{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020318506315211423, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.7115987460815045, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Spectacles of Incarceration: Ideological Violence in Prison Documentaries

If you were to sit down sometime late in the evening, turn on your television and begin flipping aimlessly through the channels, the chances are quite good that you would stumble upon a scene similar to this one. A solitary black male, dressed in a standard-issue fluorescent orange prison jumpsuit, stands defiantly in the middle of a fenced-in exercise yard. Having been granted his one hour of time outside his cell, the inmate has chosen not to go back in. The guards, dressed in full riot-style gear, surround the caged exercise yard and begin trying to spray him through the chain links with pepper spray and tear gas. The inmate, in order to frustrate their efforts, scrambles up to the top of a basketball hoop with what the show’s narrator describes as surprising strength and agility. Finding their efforts to spray him into submission wholly futile, the guards proceed to shoot him with rubber bullets. While the narrator emphasizes how painful these shots are, the inmate is pelted two, three, four, five times, before finally choosing to come down. As the now recaptured prisoner pulls aside his jumpsuit to reveal the welts, the guards can be heard remarking that the inmate must possess a kind of superhuman strength and tolerance to pain to have resisted being shot so many times at such close range. If you have opted to stay on this channel, there is a good chance that you are watching one of the three prison documentary shows that currently run on MSNBC. But you might, however, be watching the National Geographic Channel or even the Discovery Channel. The proliferation of programs like these, which I am calling spectacles of incarceration, is a testament to their rising popularity; my effort here is to examine and offer