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93
Chapter 7
Corrections
Chapter Objectives
After reading Chapter 7, students should:
1. comprehend the common entertainment media portrait of corrections
2. understand the news media portrait of corrections
3. know correctional personnel concerns regarding negative news coverage
4. understand why television and infotainment programming give corrections scant attention
5. realize how media portraits of prisoners, correctional officers, and correctional
institutions are connected to public support for correctional policies
Chapter Outline
I. Historical Perspective
a. In colonial America, jails and prisons were places to hold offenders until they
could be otherwise punished, usually by a corporal method such as:
i. branding
ii. flogging
iii. hanging
iv. Corrections were of little interest as institutions or as symbols of criminal
justice policy
b. Following the enlightenment:
c. Correctional institutions have contributed to their poor image
i. Correctional personnel have been notorious for poor media and public
relations, frequently:
1. blocking access to inmates and staff
2. withholding information
3. stonewalling in times of crisis
d. Despite the correctional field’s historic adversarial relationship with the media,
the media have played a strong role in correction’s public image
i. It is a tenet of social constructionism that the more remote the subject, the
more the public perception of it will be shaped by media content
1. Most of the general public has neither of the following:
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a. experience knowledge (from having visited a jail or served
a correctional sentence)
b. conversational knowledge (from talking with people who
work or have been in prison)
c. Most of the public is severely limited, therefore, in the
amount of non-media-rendered information it has about:
i. prisons
ii. Jails
iii. Prisoners
iv. probation and parole
v. other correctional programs
d. Access to direct non-mediated knowledge of corrections is
concentrated in the poor
i. The affluent, who influence correctional policy
more, construct their corrections reality largely
from media renditions
e. Driven by profit motives, the entertainment media have not been overly
concerned with projecting an accurate image of corrections
i. The entertainment media use the institutions as backdrops to construct
stories of:
1. social power
2. personal morality
3. action that have little connection to correctional issues
ii. Prison films are by far the most influential sources for determining the
social construction of corrections
1. Books and magazines are less widely distributed and lack the
visual impact of film
2. Television has produced only a handful of programs based on
corrections that have lasted beyond one season
3. News stories and documentaries about corrections tend to be few
in number and negative in content
4. New media based infotainment media that touch upon corrections
exist but are usually:
a. divorced from reality
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b. dominated by violent “escape from prison” videogames
II. Sources of Correctional Knowledge
a. Prison Films
i. The attraction of prison movies lies in their ability to combine escapist
fantasies that purport to reveal the backstage brutal realities of
incarceration with tales of adventure and heroism
ii. Although one of the longest running genres (movies have been made
about corrections since the early 1900s), prison films make up only about
1 percent of all films
1. Almost universally focus on the inmate
2. Unfortunately, the image of corrections found in this small
iii. Narrative staples of the genre include:
1. convict buddies
2. evil wardens
3. cruel guards
4. craven snitches
5. bloodthirsty convicts
6. inmate heroes
a. The focus of prison films is usually on an inmate’s
reaction, adjustment, and triumph over the correctional
system
b. The movie world of corrections is a place where:
i. long-suffering virtue is rewarded
ii. ironically, one has to look to the prisoners to find
moral, trustworthy men
iv. Unique to correctional films are pervasive promotional claims of “based
on a true story or actual event”
1. Nicole Rafter observes, “No other genre so loudly proclaims its
truthfulness”
2. Despite their claims of verisimilitude, prison films distort their
subject more than other criminal justice movies
3. Due to their validity claims and the lack of other information
sources to counter them, prison movies remain the most influential
correctional social construction source for the general public
v. Four different prison film narratives
1. All four invariably focus on inmates and take an inmate’s
perspective
2. These narratives are found across the history of prison films, but
Derral Cheatwood identifies four eras in which each specific
perspective dominates
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a. Nature of confinement correctional films (1929-1942):
inmates appear as victims of injustice
i. Either as good men framed or imprisoned by a
chance accident or pushed into crime by powerful
societal forces
ii. A recurrent message in these films is the corrupt
values of the correctional system and its
administrators
iii. This first era established and cemented the unique
correctional backwards law common to prison films
1. In prison films the corrections backwards
law works through a role reversal derived
from the dynamic of the underdog, wrongly
jailed inmates pitted against oppressive
correctional employees
iv. The inmate-hero was born in this era and has since
dominated the portrait of corrections
v. Examples:
1. The Big House
2. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
3. 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
b. Pursuit of justice correctional films (1943-1962): offenders
were portrayed as personally responsible for their actions,
less often as victims and more often as criminals
i. Confinement is justified
ii. The focus shifted to the flaws of the criminal and
away from flaws in the criminal justice system
iii. Examples:
1. The Birdman of Alcatraz
2. Riot in Cell Block 11
iv. Many of this era’s films revolve around violence:
1. Riots
2. Escapes
3. inmate and guard hostility
v. Individual offender rehabilitation is seen as a
possibility
c. Authority and control correctional films (1963-1980):
