Prisoners on Prison Films

Prisoners on Prison Films PDF Author: Jamie Bennett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030609504
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Prisoners on Prison Films

Prisoners on Prison Films PDF Author: Jamie Bennett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030609504
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Carceral Fantasies

Carceral Fantasies PDF Author: Alison Griffiths
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541562
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.

Captured on Film

Captured on Film PDF Author: Bruce Crowther
Publisher: B. T. Batsford Limited
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Prison has long fascinated film makers and audiences alike. The author explores the dark enclosed world of prisons on film from light-hearted comedies to the deeper implications of people imprisoned for their political and religious beliefs.

Prisoners on Prison Films

Prisoners on Prison Films PDF Author: Jamie Bennett
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030609499
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
This book explores how an audience of men serving sentences in an English prison responded to viewing five contemporary British prison films. It examines how media representations of prison vary in style and content, how film can influence public attitudes, and how this affects people in prison. The book explains the ways in which film acts as a power resource, presenting an ideological vision of criminal justice. The audience used these films to map the social terrain of prison, including issues of power and resistance; race and racism; corruption and the illicit economy; and staff-prisoner relationships, themes which are explored in the films screened. The authors argue that media consumption is one of the ways in which people in prison construct and maintain an ideal of the prisoner culture and what it is to be a ‘prisoner’. The book also reveals the ways in which audience members’ media choices and readings are part of the ongoing process of constructing their self-identity. This book illuminates the complex ways in which media consumption is an integral part of social power, cultural formation and identity construction. Recognising and engaging with audiencehood offers one potential route for supporting more progressive penal practice. This book speaks to those interested in prisons, crime, media and culture, and film studies.

Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film PDF Author: Peter Caster
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814271902
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W.E.B. DuBois famously termed "the problem of the color line." A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: "we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary." Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America's national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.

Prison Movies

Prison Movies PDF Author: Kevin Kehrwald
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231851049
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars traces the public fascination with incarceration from the silent era to the present. Often considered an offshoot of the gangster film, the prison film precedes the gangster film and is in many ways its opposite. Rather than focusing on tragic figures heading for a fall, the prison film focuses on fallen characters seeking redemption. The gangster's perverse pursuit of the American dream is irrelevant to the prisoner for whom that dream has already failed. At their core, prison films are about self-preservation at the hands of oppressive authority. Like history itself, prison films display long stretches of idleness punctuated by eruptions of violence, dangerous moments that signify liberation and the potential for change. The enclosed world of the prison is a highly effective microcosm, one that forces characters and audiences alike to confront vexing issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These portrayals of men and women behind bars have thrived because they deal with such fundamental human themes as freedom, individuality, power, justice, and mercy. Films examined include The Big House (1930), I Want to Live! (1958), The Defiant Ones (1958), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Midnight Express (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Starred Up (2013).

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture PDF Author: Marcus Harmes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030360598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
The Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture will be an essential reference point, providing international coverage and thematic richness. The chapters examine the real and imagined spaces of the prison and, perhaps more importantly, dwell in the uncertain space between them. The modern fixation with ‘seeing inside’ prison from the outside has prompted a proliferation of media visions of incarceration, from high-minded and worthy to voyeuristic and unrealistic. In this handbook, the editors bring together a huge breadth of disparate issues including women in prison, the view from ‘inside’, prisons as a source of entertainment, the real worlds of prison, and issues of race and gender. The handbook will inform students and lecturers of media, film, popular culture, gender, and cultural studies, as well as scholars of criminology and justice.

Behind the Walls

Behind the Walls PDF Author: Jorge Antonio Renaud
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574411527
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Written by a Texas inmate trained as a reporter, this book gives practical advice on how inmates live, eat, play, work, and die in the Texas prison system. It spotlights the day-to-day workings of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice--what's good, what's bad, which programs work and which ones do not, and examines if practice really follows official policy. "While the book is meant to be a primer for those with loved ones in prison, it should be required reading for any attorney involved in criminal law."--Texas Lawyer de Novo Magazine

The Working Lives of Prison Managers

The Working Lives of Prison Managers PDF Author: Jamie Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137498951
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book offers the first ethnographic account of prison managers in England. It explores how globalised changes, in particular managerialism, have intersected with local occupational cultures, positioning managers as micro-agents in the relationship between the global and local that characterises late modernity. The Working Lives of Prison Managers addresses key aspects of prison management, including how individuals become prison managers, their engagement with elements of traditional occupational culture, and the impact of the 'age of austerity'. It offers a particular focus on performance monitoring mechanisms such as indicators, audits and inspections, and how these intersect with local culture and individual identity. The book also examines important aspects of individual agency, including values, discretion, resistance and the use of power. It also reveals the 'hidden injuries' of contemporary prison managerialism, especially the distinctive effects experienced by women and members of minority ethnic groups.

The Hot House

The Hot House PDF Author: Pete Earley
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307808319
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
A stunning account of life behind bars at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, where the nation’s hardest criminals do hard time. “A page-turner, as compelling and evocative as the finest novel. The best book on prison I’ve ever read.”—Jonathan Kellerman The most dreaded facility in the prison system because of its fierce population, Leavenworth is governed by ruthless clans competing for dominance. Among the “star” players in these pages: Carl Cletus Bowles, the sexual predator with a talent for murder; Dallas Scott, a gang member who has spent almost thirty of his forty-two years behind bars; indomitable Warden Robert Matthews, who put his shoulder against his prison’s grim reality; Thomas Silverstein, a sociopath confined in “no human contact” status since 1983; “tough cop” guard Eddie Geouge, the only officer in the penitentiary with the authority to sentence an inmate to “the Hole”; and William Post, a bank robber with a criminal record going back to when he was eight years old—and known as the “Catman” for his devoted care of the cats who live inside the prison walls. Pete Earley, celebrated reporter and author of Family of Spies, all but lived for nearly two years inside the primordial world of Leavenworth, where he conducted hundreds of interviews. Out of this unique, extraordinary access comes the riveting story of what life is actually like in the oldest maximum-security prison in the country. Praise for The Hot House “Reporting at its very finest.”—Los Angeles Times “The book is a large act of courage, its subject an important one, and . . . Earley does it justice.”—The Washington Post Book World “[A] riveting, fiercely unsentimental book . . . To [Earley’s] credit, he does not romanticize the keepers or the criminals. His cool and concise prose style serves him well. . . . This is a gutsy book.”—Chicago Tribune “Harrowing . . . an exceptional work of journalism.”—Detroit Free Press “If you’re going to read any book about prison, The Hot House is the one. . . . It is the most realistic, unbuffed account of prison anywhere in print.”—Kansas City Star “A superb piece of reporting.”—Tom Clancy