Escape... to Alcatraz. Rechtgefuehl, Punishment and Prison Movies (original) (raw)
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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.
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...
Varieties of Prison Voyeurism: An Analytic/ Interpretive Framework
The public learns, experiences, and knows about jails, prisons, and the people who live and work there through a variety of mediums and/or methods. Not all situations are equal in terms of the cost to the individual, the reality of the experience, and the effect it may have on the participant. In an effort to better contextualize this process, this article develops a typology to better understand these methods of participation. Ten methods by which people can experience correctional facilities include, on one end of the spectrum, the highly personal experience of incarceration, and on the other end, attempts by individuals to understand and/or experience corrections without intimately engaging with the subject matter. This latter method, termed prison voyeurism, fails to contextualize the myths, misrepresentations, and stereotypes of prison life rather than clarifying or explaining them. The author develops a framework to interpret the jail and prison experience. Examples are drawn primarily from the American prison experience.