New Season of ‘Orange is The New Black’ Will Tackle Officer Violence Against Black Inmates

By Kenrya Rankin Jun 09, 2016

The new season of “Orange is The New Black” won’t hit Netflix until June 17, but The Hollywood Reporter (THR) says “the darkest season yet” will tackle police violence against Black people.

THR writers got a sneak peak of the entire season and said that a major arc will involve a “culture war” and reflect issues that the Black Lives Matter movement seeks to address: “The new and inexperienced guards employ levels of brutality and racial injustice that ultimately evoke the movement in an event that will impact all of the inmates.”

The show has always depicted how racial factions function in the fictional Litchfield Federal Penitentiary, but season four will explore how those groups become more important when 100 new inmates are introduced into the prison, which converted to a for-profit model in last summer’s episodes.

“Danger is the underlying theme: racial tension and danger,” Selenis Leyva (who plays chef “Gloria Mendoza” on the show), told THR. “This season is definitely going to start up conversations that we’re dealing with now. That’s the beauty of what Jenji [Kohan, series creator] does, with the writers. They really take things that are happening, that are current events, and deal with topics that people are afraid to really dive into. And we’re going to go there this season, especially with the prison system.”

Watch the trailer for the fourth season below.