How American-based Television Commercials Portray Convicts, Correctional Officials, Carceral Institutions, and the Prison Experience

ABSTRACT

The manner in which deviant and marginalized groups are portrayed in popular culture shapes public perceptions and policy responses. These messages are communicated through a variety of channels. Over the past decade, scholarly interest in the portrayal of prisoners, correctional officers, and correctional institutions has increased. One of the unexplored, important, and relatively contemporary mediums through which inmates, correctional officers, and carceral spaces have been portrayed is through commercials. These messages appear via print, television, and the Internet. In an attempt to understand the content and context of these commercials, the following article presents the results of a content analysis of American-based television commercials that feature convicts, correction officials, prison settings, and/or the carceral experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Television
• commercials
• convicts
• correctional officials
• carceral institutions
• prison experience

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Joffrey Alcidor for identifying some of the videos, Tara Moon and Sonce Reece for assistance with coding, and the comments of the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Notes

1. The words convict, inmate, and prisoner are used interchangeably throughout this article.

2. As the scholarly study of corrections should demonstrate, the field of jails, prisons, correctional officers, and inmates is more complicated than the public assumes it to be.

3. Numerous arguments can be made for focusing on American commercials, including the high jail and prison population in the United States and the ease of archival access to this material (Anonymous, n.d., 2010, 2016).

4. Horton is the prisoner who, after being released from prison in Massachusetts—Dukakis’ home state—raped and killed Angela Miller (Hacker & Swan, 1992; Jamieson, 1989; Mendelberg, 1988).

5. It was not possible to identify the year for one of the commercials, and therefore marked as missing.

6. The coding sheet was developed using the following variables: length of commercial by seconds, advertising type, message packaged around advertisement, number of prisoner(s), gender of prisoner(s), race/ethnicity of prisoner(s), number of prison official(s), type of prison official(s) depicted, gender of prison official(s), and race/ethnicity of prison official(s). A document was then created, separate from the coding sheet, that included the commercial name, identifier, and URL to assist with future coding.

7. For example, the researchers ran into a couple of cases where after locating a URL during the earlier part of data collection, the video could no longer be found when a follow-up was done.

8. Research Assistant 1 was given a document with the relevant URLs and a coding sheet. Over a 4-hour period, the assistant completed the coding of the commercials, and it was discovered at this time that one of the sample commercials was no longer attached to the URL provided. The coauthor did an extensive search of the Internet for the commercial, but it could not be located, thus reducing our final sample to 32 commercials.

 Research Assistant 2 spent approximately 5 hours coding the new sample of 32 commercials. Next, the coauthor compared the three coding sheets, discovering that each commercial viewed by the three had a minimum of two discrepancies in the coding of the variables—the majority of these were found in the message packaged around the advertising and the race/ethnicity of the prisoner(s). The coauthor proceeded to rewatch the commercials, recoding and correcting any discrepancies. From there, the coauthor entered the new data into the SPSS database and ran a frequencies query with the updated sample set.

9. Again, the co-author viewed each commercial first for coding purposes, followed by the work of two research assistants. And as with the original coding, the coauthors followed the same guidelines as before in which they rewatched each commercial, recoding, and correcting any discrepancies. The data was entered into the original SPSS database (now with the addition of the five new variables), and a new frequency query was run.

10. Because the next five variables were coded at a later time, only 32 out of the previously coded 33 commercials were accessible via the World Wide Web.

11. We defined slapstick humor as “deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events,” and dark humor as humor that “makes light of themes that are generally considered serious of taboo.” Definitions were derived from www.dictionary.com.

12. Ranges instead of actual numbers were coded for number of prisoners and correctional officials.

13. The authors understand that the Federal Bureau of Prisons is only a fraction of all prison systems in the United States.