offender confinement is still justified, but it occurs for less
serious offenses
i. This era reintroduced a pessimistic view of
corrections against a continuing backdrop of riot
and escape stories
ii. This era is most significant for immortalizing the
“smug hack” portrait of correctional officers as the
evil foil of the inmate heroes
iii. In these films, correctional officers are borderline:
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1. crazy
2. insensitive
3. ineffective
a. Officer corruption is portrayed as
universal
iv. Within an isolated ecosystem, all facets of prison
life become subject to exploitation, producing the
first, if unrealistic media portrayals of real prison
problems, such as:
1. rape
2. racism
3. drugs
v. Examples:
1. Cool Hand Luke
2. Escape from Alcatraz
iii. Images that remain common:
1. prison violence
2. rape
3. death
a. The correctional world as
constructed in these films reflects the
fantasy world of comics more than
any recognizable social reality
iv. Examples:
1. Escape from New York
2. The Fortress
3. Aliens 3
4. Holes
5. The Shawshank Redemption
3. The true issues and needs of corrections are absent or perversely
distorted in these constructions
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a. The public is more disadvantaged in constructing an
alternate worldview of corrections than it is in constructing
other components of the criminal justice system
b. Unfortunately, when the other limited sources of
correctional information available to the public are
examined and added, their contribution does little to correct
the dominant prison film constructions
b. Correctional Television and Infotainment
i. In television entertainment programming, corrections is the least shown
component of the criminal justice system—and therefore by extension the
least important
1. Television has had fewer shows focused on corrections and they
have been shorter lived than any other aspect of the criminal
justice system
a. The few television programs that have featured jails or
prisons have either been slapstick comedy or featured
inmates rather than staff
ii. With habitual criminals outnumbering first offenders by more than four to
one on television, media indirectly constructs corrections as ill equipped
and unable to rehabilitate offenders
1. Instead, media imply that the corrections system is simply a
stepping stone for criminals from which they frequently return to
society as worse criminals than when they were sentenced
iii. Perhaps the greatest impact of television on the social construction of
corrections is as a means of extending the life and reach of commercial
prison films
1. Television’s recycling of the more than one hundred corrections
movies made since the 1920s provides a continuous, negative
media loop in which corrections is constructed negatively anew for
each succeeding generation
iv. The infotainment genre has slowly discovered corrections
1. Example television programs:
a. “Inside American Jail”
b. “Intervention”
c. “Street Time”
d. “Parole Board”
2. The delay in correctional infotainment programming is party due
to the fact that prison entertainment films already market
themselves as accurate portraits of correctional life
3. Even when greater media interest to create correctional
infotainment products exists, correctional administrators have little
incentive to cooperate
a. Coupled with the historical distrust of the media on the part
of correctional officials and their reluctance to provide
access, correctional content continues to lag in infotainment
media
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4. Correctional infotainment that is created is not likely to result in
greater public support for corrections
a. Correctional documentaries that have received widespread
public play have ultimately resulted in negative attention
and criticism for their subject institutions
i. Example documentaries (both of which resulted in
criticisms of the correctional administrators and
personnel and lawsuits against the institutions):
1. Titticut Follies: shows life in an institution
for the criminally insane
2. Scared Straight: describes a popular shock
incarceration program for juveniles
c. Corrections in the News
i. Contrary to common impressions, there is not a lack of attention about
corrections in the news
1. In a study of television and newspaper news, Steven Chermak
found that 17 percent of crime-and-justice stories involved
correctional institutions in some manner
a. Most references to corrections, however, are found inside
stories focused on a different component of the criminal
justice system or are found within stories that trace an
individual offender or case as it progresses through the
system
2. About one-fifth of the crime-and-justice news at least
acknowledges the existence of corrections
ii. Individually based correctional stories are usually presented through a
reference to an offender’s:
1. commitment to prison
2. behavior on parole
3. execution
iii. Percentages on which news reports concentrate
1. 50 percent on law enforcement activities (discovery of crimes
through the formal charging of suspects)
2. about 30 percent on court proceedings (pretrial motions through
Supreme Court decisions)
3. less than 5 percent on corrections (probation to execution)
iv. Once they leave the courtroom, offenders usually disappear from the news
unless he or she violates parole or probation, is released from prison, or is
executed
v. News stories that discuss correctional institutions are found either inside
stories about other criminal justice topics or within lengthy special reports,
usually produced by the print media
1. More developed and contextualized issue-focused news stories that
discuss the daily operation of prisons, how inmates adapt to the
conditions of incarceration, and institutional programs do exist;
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unfortunately, they are rare and can distort correctional policies
and practices
vi. In television news coverage of corrections, extraordinary events dominate
1. Many news stories incorporate day-to-day police and court
operations such as arrests, charging, verdicts, and sentencing
vii. Nonincarceration aspects of corrections, such as probation or community
corrections, receive even less media attention
viii. Why do corrections fare so poorly in the news?
