When you’re watching Orange Is The New Black, it’s sometimes hard to remember that the women on the show are actual criminals. While I’m watching Taystee take a piece of Chapman’s hair or Soso wage a hunger strike, that drama is way more interesting to me than why the ladies are actually in jail. I guess prison is the great equalizer. In Season 4 of Orange Is The New Black , we got the backstory on one of my favorite inmates — Maritza Ramos. Why is Maritza in prison on Orange Is The New Black?
Maritza is really beautiful, so there’s no surprise that she was working as a bottle service waitress in a club and making some serious tips. She’s pretty, but she’s not dumb, and Maritza was using this to her advantage to make a few bucks off the high rollers she met at the club. While working, she would fill a vodka (or whatever liquor) bottle with water, smash it on the ground before it was served, and then cry about how her manager was going to kill her and make her pay for her accident out of her own pocket. The guys in the group would feel badly about seeing a pretty girl cry, and they’d pony up some money to make up the difference in her paycheck, even though they had already paid for the bottle that was all over the floor. No one ever thought that any of this was strange, and I guess Maritza made enough extra cash to justify her little scam.
That was until one of the men she pulled the bottle scam on took her aside and asked her if she wanted to make some real money. His scam was a little bigger, though — she would pose as if she worked at an expensive car dealer, target an older bachelor, pretend to be his wife for the keys, and take the car for a test drive with older dude in tow. Then she would steal the car in his name, boom. Except the time she went through with it, the car salesman got in the vehicle with Maritza and her mark. Whoops.
She panicked, needless to say (I would have, too), and then pretended to get sick. When the men came out of the car to see if she was OK, she ripped off her heels, ran to the car, and hit the gas. This whole thing went from a light scam to grand theft auto real fast, didn’t it?
So, while we don’t know exactly the charges that landed Maritza at Litchfield, I’m going to have to guess it has to do with her stealing that very, very expensive sports car. I’m also going to speculate that she had other marks on her record, because would stealing a car once really get you that much prison time? According to Justia, a website where one can find lawyers and ask them for advice, grand theft auto and carjacking are different — grand theft auto involves a parked car and carries a ballpark sentence of a year or more in prison. Carjacking, however, involves taking a car from an owner or driver directly, and it could nab you a decade behind bars. This all of course depends on jurisdiction and circumstances and all that, but maybe that’s why Maritza has been in jail for so long? Grand theft auto could have had her out in a year, less with good behavior.
When it comes to the law, Maritza couldn’t con her way out of stealing a car — that’s how she ended up in Litchfield.
Images: JoJo Whilden/Netflix; Giphy (2)
