Escape... to Alcatraz. Rechtgefuehl, Punishment and Prison Movies (original) (raw)
Imprisonment is a widespread punishment all over the world, but prison is for most of us an unknown experience and anything we know is mostly through media and cinema representations. Therefore, it is very likely these representations play an important role in formation of our social representation for this matter. Additionally, the audience captivated for issues which are unknown and unreachable and that relate to the criminal behavior and action of institutions of social control of crime, but also to life in prison. In this article we will refer, first to the way of representation of prison in fictional films and television series, secondly the research which have been developed about the relationship between the fictional representation of the prison and the audience’s reception and finally we see what impact have all these to criminal justice community, since research saw that “skilled public” in criminological knowledge share the same perceptions for prison with others. Key words: prison, fictional representations, reception of audience, social construction, criminological knowledge
Imagining Prison: Culture, History, Space
In this article I explore the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society’s origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement — both real and imagined — have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article examines how prison space has been represented in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the complex cultural landscapes of punishment.
Prison walls are the natural landscape of radical politics as depicted in Italian cinema. The wall as “the most dreadful device of violence”, namely a device which “never evolved, since it was born perfect” (Bonvissuto), becomes a cinematic device able to provide a material connection between political and personal struggles. The prison, the house. The walls as “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin) against which the cinema stages the failure of struggles for liberation inside society and family: the prison-house becomes in its turn a primary space of acting the struggle in the loneliness of failure. In this paper I address the cinematic construction of space within the “prison-house”, the allegorical interaction between characters and walls throughout the following examples of Italian cinema: Taviani brothers’ San Michele aveva un Gallo (1972): walls as theatrical wing, walls as audience of a private, desperate representation of politics. Dal Fra’s Antonio Gramsci – I giorni del carcere (1977): prisoners obsessively moving along endless walls, their voices, Gramsci’s voice, ghostly explaining pictures to dead hares. Home as prison (there’s no prison like home): Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974), Scola’s La famiglia (1987). My aim is also to show a continuity throughout the cultural history of last four decades, drawing a parallel to other television “prisons”, from the first successful American sitcoms of the eighties, to the triumph of reality television.
2018
Narrative is the way in which human beings organise and structure their view of themselves and the world (Bruner, 1986; McAdams and Pals, 2006). Narrative as a story told provides material to research a person's reality in terms of the one who knows it best – the narrator himself. From this perspective the offenders' accounts of what a film of their life would be are explored in this study. The main purpose is to evaluate the recently developed “Life as a Film” procedure for elicitation and interpretation of the narrative content (Canter and Youngs, 2015). This procedure was created specifically for use with offenders and is based on McAdams (1993) qualitative research methodology. This study also aims to reveal the implicit content and the structure of offenders' “Life as a Film” stories. The “Life as a Film” descriptions were collected from 227 prisoners in four countries (Great Britain, Hungary, Italy and Poland) together with demographic data. Their responses were an...
Experiencing Prison, 2012
Art has been made in prisons probably since prisons exist, and a proper focus within the social sciences should provide an interesting research on the matter. In this paper I sketch some of the underlying principles of such a research, addressing art professionals who work within prisons with inmates and advancing some considerations around what the prison art universe comprises.
Visibility and Obscurity Within the Surveillance Regime of the U.S. Prison
2020
Prisons are physical and imagined objects of fascination. Dramatic images of prison life are highly available in the public imaginary, yet the lives of typical prisoners remain obscure from public view. Through media portrayals—both fictional and 'real'—the public is led to visualize the prison primarily in terms of dramatic physical violence. At a different level of public visibility, the external physical features of the prison facilities themselves project a message of violence (e.g. through razor-wire fences and gun towers) and thus an implicit message about the publicly-unseen population secluded within its walls. This essay examines issues of visibility and obscurity in regard to the present-day "control prison" (Rhodes 2004)—a regime that functions primarily as a means of punitive social exclusion. Kleinman's (1997) anthropological concepts of social violence and social suffering will be used to discuss the diffuse, less-readily-visible, forms of violenc...