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Representations of Prison in Nineties Hollywood Cinema: From Con Air to The Shawshank Redemption

2005; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Sean O’Sullivan,

Cinema and Media Studies

The 1990s saw a steady growth in the world prison population with the USA contributing significantly to the upward trend. But, whilst it has been suggested that media-led panics and the propagation of 'prison myths' have legitimated prison growth there has been little work done on the significance of representations of prison in popular cinema for social and cultural understandings of imprisonment. The current article attempts to redress this neglect. After a brief review of some of the existing literature, an analysis of four significant 'prison films' of the nineties is presented. It is concluded that, with respect to film, the notion of challenging media misrepresentations of prisons and prisoners is problematic.