The Cultural Commodification of Prisons
2000; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance
ResumoPOP CULTURE IS ABOUT ACCULTURATION MORE THAN IT IS ABOUT CULTURE. IT IS about defining the norms and parameters of society. More than 100 years ago, Karl Marx wrote about capitalism's ability to turn everything into a commodity. Commodities are items, whether goods or ideas, which can be bought and sold. In his day, Marx observed that capitalism had converted labor, raw materials, manufactured goods, even sex, into commodities, and that traders and merchants had eagerly made a fetish out of the commodities themselves. By the mid-20th century, a mass consumer culture had evolved, which was capable of commodifying much more than Marx had ever envisioned in his day. By the 1950s, abstract ideas like lifestyle and art were marketed and sold as pop culture. Hugh Hefner sold the idea of the playboy -- the suave, cultured, swinging bachelor. Benjamin Bugsy Siegal sold the Las Vegas idea that anyone could strike it rich at the gaming tables. Jack Kerouac helped create the Beatnik culture. Hollywood contributed to this phenomenon, with the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, the individualistic, albeit apolitical, social rebel. After all, a rebel without a political cause is hardly a threat to the status quo. Probably the biggest and most successful cultural marketer is the Walt Disney Corporation. Disney, with its global empire of theme parks, films, television, radio, music, and publishing, produces and sells the physically intangible commodity of American pop culture. It is pop culture with an upbeat, pro-capitalist, American theme, but pop culture nonetheless. One aspect of cultural commodification is its ability to co-opt, neutralize, and render powerless any challenges to the economic and political status quo. In this way, cultural hegemony is enforced. Rock and roll music, characterized in the 1960s as the music of protest and rebellion, became, within 20 years, the music of selling beer, tennis shoes, and cars. Even revolutionary activist Malcolm X has been commodified and marketed as a fashion statement. This ability to tam anything into a commodity, and make a profit doing so, contributes to the short collective political memory in capitalist consumer societies. While culture as a commodity tends to be upbeat and cheerful (happy, optimistic people buy more), it also has its darker side. Few people question the policy choices that have led to the objectively abnormal situation that constitutes mass imprisonment (and the rise in executions). The commodification of prisons as culture has contributed to normalizing the abnormal. Prison as Concept and Reality The social and physical reality of prisons is constantly mystified and mythologized. Incarceration is a tool of social control. Its purpose is to discipline those workers and poor people who are not imprisoned, yet. Each prisoner serves as an example of what could happen to the other 150 Americans who are not currently imprisoned. The intimidation and deterrence factor of prison is served by keeping it distant, remote, and unknown, but at the same time, nearby, an immediate threat of imaginable evil. On the surface, these seem to be contradictory and impossible goals. Amazingly, American pop culture has largely succeeded in having it both ways, while simultaneously ensuring the belief in the general population of nonprisoners that what occurs in prisons does not affect them. Popular culture, mainly through film and television, but also with cheer leading from the corporate media and opportunistic politicians, has ingrained two conflicting images of prison into the collective American consciousness. When it is for the purpose of social control, to get the weak and poor into line, prison is the dark, barred world of brutal, sweaty, muscled, tattooed men, a world of sodomy, stabbings, and razor wire. This world was alluded to when federal prosecutor Gordon Zubrod told a Canadian television interviewer that three Canadian men who were resisting extradition to the United States on fraud charges would face along, hard prison term as the boyfriend of a very bad man. …
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