Analysis of the HBO Show Oz

Before this class I had never seen the show Oz. My mom has worked for different cable companies for years so I have had access to HBO and other movie channels for years however I seem to have missed this show which was probably a blessing in disguise because I probably wouldn’t have been able to decode the messages that I was seeing on the screen and would have been caught up, like most of the shows fans, in thinking that it was a realistic representation of a maximum security prison.

After watching several clips of Oz and contextualizing what I have seen with the film “War on Drugs” and the reading by Glassner and Yousman it is crystal clear that the show Oz is not a real representation of prison in the slightest. Yousman states in his article that “The HBO audience is wealthier, more educated, and more suburban than the general population of television viewer. Demographically, this is the precise opposite of the US prison population. Inmates tend to be poorer, less educated, and more urban than the general population.”(266).  This is a very important idea to consider when analyzing the messages that are put out by the HBO program Oz. It is likely that most of the people who are watching this program do not have any first hand experiences or personal experiences with the prison system in our country and thus they have no ability to contextualize what they are seeing on the screen. Then, by default, the viewers of Oz develop a very skewed perception of not only what it takes to end up in prison but also what prisoners’ lives are like. From the reading in Glassner’s chapter 6 and the film War on Drugs it has become clear that most of the people in our real prisons are not in for violent crimes but rather for drugs however, in the show Oz (granted it is a maximum security prison) nearly all the main characters are in for horrible murders, rape, and other very violent crimes. This leads the typically upper-middle class viewers to view prisons are a holding tank for all the misfits and psychopaths of society.

Another thing that I noticed from watching some clips of the show Oz is that the prisoners are essentially free to roam the facility and commit ever more violent crimes inside the iron gates. I watched one clip called “Jaz Hoyt’s Death” in which two men (I assume prisoners) are sharing a hospital room, neither are shackled or restrained and after the nurse leaves the room (yes the young, female nurse in the room with two un-restrained prisoners) one man gets out of his bed and stabs and kills the other man…The nurse able to see it all through  a crack in the door but does nothing about it. This is something that if watched as just part of another episode of a television show that a person enjoys would not resonate as odd however it is extremely unlikely  that that could ever be the possible set up for hospitalized prisoners. The misconception that prisoners have the freedom to roam around and do harm to other prisoners, guards or other persons working in the prison is further pressed in another clip I watched called “Adebisi gets rejected by Shirley” where the prisoner Adebisi tells Shirley to give him oral sex through the cage and Adebisi is then caught and taken away from her cell after she says no and refers to him with a very derogatory term. Just the fact that women and men are ever in a place where that is possible in prison is very uncharacteristic of a real prison. However viewers are fed the illusion that this is how things work in prison.

We have learned from the film War on Drugs and Yousman’s article that “Stories of punishment have long been a source of titillation for audiences, and this titillation often has served political purposes.” (267). This is very evident in Oz and in the real prison-industrial complex. In War on Drugs there are several stories, one very interesting about a young college student who was dating a small time LSD and marijuana dealer. The woman was charged with aiding and abetting a drug dealer for only providing the police with his location. She was in turn given close to 30 years in prison and when her parents were interviewed her father mentioned that the judge had said that the severe charges were only given because they were a message to others about the severity of charges for anyone involved in any way with drugs or drug dealers. This is a prime, real example of how stories of punishment can be used to control the people. The difference between real life and Oz is that the “stories of punishment” in the HBO smash hit are not real and thus they make audiences think that political decisions to build more prisons, be harsher on crime, and continue the War on Drugs are good and just decisions. Since the audience that is primarily watching this program is not from the social group that the program focuses on, it builds a wall between the truth and the illusion. Had this program been shown on another network it is possible that it would have been received quite differently because the audience would have a better or rather, different understanding of the discourse being presented.