What are we really seeing when we ingest what the media is feeding us? For this week I watched quite a few clips from the HBO series Oz, trying my best to get a good range of characters. What I saw confirmed what I had already believed to be true, that Oz is in fact a very unrealistic look into the American penal system. The show reinforces and exaggerates preconceived stereotypes that people already have about what goes on in the prison system (on a side note maybe that could be one explanation to why critics call it so realistic).
From all the character profiles that I came across a shocking few were in Oz for drug charges. The reason this is shocking, as many of you know, is that the vast majority of people are in jail not due to violent crimes but for drug charges. Nearly all the criminals in the show that the audience gets acquainted with are hardened killers many of which are sociopaths that take no reservation to murder and rape. However, according to the film The War on Drugs: The Prison Industrial Complex and the Glassner reading, this portrayal is not an accurate view. As the documentary pointed out there are a ton of incentives, funding being the primary, to put away drug users. As well, the sentencings for these people are unnecessarily harsh. People are put away for 10 years for mere association with actual drug dealers. One example in the film was of a college student who mailed a Fedex package for a friend was unknowingly trafficking crack and was sentenced for around 15 years. In fact, another example given showed that a second offense drug charge wound up to more years in prison than that of a convicted rapist.
The point that I am getting to here is that despite exorbitant amount of people in the prison system due to drug charges of some sort, they are seriously underrepresented in the shows portrayal of prisoners. In all of clips that I watched I witnessed that drugs were only mildly addressed and used as means of addressing a power system once people were in jail but that was not the reason they were in there in the first place. I found one story where a cop was going in undercover to infiltrate one of the prison gangs got hooked on what I believe is cocaine. Other than that I didn’t find too many story lines that addressed people being incarcerated for possession. Which leads me back to my original question; what are we really seeing when we ingest what the media is feeding us?
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After watching several clips from Oz I noticed the lack of drug related charges as well. They seem to stress drugs on the inside, but as you said they most likely weren’t incarcerated for drugs. So the image illustrated of prisoners is drug users who kill people. Apparently drug charges don’t appeal to viewers as much as murder. I watched the pilot and the only advice for the new prisoner was to get a weapon. If I took this show for reality I would believe that prisoners must fear getting either shanked or raped at any moment, which seems odd to me because they stress that they are under constant supervision. How can they pull these crimes off if eyes are always watching them? If most prisoners are in for drug charges then I doubt they would want to get a life sentence for killing someone on the inside. People who haven’t been to prison don’t have clue what it’s like so the writers believe they have nothing to hold back when they fabricate the truth. That Chapelle clip is awesome because he just switches how they treat each stereotype. Reversing these roles really stresses how these representations of criminals are so biased.
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