978-1285459059 Chapter 7

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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:

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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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

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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

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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/