1. First, compared to other crime-and-justice stories, corrections has a
relatively low newsworthiness value
a. Once a newsworthy individual enters a correctional
institution and settles into the routines of correctional life,
unless he or she does something noteworthy in prison, such
as dying, the individual is not often again seen as
particularly newsworthy
2. Second, corrections stories are difficult to produce because news
media traditionally have only limited access to corrections sources
a. There is no corrections newsbeat that matches the police
and court beats in journalism, so corrections stories are
time consuming to produce because a preexisting
journalism–corrections link does not exist
b. The information channels and public information officers
commonly found in police stations and courthouses, while
increasing, remain absent in many correctional institutions
3. Third, reporters usually have limited prior knowledge of
corrections and likely need to be introduced to the disciple during a
breaking news story—almost always a negative one involving an
escape, assault, or riot
a. Reporters do not maintain relationships with correctional
officials as they often do with police or court officials
i. Correctional personnel are the least likely of all
sources to be quoted in news stories accounting for
less than 1 percent of the total
ix. On the corrections side of the news creation process, the closed
environment of correctional programs helps to shield officials from
external scrutiny
1. Correctional officials are more able to control information because
media access to inmates is limited by law to a much greater extent
than in the other components of the criminal justice system
2. Prison administrators have a large number of justifications and
mechanisms available to limit media access
a. Common justifications include:
i. claims of institutional security needs
ii. ongoing investigations
iii. prisoner confidentiality, privacy, and rehabilitation
considerations
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iv. bureaucratic red tape (especially in arranging
interviews)
b. Delaying mechanisms include:
i. using uninformed personnel to slow the release of
information to the media
ii. directing staff to present themselves as apolitical
and inappropriate to comment on political decisions
iii. being geographically isolated
c. Ironically, the net result of these information blocks and
delaying tactics is that newsworthy offenders are often
pilloried by the media before trial, when they are still
presumed innocent, and shielded from the media
afterwards, when they have been declared guilty
x. Alternate sources of information about correctional conditions are
available, such as:
1. inside leaked information provided by correctional officers
2. inmates
3. inmate families
4. elected officials
5. defense attorneys
6. researchers and academics
7. prison support and prisoner rights groups
xi. Because administrators are less likely to have the media competing for
access, they cannot use a need for access to influence the content of
coverage
1. Prison officials are less able to offer “exclusives” or “scoops.”
a. The routine operations of prisons seldom offer news items
for which media outlets will compete
b. The chief messages they are trying to mobilize consist of
“good news” about the system
2. Because the media do not have a daily corrections news need,
which would give a correctional administrator more influence over
correctional news creation and more leverage to influence content,
negative coverage of corrections can be produced without much
concern
a. As there is no media need to maintain ongoing regular
access to correctional authorities, the news media need not
worry about burning their bridges to corrections
b. Negative correctional news can be produced without media
concern about subsequent repercussions or access
restrictions
xii. Access to the criminal justice system as well as the resulting media
content remains front-end loaded
1. Most of the news of corrections that is produced is dominated by:
a. riots
b. escapes
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c. the release of newsworthy individuals
d. the death of newsworthy individuals
i. Much like in the movies
2. Three types of negative stories typify correctional news
a. The first are stories about correctional failures to protect
the public, such as:
i. prison escapes
ii. staff negligence in supervising inmates
iii. failure to control prisoners
b. Second are stories of corrections pursuing inappropriate
goals in which punishment is absent while amenities are
highlighted, such as:
i. prison parties
ii. plush recreation rooms with color television
iii. air-conditioned cells
c. Third are stories of correctional horrors: exemplified by
corruption and misconduct exposés
i. Usually one of two types:
1. individual bad-apple stories (the sadistic
guard)
2. systemic corruption stories (the corrupt
warden and administration)
ii. They often employ the death of a preyed upon
inmate as the symbol of the correctional system’s
own criminality.
