Welcome to the Emerald City

After watching the pilot episode of Oz and several clips from other seasons I feel truly terrified of the prison system through this lens. This hostile barbaric environment is filled with murderers, even though statistically most prisoners are incarcerated for drug charges. To see the real Wizard behind the curtain of the prison system watch the documentary, The War on Drugs: The Prison Industrial Complex.  This film enlightens viewers on the reality of the penal system and the police force that drives this “war,” as one scholar describes it as “the war on poor people.” The American penal system is now driven by profit rather than rehabilitation, which becomes detrimental to our society, specifically poor urban societies. Our neoliberal capitalist society perpetuates a cycle of oppression and inequality towards poor people of color and our corrupt legislation and media representation mask this reality. People feed into this system because they believe crime is rampant (yet Glassner tells us crime rates are decreasing) which leads to stricter and longer sentences paid by American tax dollars. The incarceration rate has grown exponentially and Americans understand this shielded environment through media images of prisons and criminals.

The hit HBO series Oz premiered in 1997 and ran until 2003. Ironically the demographics of an HBO audience are mainly white and wealthy, so basically opposite of prison demographics. Check this site out for the numbers on HBO audiences: http://www.quantcast.com/hbo.com.  As Yousman mentions in his study of the show, Inside Oz, that the viewers who receive this representation of prison have no real life experience with either going to prison or knowing someone who has gone. This becomes extremely dangerous because their reality won’t be blurred by this image if they have no reality to distort. People take this show as the truth and praise it for its authenticity, but who are they to know what’s authentic about prison life? They believe since HBO doesn’t need to censor their material that the writers aren’t holding back the truth. This continues the discourse that men of color are violent criminals that need to be locked up, and it’s all driven by one thing: money.

Media outlets and politicians use rhetoric to scare us into thinking that our biggest problem in this country is drug use, as Ronald Reagan put it “America’s crusade” against drugs. I’m not condoning drug use but people are made to think poor urban youth slip through the cracks of society because of drugs and spend all our money to rehabilitate them in prison. From what I’ve seen in the Emerald City’s prison is crime increases on the inside, so I guess rehabs out of the question. We should be taking this money to rehabilitate positive social organizations not the police. The police profit from drug charges and more arrests which equals more money for them and less for the rest. They target poor communities, put these images in front of a white audience and preserve our culture of fear. All that’s left is to make a twisted hyperviolent prison show ironically headed by a black man to show us that black men can succeed because it’s not our system’s fault if you fail, it’s only the individual to blame.