to import drugs of any kind. Narratively, OITNB tries to mimic imprisoned women's reality not just through casting but also through the show's storylines.

Notably, these stories do not shy away from the harsher realities of these women's lives. The aforementioned survey found that 79% of the female inmates studied were abusing drugs and/or alcohol. OITNB has shown a wide variety of experiences with drugs, from Tricia , whose addiction lead her to overdose, to Angie and Leanne , who chug nutmeg during a prison blackout in an outlandish attempt to get high. The show also has tackled problems with mental health, education and parenthood, all of which are closely related to actual statistics of women's prison populations. The jury in the courtroom didn't see her—her sense of humor, her intelligence, her potential, her empathy.

They saw, instead, a black woman in prison for dealing drugs, which was all they needed to see to believe she could also be a murderer. In dealing Taystee such a brutal hand, the writers on Orange gave the series its darkest story line since the death of Poussey. If they gave Taystee a happy ending and got her conviction thrown out, the series would sacrifice its commitment to accurately portraying the state of the justice system for so many of the unfairly incarcerated. But if they left her in despair, they'd be doing a disservice to a character who represented the show's heart. When the season opens, Aleida and prison guard Hopper are still living together and smuggling drugs into the prison, with Daya as their seller. Daya, who has been sentenced to life for killing a guard during the riot, has become her block's ruthless boss.

But when Aleida's younger daughter becomes involved with an older drug dealer, Aleida beats him up and smashes his car, landing the mother of five back behind bars. Daya sets up Hopper to get fired and recruits her younger sister Eva as her new external drug pipeline. When Aleida learns this in the finale, she confronts Daya and things quickly escalate in one of the show's most shocking climaxes.

After Aleida calls her eldest child an "evil junkie," Daya asks her, "Do you know what it's like to kill somebody? " Aleida punches her in the throat and climbs on top of her on the floor and starts strangling her. After chasing and failing to catch the phone thief, she gets lost and after being dismissed by multiple people she is taken to an alternative club by two people she met before she got back in touch with her friends. She then rides a subway towards her friends' location before catching a ride the rest of the way with some men dressed as monks for Improv Everywhere riding bicycles. While smoking marijuana with one of them, she tells him that she lost her chance to go to West Point after her incident with Franziska's father in Germany and that she was planning to move to Amsterdam in a few weeks. She appears in another flashback during the riot showing her first meeting with Taystee in the prison library, and the two joke around with each other before becoming friends.

In the final flashback during the seventh season, she is speaking to and joking around with Taystee over the phone during the short period of time Taystee was out on probation during the first season. At the end of the seventh season, Taystee and Judy start the Poussey Washington Fund in her honor to provide microloans to inmates after they are released from prison. During the fourth season, her relationship with Brook becomes romantic and she becomes excited at the prospect of meeting Judy King, the cooking show host Poussey was a big fan of who was sent to Litchfield for tax fraud. Eventually, Poussey accepts Brook's apology, the two begin anew, and it soon becomes clear that they have fallen in love. Poussey later finds herself helping Judy after her friends were angry about a racist puppet show that Judy filmed in the 80s, that ended up being leaked on YouTube. Judy later offers Poussey a job once she gets out of prison, ensuring she will have something to look forward to.

During a protest in the cafeteria, Poussey is caught in a scuffle with Officer Bayley, who tries to restrain her while fighting off an erratic Suzanne by pressing her into the ground and putting his knee over her. Unable to breathe in this position, Poussey dies of asphyxiation, shocking the other inmates and leaving Bayley traumatized. As a result, her body stays in the cafeteria overnight and is not removed until the following afternoon. At the beginning of the fourth season, he is forced to call for reinforcements from max to replace the guards that walked out while the prisoners escaped and started playing in the lake outside of the prison.

He appoints Desi Piscatella, one of the reinforcements that came from max during the strike, as the new captain of the guards after the crisis is over. During a meeting at MCC, he recommends using veterans to supplement personnel and to house them near the prison in the existing housing to save money. He also meets Linda, an executive he starts a relationship with and appoints Taystee as his secretary at Linda's suggestion. He is repeatedly confronted by Crystal, Sophia's wife, and eventually uses a smuggled cell phone to anonymously show proof that Sophia is in the SHU, resulting in her being returned to general population. After Aydin's remains are found in the garden, he orders the guards not to interrogate the inmates and to let the FBI handle the situation when they arrive.