Life Behind Bars

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Recommended: Impact of media representation on the public perception of crime

From prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, costing the country billions each year to operate. Creating a booming business for the entertainment industry to convey prison life through films, documentaries, and TV shows, Beyond Scared Straight, Jail, and American’s Hardest Prisons are a few. Allowing citizens to utilize their imagination to envision what it would be like ripped of all dignity and locked up to inhabit a six by eight center-block cell for an extended period of time. However how accurate are films, TV shows, and documentaries of life behind bars? Hollywood’s take on prison life is often inaccurate using obscured facts to display daily life and various experiences of prisoners for its audience. Creating a misassumption of prison and its inmates to citizens within the U.S. Literacy works, regarding actual accounts of inmate experiences that either an inmate wrote or outsourced to an author similar to A Life for a Life contain more detailed and authentic material. Insight of food consumption, violence, sexual encounters, corrupt guards, and health care are various topics exaggerated in films such as, Animal Factory which the books, journals, and biographies like A Life for a Life adequately convey in greater detail to help an individual create a better understanding of the actual realities of life behind bars. By comparing the two, Animal Factory and A Life for a Life, an individual can correct any false assumptions they may have regarding prison life.
Sexual relationships in prison are a constant trend. Hunger and violence are second nature to human as is the urge to reproduce. Adjusting a basic human nature, one as simple as sex in pris...

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...ying, control in institutions is upmost priority conflicting with Hollywood’s partial. In addition to, the movie displayed long lines of prisoners visiting the commissary to acquire various things. The book portrayed a military type system where inmates were handed an item sheet of available merchandise marking to indicate their desired goods. Upon reviewal and transaction of money from the inmates funds, their items were centralized and collected. This limits overcrowding of high risk areas in prisons, decreasing the likely hood of violence or a riot. However, violence in the film particularly in yard where random stabbing and shootings of convicts to break up a heard of inmates disobeying the order from the guard tower. Adequately interrupting prison life and the violence which takes place behind the walls of prison which Americas worst citizen experience daily.

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