Cat fights and cunning among Sacramento County’s ‘Jailbirds’
At some point in your life, a parental figure has, hopefully, sat you down to give you the “choices matter” speech. The gist is that making the right choices will unlock the oyster that is the world and the wrong ones will land you in prison taking anxiety-inducing showers. Netflix’s new series Jailbirds is the garishly funny visual representation of that speech.
Set in the high-rise Sacramento County Jail in the US, it’s a reality show that follows the lives of a group of imprisoned women. Think of it as the resultant stew when you throw Real Housewives of Atlanta, Orange is the New Black and MacGyver’s ingenuity into a pot.
The show kicks off by introducing us to 19-year-old Yasmin Sundermeyer as she is going through the intake process. Although there’s a bit of coyness when viewers first meet her, one eventually learns that the $100,000 (R1.4m) bail she is trying to rustle up is because she was arrested on charges of car-jacking, assault with a deadly weapon, alcohol and drugs.
But by the time the series ends
Sundermeyer is arguably one of the least interesting characters on the show. This is down, in part, to the absurdly messy interpersonal relationships between characters with names like “Monster”, “Baby Girl” and “Noonie”, whose crimes make Sundermeyer’s look like a minor misunderstanding about a drunken jaunt.
If cat fights, love pentagons and tense bathroom standoffs don’t do it for you, the inmates’ uses for toilets will. In Sacramento County Jail there seems to be nothing one can’t do with a lavatory. The bogs in the show are basically rudimentary smartphones enabled with apps like Tinder and Mr Delivery. With a surplus of free time in a confined space, the inmates have found ways to use them to brew jail wine, call one another and pass around contraband. As one quickly discovers, there is very little one cannot do if one has a T-shirt, some plastic spoons and an aluminium toilet.
There is a lot wrong with this show. It often feels exploitative, can sometimes come across as making light of very serious topics and raises a lot of questions about how Netflix was able to secure the legal rights to film inside a jail. The thing is, your lizard brain is going to ignore all of that because it’s a new frontier on the reality-show map. We’ve heard stories of prison and watched Oz, but very seldom have we seen what actually happens inside prison, especially women’s prisons.
Sure, the part of your brain urging you to keep hitting the “continue watching” button long after bedtime is the same bit of amygdala the Kardashians massage when their new season hits, but there is more to Jailbirds than cheap drama.
In a humorous way, the show is an examination of just how easy it is for everything to go tits up when life hands you a shit deck of cards. We’re constantly parroted to about the value of good choices but how do you even learn to begin to make good choices when both of your parents were 13 when you were born? Or when you have had to be a pimp since adolescence to survive?
Yes, we can all point out examples of individuals who came from difficult environments and went on to change their circumstances, but the truth is that those people are the exception, not the rule. For every heartwarming story about someone who came from nothing, there are 100 unheard ones about the people who stayed there.
So in a weird way, Jailbirds is a rebuttal to the good choices speech. One that shows that, thanks to the structure of the world we live in, sometimes all you have are bad choices. It’s damn funny, too.
Yolisa Mkele