Since most people have never been in a prison or jail as an arrestee or inmate, or even toured a correctional facility, the public is very dependent on media portrayals for its knowledge of prison conditions and inmate subcultures. While Hollywood has had great difficulty in updating its outdated stereotypes of prisons and jails, news media accounts of prison life have been hampered by the inability of reporters to access prisons and institutional efforts to censor inmate communication with the media.

The Warehouse Era: The Creation of a Stereotype

Prisons have not been a popular topic for the Hollywood film. Many more crime dramas, police stories, and court-centered films than prison dramas have been made. However, once Hollywood did begin make a few prison films in the 1930s (as part of their attempt to deal realistically with the Depression and its accompanying problems), a stereotyped image of prison life emerged that would reappear over and over again for the next 50 years. The original 1930s image was surprisingly close to the reality of prison existence.

In the 1930s the American prison system was still firmly entrenched in what penologists have called the "warehouse era" of American corrections. The rehabilitative hopes of the two great 19th century American prison experiments in Pennsylvania and New York had been dashed. The Reformatory Movement had also come and gone, without fundamentally changing the prison regime. Most prison administrators hoped to merely turn out ex-convicts who were not worse human beings than when they entered the penitentiary. Rehabilitating criminals was the hope only of prison reformers and enlightened criminologists.

The warehouse prison system emerged with the end of the PA solitary confinement model and the Auburn (NY) system of congregate silence. The warehouse prison had a number of basic traits. Warden and guards no longer had absolute control of the prison. Inmates had wrestled a considerable amount of power away from the administration. The warden now ruled ultimately only through tacit inmate consent. Inmates created a prison social system or subculture whose effect was to maintain the institution's status quo. The status quo that was acceptable to both inmate elites and administration, because both found the system that emerged advantageous. Inmate elites could control flow of economic goods, contraband items, and special privileges. In exchange for the administration's silent complicity with the inmate subculture, inmates made sure the rest of the population stayed in line. Such inmate pecking orders remained in place in America prisons until the 1950s and 1960s, when major changes were introduced in the prison system.

As far back as the 1930s, the Hollywood film industry created a stereotype of prison life in an all-male prison. While the stereotype may have in some way approximated the real prisons of the 1930s, Hollywood stuck with its type of portrayal long after the American prison system had undergone dramatic change beginning in the 1960s. Many of the prison films which are made today are historical in nature, allowing Hollywood to fall back on the old clichés. The film that first created the model for later prison dramas was The Big House (1930). Others that followed included The Criminal Code (1930), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Angles With Dirty Faces (1938), and Each Dawn I Die (1939).

Classic Hollywood Prison Films

When it comes to women's prisons, Hollywood was remarkably silent until the 1950's when several films were made: Caged and I Want to Live, the latter based a true story about the first female executed in California. In Caged an innocent young woman guilty of only being so in love with her husband that she aides him in a stick-up is placed in a prison filled with stock characters: the ineffective warden; brutal matrons; career criminals; and women obviously without any concerns for their children or families. It is hard to tell this isn't a male prison. While the heroine fights off the system bravely for a time, she eventually succumbs to the brutalization and responds by becoming an incorrigible felon herself.

The 1980s and 1990s womens' prison films have been largely "exploitation" films. Almost all seem to contain the word "heat," a term borrowed from the porno genre. Examples include Chained Heat (1983), Caged Heat (1974), Caged Heat 2 (1994), and Red Heat (1985). These films, like porn movies, feature lesbianism, dominance and submission themes, and scantily clad females. We do not learn much about the real lives of women behind bars.

Prisons have changed dramatically since the 1930s as a result of a number of factors and forces. Together these factors have dramatically altered the nature of day-today prison life and inmate subculture. While a detailed analysis of the impact of each of these features is beyond the scope of this lecture (See my Corrections course syllabus), the following must be considered.

1. The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
2. The growth of the Black Muslim movement within prisons.
3. The introduction and then rejection of the "medical model" in corrections.
4. The opening up of the federal courts to inmate petitions.
5. The resulting takeover of many state prison systems by the federal judiciary
6. The emergence of unionism among corrections officers and staff.
7. The massive influx of additional prisoners from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s.
8. The end of indeterminate sentencing and early parole.

The latter two show no sign of abating and are being driven by conservative crime-control politicians and anti-drug hysteria. The result is that the United States has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world, and that population is serving some of the longest sentences comparatively.

