Abstract
Reviewed by: James Oleson, University of Auckland, New Zealand
I recently published an article suggesting that the 18th century shift away from visible, corporal punishments to concealed, carceral punishments eliminated Durkheimian social rituals of punishment (Oleson, 2015). This vacuum, I suggest, has been filled through the consumption of crime and punishment media. In movies and on television, at least, we can glean normative lessons about good, evil, justice, redemption, and revenge. Accordingly, I was very excited when I noted the publication of Dawn K Cecil’s book, Prison Life in Popular Culture: From the Big House to Orange Is the New Black. Although there are literally dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the topic of prison film, Cecil’s book provides a fresh and insightful look into representation of prisons in contemporary television and film.
Although Cecil’s book is entitled Prison Life in Popular Culture, her work does not provide a comprehensive examination of the prison in all aspects of popular culture. For example, despite America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for prison culture (Novek, 2009) there is no real discussion of the prison in fine art, literature, theater, architecture, design, fashion, tourism, video games, or toys. There is some discussion of prison music (e.g. Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and prison rap) and prisons in cartoons (e.g. The Simpsons and The Boondocks), but this is more exploratory than encyclopaedic. What Cecil’s book does cover are US-made films and television shows about prisons. But the definition of “prison film” is notoriously elusive (Bennett, 2006), and Cecil’s attempt to focus on the “pure prison film” (e.g. pp. 18, 35–36)—the story about incarceration rather than the story that is incidentally set within a prison—necessarily involves subjective judgment. This has profound implications for the scope of the book and might have been more carefully discussed. The decision to concentrate on pure prison also excludes a broad swath of titles that—arguably—might belong within the prison genre (e.g. execution films, POW and political prisoner films, escape films, or science fiction prison films). Excluding foreign works and titles only peripherally related to prisons, however, tightens Cecil’s focus and allows her to impose valuable order on a sprawling and unruly subject matter.
Prison Life in Popular Culture is arranged into 10 well-structured chapters. Chapter one sketches out the history of the prison and its representations, as well as laying out the structure for the book. Chapter two contrasts the depiction of prisons in newspapers with the depiction of prisons in less expected places (such as in Sesame Street or in product marketing). Chapter three examines prison drama in films (across the golden age, the rehabilitation era, the confinement era, and the modern era); chapter four looks at prison drama on television (e.g. Oz and Prison Break). Chapter five examines prison documentaries on film (distinguishing historical, deterrence, and investigative types); chapter six looks at prison documentaries on television (Lockup and its progeny). Chapter seven looks at women in prison in film and television (distinguishing romantic melodramas, exploitation films, and modern dramas); chapter eight looks at women in prison in documentaries. The penultimate chapter, chapter nine, examines prison music and prison comedy, and chapter 10 draws all of these themes together into a solid conclusion. The chapter titles occasionally muddy the structure of Cecil’s book. For example, chapter five (“Early Prison Documentaries”) canvasses film documentaries up to 2012, but chapter six (“Modern Prison Documentaries”) extends as far back as 2000. Given these dates, an early/modern distinction does not make sense, although this structure does make sense if it is understood as distinguishing film from television documentaries.
The introduction to the prison is not as developed as it might be. Although Table 1.1 helpfully parses the US penitentiary/prison system into a handy timeline, key scholarship in the history of the prison (e.g. Foucault, 1977; Morris & Rothman, 1995; Rothman, 1971) are conspicuously absent from the bibliography. The discussion of the emergent modern prison is correspondingly underdeveloped. This, however, is not an insurmountable defect in a book about representations of the prison in television and film. Potentially more problematic, however, are absent references to relevant works about prison film and television. Although Cecil’s bibliography is impressive, it is not comprehensive. It does not include, for example, prison movie texts such as Captured on Film (Crowther, 1989) or Prison Pictures from Hollywood (Parish, 2001).
Cecil’s book does not examine all forms of prison culture, and excludes even feature films and television programmes that might be germane to the study of prison in popular culture. Nevertheless, in the tradition of the work of Ray Surette (2015), Prison Life in Popular Culture will be exceptionally useful to anyone interested in the relationship between punitive societies and media representations of the prison. Cecil’s chronologies are valuable tools for understanding the evolving nature of the imagined prison, and her film taxonomies have the potential to organise seemingly heterogeneous works of media. Cecil’s chapter on MSNBC’s Lockup franchise and its successors is frankly the best I have read on the topic, and her discussion of Orange Is the New Black is thoughtful, insightful, and timely. Prison Life in Popular Culture synthesizes the best existing scholarship on prison media and extends it into new directions. It is a fine addition to the cultural criminologist’s shelf and will be especially valuable for students and lay readers seeking an introduction to the prison in media.