iii. When presented, the media are willing to expend
considerable effort and resources, at least for a short
time to explore and construct another correctional
system gone bad
d. The day-to-day administration of punishment as a loss of
freedom and attempts to rehabilitate do not fit common
media narratives
i. There are few dramatic rituals or events involved in
prison life, and those that do occur are negative and
involve death and violence
xiii. News of corrections focuses on the inmates and ignores the staff
1. After a content study of 1,546 newspaper articles, criminologist
Robert Freeman reports that negative stories about corrections
significantly outnumber positive ones, and the positive ones tend to
focus on inmates, not staff
2. Corrections is covered more often as an act connected to an
individual than as an issue connected to a system
xiv. Corrections news does focus on policy questions more often than do
police and court news
1. All of the following receive periodic coverage:
a. release policies
103
b. institutional conditions (usually as follow-up to riot, death,
and escape stories)
c. execution coverage (which sometimes incorporates the
debate over the death penalty and the issue of the racial
composition of death row)
d. the incarceration of juveniles and mentally retarded
offenders
2. In addition, news stories periodically appear concerning innovative
correctional efforts such as:
a. intermediate sanctions
b. shock incarceration
c. electronic home monitoring
3. Although corrections is the least covered component of the
criminal justice system, it is the most likely to have its policies,
missions, and basic functions discussed
III. Corrections Portraits and Stereotypes
a. Three important portraits of corrections
i. Prisoners
1. If inmates are constructed as incorrigible and innately evil, this
logically leads toward correctional policies of incapacitation and
capital punishment
a. If inmates are shown as victimized—basically good but
misled—then policies of rehabilitation and resocialization
make more sense
2. The more inmates are constructed as similar to the rest of us, the
more it makes sense to offer more help and less punishment
3. The more they are constructed as different, as predatory and
inhuman, the more sensible it is to permanently remove, punish,
and execute them
4. Two popular constructions:
a. Males as heroic inmates
i. The dominant construction of male prisoners
derives from the role reversal of a heroic offender
caught up in a violent correctional system run by
predatory criminal justice system workers
ii. Tapping into the American cultural tendency to root
for underdogs, the irony of the media construction
of male prisoners is that most of the predator
criminals who terrorized society in the crime-
fighting media are reconstructed in the correctional
media as victims
b. Females
i. Female inmates are found in constructions
containing high levels of gratuitous sex (primarily
lesbianism and rape) and correctional officer
dominance and sadism
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ii. The films reinforce stereotypes about female
prisoners as violent, worthless, sex-crazed monsters
1. This focus on violence and sex in female
prisons has also been found in:
a. recent reality-infotainment news
magazines
b. talk shows
c. documentary programs
2. Focus on:
a. Sex
b. Violence
c. Failed motherhood
iii. Other issues are downplayed such as:
1. Drug history
2. Sexual history
3. Physical abuse history
c. Collectively, male and female prisoners are often portrayed
as victims rather than offenders
i. Victimization of offenders can come from other
predatory, violent, psychotic inmates or predatory,
violent, psychotic correctional officers
1. The message is that both need to be removed
from the correctional institutions they are
terrorizing
d. The constructed portrait of these institutions reflects the
paradoxical construction of their populations
i. Reform must begin not with the prisoners but with
the institutions and staff
ii. Prisoners are either:
1. incorrigible and beyond rehabilitation and
need to be separated from the redeemable
2. the moral superiors to staff and
administration and must not be brought
down to their level
ii. Correctional institutions
1. If the institutions are violent madhouses filled with irrational
predators (inmates or staff), money for work, education, or
counseling programs will appear to be wasteful
a. If the institutions are constructed as understaffed,
underfunded places where humane correctional officers are
trying to supervise large numbers of offenders, some of
whom are redeemable, then public monies for these
institutions and their programs will make more sense
2. The more inmates are seen as like the rest of us—if there is a
“there but for the grace of God” reaction to the way they are
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portrayed—the more palatable improvements to conditions and
programs in these institutions will be viewed
a. The more the portrait generates a ‘thank God they’ve
locked those animals up’ response, the more palatable
punishment, long term incapacitation, and minimum
funding will make sense as correctional policies
3. The complex political, social, and economic realities of
correctional facilities are ignored, and a corrections template that is
stark and bleak is presented instead
4. Smug hack corrections, described as several interwoven portraits
of negative correctional imagery, make up the media-constructed
correctional world
a. Physical brutality in the name of inmate discipline is
