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  • Spectacles of Incarceration:Ideological Violence in Prison Documentaries
  • John Riofrio (bio)

Introduction

If you were to sit down sometime late in the evening, turn on your television and begin flipping aimlessly through the channels, the chances are quite good that you would stumble upon a scene similar to this one. A solitary black male, dressed in a standard-issue fluorescent orange prison jumpsuit, stands defiantly in the middle of a fenced-in exercise yard. Having been granted his one hour of time outside his cell, the inmate has chosen not to go back in. The guards, dressed in full riot-style gear, surround the caged exercise yard and begin trying to spray him through the chain links with pepper spray and tear gas. The inmate, in order to frustrate their efforts, scrambles up to the top of a basketball hoop with what the show's narrator describes as surprising strength and agility. Finding their efforts to spray him into submission wholly futile, the guards proceed to shoot him with rubber bullets. While the narrator emphasizes how painful these shots are, the inmate is pelted two, three, four, five times, before finally choosing to come down. As the now recaptured prisoner pulls aside his jumpsuit to reveal the welts, the guards can be heard remarking that the inmate must possess a kind of superhuman strength and tolerance to pain to have resisted being shot so many times at such close range. If you have opted to stay on this channel, there is a good chance that you are watching one of the three prison documentary shows that currently run on MSNBC. But you might, however, be watching the National Geographic Channel or even the Discovery Channel. The proliferation of programs like these, which I am calling spectacles of incarceration, is a testament to their rising popularity; my effort here is to examine and offer [End Page 139] an argument about the particular kind of rhetorical and ideological violence they enact on a nightly, and increasingly profitable, basis1.

Their violence begins with the very fact that they appear on television for, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the existence and influence of television represents a constant and growing threat not only to all realms of cultural production—including Art, Literature, Philosophy, Law—but also to the possibility of engaged, critical thought. In Bourdieu's estimation, television functions as a threat for two primary reasons: it enables a kind of daily amnesia among viewers, and then profits from it by programmatically filling that amnesiac void with particularly dangerous ideological content. Bourdieu, speaking here of the news' tendency to treat current events as a form of entertainment, writes: "events are reduced to the level of the absurd because we see only those elements that can be shown on television at a given moment, cut off from their antecedents and consequences...This inattention to nuance both repeats and reinforces the structural amnesia induced by day-to-day thinking..." (1998, 6-7). Television's need to be both lightening quick in its coverage of events as well as its deeper imperative to be economically profitable means that superficiality and predictability rule the day. For Bourdieu, the result of this predictability is a kind of persistently reinforced structural amnesia. Television viewers are taught to see events and conflicts as suspended in time, as occurring instantaneously like earthquakes or "recently formed" like hurricanes, instead of deeply complex social relations that have mutated, and in some cases festered, over decades and even centuries.

More to the point, perhaps, is the insidious function of television with its inherent ability to fill the void of critical thought with images, startling, attention-grabbing images that have their own ideological consequences. "The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a reality effect. They show things and make people believe in what they show" (21). Bourdieu's contention is that television's "de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population" means that the images they represent matter. They matter because rather than reflecting reality, they create...

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