While prisons have always had their share of violence and mayhem, the levels of violence within these institutions have risen dramatically since the 1930s. Until recently, the inmate subculture, while sometimes brutal, in effect controlled the prisoners on behalf of the administrators. For example, Texas institutions had building tenders who maintained control and kept troublemakers from harming other inmates. Other states had similar positions. The segregation of prisoners by race, particularly in southern states, kept interracial conflicts to a minimum. The Civil Rights movement put an end to official racial segregation, gangs formed where the principle cohesive factor was race, and gang-based violence became commonplace in many prisons. In Texas a series of lawsuits (e.g., Ruiz v. Estelle) put an end to the building tender system creating a power vacuum within the prisons that the gangs quickly capitalized on. Inmates not affiliated with any of the gangs now find themselves subject to victimization by any or all of the gangs. The "right guy" doing his time, not bothering anyone else is largely a thing of the past. About the only way such individuals can now survive the prison situation is to ask to be placed in solitary confinement, where they will do their time monotonously day after day with little interaction with prison programs and staff. In the Santa Fe, New Mexico riot of the early 1980s the inmate rioters headed straight for these cells and systematically killed the inmates there, claiming they were all snitches or in league with the administration. Prison officials have now concluded that the most dangerous inmates must also be placed in administrative segregation. The federal system opened control unit prisons such as Marion and kept inmates in permanent lock-down status.

Take the Money and Run: End of An Era?

While the American prison system underwent numerous changes in the 1960s and 1970s, the Hollywood prison film continued to merely copy its 1930s stereotypes. The opportunity to break from these stereotypes was offered by Woody Allen, in his first feature film, Take the Money and Run (1969). Allen parodied the Hollywood prison film, from 1930s' prison dramas like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang through such 1960s films as Cool Hand Luke (1967). Memorable scenes included a jailer whipping a shadow on the wall rather than an inmate, an inmate being put in a sweat box with an insurance salesman, and a racially-mixed escapee chain gang claiming to be cousins. One impact of Allen's film was to drive home the point of how little prison dramas had changed in a 40-year period.

Following Allen's deconstruction, Hollywood could have moved on and updated its imagery, but little changed. Many of the prison stories Hollywood chose to tell were set in historical prisons rather than in the present, so that the old stereotypes could still be used. These included Birdman From Alcatraz (1962), Escape From Alcatraz (1979), Mrs. Soffel (1984), Shawshank Redemption (1994), Murder in the First (1995). Even the dramatic story of Malcolm X (1992) took nearly 30 years before it was brought to the screen.

Some of these stories certainly needed to be told, even if the facts on which they may have been based had been uncovered years before. Brubaker (1980) is a good example.

In comparison to the treatment inmates receive in American prisons, Hollywood has also focused on American's imprisoned overseas or sent to prisoner-of-war camps. In these films torture, mutilation, and death predominate. Examples include Bridge On the River Kwai (1957), Stalag 17 (1953), Deer Hunter (1978), Midnight Express (1978), and Saigon Hilton (1987). In 1996, TNT featured Andersonville, a drama based on the notorious Civil War prison camp run by the Confederacy. This story of horrible atrocities committed by one group of Americans upon other Americans had long been forgotten.

In the future prisons will only get worse. So predicts Hollywood. In Escape From New York (1981) convicts are simply dropped into Manhattan, the whole island having become a prison. However, there are no keepers. Inmates are free to set up their own society, which they do. Survival of the fittest rules. In Fortress (1993), prisoners are forced to wear devices around their necks (similar to contemporary electronic monitoring equipment given to house arrestees). But, there is a difference. If they wander too far from the prison yard or too far from a convict partner, they the necklaces will automatically kill them. Finally, in Judge Dredd (1995), Sylvester Stallone becomes cop, judge, and executioner in a future populated by unredeemable criminals.

Changes in prison architecture and supervision style like those associated with the new generation jail philosophy have been entirely missed. This is not to mention the fact that few prisons today contain traditional cells with bars, concrete, and metal fixtures. The distinctions between maximum, medium, and minimum security facilities are rarely depicted, as most Hollywood prisons appear to be maximum security. Fed a steady diet of such prisons, it is no wonder citizens consider institutions in which inmates can watch TV or lift weights "country clubs" and support legislators who would eliminate even the last vestiges of outside civilization from prisons.

The Death Penalty

Hollywood has rarely taken on the death penalty as a serious topic. This is somewhat surprising given the number of criminals who are simply killed off before a movie ends without trial or conviction. Probably the most thought provoking movie on the death penalty was the recent Dead Men Walking (1995). A Catholic sister, played by Susan Sarandon, agreed to aid a convict (Sean Penn) prepare for his own impending execution, including facing up to his complicity in the crimes. She also tried to assist both his family and survivors of the victims, an extremely difficult task. However, this allowed the viewer to see the phenomenon through the eyes of a broad spectrum of opinions. The prolonged scene showing the carrying out of lethal injection may lead some to rethink whether the 8th Amendment's "cruel and unusual" phrase might cover this "procedure."

Discussion Questions:

Question 2. Is it possible to change the media stereotypes of corrections officers as "smug hacks?"  

Copyright 04/01/2003 Cecil Greek

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