common
b. Control is maintained with corporal punishment and severe
infliction of pain, often for trivial rule violations
c. Staff incompetence, corruption, and cruelty are common,
ingrained, and unchallenged
d. Under the thumb of despotic staff, the prisoners suffer
systematic:
i. racial prejudice
ii. homosexual rape
iii. institutionalized violence
e. If female, the inmates suffer further degradation, sexual
assaults, and harassments
iii. Correctional officers
1. The more violent and predatory the staff is shown to be, the less
attractive these positions appear to recruits as possible careers and
the more the public is led away from putting money into
corrections
a. A social construction of a humane staff striving to help
salvageable inmates brings an opposite reaction; in that
frame of mind, steering public resources into corrections
would be sensible
2. The smug hack portrayal of correctional officers dominates
a. Portrayed as caricatures of:
i. brutality
ii. incompetence
iii. low intelligence
iv. indifference to human suffering
b. This negative correctional officer construction creates a
perception of modern corrections that remains locked in a
pre-1960s frame of punitive human warehousing
c. The media-promulgated imagery provides the baseline for
the public’s construction of corrections and correctional
officers
106
3. Whereas the police are heroic rescuers and the attorneys (at least
sometimes) are the preservers of truth and justice, media-
constructed correctional officers are, more often than not,
oppressive villains (if not oppressive, they are irrelevant)
IV. The Primitive “Lost World” of Corrections
a. Lacking direct knowledge of corrections, the public believes a number of
correction myths (described by criminologist Ian Ross) regarding:
i. the quality of living conditions within prisons as either exceptionally harsh
or luxurious
ii. the perceptions of convicts’ physical appearance as un attractive, their
nature as innately violent, their guilt as unquestioned, and their redemption
as unlikely
iii. the perceptions of correctional officers as brutal, uncaring, and
unintelligent
iv. the effectiveness of corrections as means to rehabilitation and as a cost
effective criminal justice policy as low
1. Not surprisingly, most of the myths are common in media content
b. At the same time, the media tends to ignore a number of correctional realities
regarding:
i. the economic costs of high imprisonment rates
ii. the pains of imprisonment
iii. the number of mentally ill inmates
c. Unlike the impact that they are having on the operations of law enforcement
agencies and the courts, new media have not altered public access or knowledge
to corrections in any meaningful ways
i. The impact of new media in corrections has mostly been connected with
keeping the new devices and their effects out of institutions
d. The impact of the media on the public’s constructed portrait of corrections is due
to its primary effect: the first set of information about a person, group, or
organization that is received has greater weight than later information because it
creates an initial resilient perception
i. For corrections, the first impressions are usually picked up from prison
films and other entertainment media (perhaps new media more recently)
and are likely to be:
1. negative
2. reinforced rather than challenged by information provided in the
news and infotainment media
ii. It is highly unlikely for the typical media consumer to have positive
perceptions of corrections or to have his or her negative perceptions of
corrections challenged in the current media environment
1. The impact of the initial negative messages is compounded for the
public through its repeated exposure to the continually rerun prison
films and recycled news footage of past prison riots and escapes
iii. Prison films, tabloid-style crime reporting, television programming, the
focus on prison riots and brutal attacks by paroled assailants, and the less
107
than flattering portrait of correctional staff and administrators comprise
the foundation for the social construction of corrections
1. This construction has been blamed for:
a. helping to heighten the public’s fear of crime
b. eroding public confidence in the ability of corrections to
deter, rehabilitate, or even retain criminals
c. increasing the public’s desire to make the system more
punitive for all offenders regardless of their offense history
or forecast dangerousness
2. Media images are felt to normally translate into a lack of public
support for real-life correctional institutions while ironically
constructing prison as the sole solution to violent crime—in which
rising criminality is viewed as proof of their necessity
a. Like the police who gain public support when crime goes
up, corrections, at least in term of more cells, gain public
support in times of increasing crime rates, a tendency
countered only when economics force institution closures
and early prisoner release.
Chapter Key Terms
nature of confinement correctional films [5] correctional horrors [14]
pursuit of justice correctional films [5] heroic inmates [17]
authority and control correctional films [6] smug hack corrections [18]
freedom and release correctional films [6] smug hack [19]
Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites
The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before
recommending them to your students.
Prisons
http://www.corrections.com/
http://www.bop.gov/
Prisoners and Correctional Issues
http://www.prisonwall.org/
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/
