Date of Award

Summer 2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology & Criminal Justice

Program/Concentration

Criminology and Criminal Justice

Committee Director

Ruth Triplett

Committee Member

Vanessa Panfil

Committee Member

Alison Reed

Committee Member

Stephen Young

Abstract

Mass incarceration began almost fifty years ago and has proliferated to the point that the United States is the world leader in incarceration. Much work has been done that examines the history and nature of mass incarceration and the carceral state. However, an area that has received far less attention is how people think about prisons. To address this gap, I ground my analysis in the works of Louis Althusser, Slavoj Zizek, and Mark Fisher to formulate “Carceral Realism”, which I argue is the ideology of mass incarceration. To better understand the nature of this ideology, I employ a content analysis of prison films to examine how they portray prisons and the people in them. In the analysis, I show that prison films support the ideology of Carceral Realism by selectively portraying what kinds of people are in prison, by focusing on particular acts of violence, especially rape, and by depicting the primary purpose of prisons as incapacitation.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/1yns-yw86

ISBN

9798460434251

ORCID

0000-0002-6096-0332

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