As Social Comentary

When I told some friends of mine I was starting a blog about prison dramas, and asked them to help me to come up with a snappy and groan inducing title, my friend Michael expressed some concern. He told me, "It's hard for me to think of witty titles when all I'm thinking about is how prison dramas kind of lead people to be more tolerant of the prison industrial system." There is a lot of reason to be concerned about anything that may promote the current prison complex. The current American prison system finds its roots in the early 19th century surrounding rhetoric of criminal reformation (Malsin). The same arguments have been rolled out consistently since this time in order to justify the constant increase of incarceration rates. It is proven to ineffective at prisoner reformation, prison populations are always growing, and incarceration rates firmly prove that minorities (especially black men) are disproportionately targeted for incarceration (Wills).

The effect that television drama has on public perception of the American prison complex is especially marked in Oz. Some hold the drama found in Oz to be an illumination of the hopelessness to be found in the prison system (Hoskin). In season 3 of Oz, Oswald State Penitentiary is renamed .. Agustus Hill, in his first monologue of the season:

The name on the street for the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary.
Only, big news: They've changed the name.
It's now called the Oswald State Correctional Facility, Level Four.
I don't know what the difference is.
Leo Glynn is still warden.
Sister Peter Marie is still in psych.
Tim McManus is still unit manager of Emerald City.
And I know for damn sure none of us have changed.
Beecher is still in the hospital after Schillinger and Keller broke his bones.
Alvarez is still in solitary after blinding a CO.
Adebisi, still in the loony ward, after changing hats.
Maybe it's truth in advertising.
Maybe by getting rid of the word "penitentiary" the state is finally admitting that nobody's penitent. Nobody's sorry. Nobody.

Emerald City was established to be a reformatory cell block, as opposed to pure punishment. In this monologue, Hill is acknowledging that it is still a punishment system, and a rigid institution. The characters change in response to their environment, but almost always for the worse (Hoskin). Even when an inmate begins a redemptive arc, they are dragged back down by the other inmates or COs, and to a lesser extent this is also true in OitNB. 

This effect is fundamental to real world prison systems, just as it is in fictional one. There is a fairly common conception that inmate-inmate violence is a necessary part of criminal reformation, and this is one of the cornerstones of the American criminal justice systems (Wills). While this method is effective at removing this behavior from the public eye, it is more effective are creating a "'hierarchy of crime' [...] by structures created around racial and religious stratification (Wills)." Hoskin argues that Oz reifies this viscous system by showing intelligent characters that are forced to conform to brutal simplicity of the prison.

However, there are many critics that are in the same camp as my friend Michael. Oz and to a lesser extent OitNB are fundamentally a shows which make spectacle out of the violence of prison. The idea of creating a public show out of the violent punishment of criminals is nothing new. In 1975 Michel Foucault published an word for word account of the public torture and execution of a man who committed regicide (Garner and Black Hawk). The account references regular citizens cheering for the grotesque spectacle. The open nature of the event served to increase public approval of such punishment. There are critics who argue that Oz is the modern equivalent of the event which Foucault describes (Yousman; Enck & Morrissey). Oz may well have served the purpose of perpetuating the notion that prisons built on redemptive violence are necessary, and the fact that HBO advertised the show based on its violence only increases this reading of the show. However, the show runner states his purpose is to show how awful that violence is in the same promo.