I did some research for this comic.
It was fucking difficult though, way more so than I thought it would be, because of the impressive/creepy paucity of information on women’s prisons.
There is a certain amount of information about Maximum Security prisons with women’s sections, especially at Riker, but Neal would not end up in Max for the crime she committed- she’d end up in Medium Security with the vast majority of the imprisoned female population. And there’s little to no info on that, aside from a California study case file that recorded….well….pretty much every awful thing that happens in the comic.
The rape/sexual harassment of prisoners by their male guards (who comprised like 75% of the guards, if I remember right, just ridiculous), the patronizing language designed to make a woman feel childlike, the Butch/Femme lesbian relationships that were formed, and the sense that these women were animals more than people were all pulled from that case study, which dated from the early 90s- when Neal was imprisoned.
Honestly I doubt anything has changed since then.
One issue that got excluded because I had no real sense of how to include it was race. No one is surprised that a depressing number of non-whites are in jail. We’ve heard that statistic over and over again. I wanted very much to add that to the mix, to this terrible time that April and Neal endured, but as a white author writing a story with two white protagonists I was at a loss.
So I tried to remember to shade background characters in as a darker shade of gray, as some sort of silly compromise, but honestly I forgot sometimes. I was pulling out 2ish pages a day, trying to finish it fast. This page is one of those times I forgot.
Which is what inspired me to write this post. Yaaay. Jail is bad guys. M’kay.