To be deprived from your freedom and from your privacy should never be underestimated. In prison, it isn't only the loss of your freedom that you deal with but the inevitable loss of your privacy, too. You see, once you enter those doors to do your time there, once you step in those orange clothes or khaki, you're not seen as a person any longer but as a true criminal, who, without doubt, must have deserved to go to jail. Correctional officers, or those who run the place from higher up, treat you as one of so many, as a number, and most of them just don't care about the person you really are... but only the inmate who suddenly has to strip, squat and cough before strangers, while, for them, it is daily business.
There were all sorts of inmates to be distinguished. There were the crazy ones, like "Crazy Eyes" Suzanne Warren, who weren't a part of reality like everyone else. Most of those might have been already rather coo-coo before, and that craziness might have then lead to the crimes putting them in the prison.
There were also the lesbians, and again, although more than a few hadn't turned gay in jail and had always had their preference for the same sex, it was a way of coping for many women who came into prison as straight, like Lorna, and who had had to say goodbye to their loved ones at the prison doors to, from then on, only do with scheduled, limited phone calls and scheduled, more limited visits... and to be deprived from a gentle loving touch, from warmth, should never be underestimated either.
The sex was a way of coping as well. With a bit of luck, it resulted in an intense feeling of ecstasy for a few seconds or maybe minutes that you could actually, possibly... temporarily consider forgetting where you were and how long you had left there. Crazy and lesbian tendencies were not, necessarily, mutually exclusive.
Those who were not interested in being intimate with each other after all, sometimes fucked a guard, for similar... purposes. It would be very naive to believe that didn't happen often in any prison, because, after all, the guards very rarely said no.
There were the quiet ones, too, then, and the motherly figures, distinguished from the others very easily by their down-to-earth, rational behavior. Those women weren't ambiguous, nor did they ever fuck each other or any of the guards. Instead, they could find this feeling of comfort in helping their fellows and so themselves.
It would be very naive to believe that people like Galina Reznikov, AKA Red, didn't have ulterior motives, didn't somehow manage to buy their friendships with the goods they exchanged. Nonetheless, it would be very stupid to ever believe Red did all this only for selfish purposes and to deny the obvious evidence that the Russian lady cared a great deal about 'her girls'.
Of those, Norma was the one she was most close to. After all, when she was brought in, Norma had been at Litchfield for many years already. There wasn't anyone who truly knew the reason why she was in prison, but it was assumed that she would live the rest of her life in it.
Despite the fact the woman had only spoken once since she was arrested and brought in, when she rescued the Christmas play, the relationship she and Red shared was a strong one. Norma was the one helping her through the first few weeks at Litchfield and was the one who held her every time Vee and her gang decided that she needed what the black woman had always called some reminder of her place. She had never been able to stop them, even if she wished she could have every single time. Nonetheless, it was truly amazing how the woman could, quite literally, comfort without any words and make you feel like everything would be okay.
No matter how you dealt, because dealing was what everyone needed to do to survive somehow, prison changed you in a crucial way. For most of the women, the great challenge upon release was maybe not to fall straight back into the same old pattern and resume the path that had inevitably lead to prison to begin with. After all, the world hadn't stopped turning when you stepped through those prison doors, and as a former inmate, you didn't exactly get things thrown right in your lap, either. It didn't stop at the end of your time. From then on for the rest of your life, no matter how much you regretted or didn't your actions, no matter what those actions were, you carried a label that would always read 'criminal', and that label was usually what people noticed before anything else. Many, therefore, came back. At Litchfield, this was the case, too.
To be deprived from your freedom and your privacy should never be underestimated. You're never really the same after, and at the same time, between that and 'welcome back', you are the exact same person as before. Isn't it curious?