Bad Boys

I have been watching this show “Jail” on the TruTV network whose slogan is “Not reality… actuality!” Can I just give that a great big WTF? Something horrible has happened. We’ve completely twisted the word “reality” to mean its opposite via the moniker “Reality Television”. Here we go with the destruction of language rant once more. This ties into my analysis of the show “Jail” nicely. If you haven’t seen this show, essentially they put a TV camera crew in a county jail and film the prisoners interact with the corrections officers from when they enter until they (eventually) get placed in their cell.

Disclaimer: I understand that these corrections officers are doing a difficult and often dangerous job, dealing with some of the most beligerant and annoying people in the world. They receive training to deal with situations that most of us have never considered and this training dictates, to a large degree, their actions.

That said, these people are violent pychopathic assholes.

You simply have to watch this program with a critical eye. There is no reason to treat a fellow human being in this manner. They routinely beat the living shit out of these people for doing nothing more than flinching or stumbling. Most of these people are drunk of course and are reacting to how they are being treated. It is the assumption of hostility that leads to this cycle of violence. In other words, it is assumed that everyone there being incarcerated is a deesprate, violent and hostile criminal that needs to be physically thrown to the ground and have their arms and wrists twisted 180 degrees backwards in order to get them to comply with any given order. As it turns out this is usually what it takes. But the reason is that neither party has the ability to effectively communicate with the other.

They are not using language that conveys what they want in a way the other party can understand. When this happens, the guards get mad, start yelling at the prisoners and treating them in a sub-human fashion. Naturally, these already agitated prisoners react with hostility (even just an angry gesture or way of talking is enough) which immedialy leads to three or more guards jumping the guy and practically breaking his arms while tazering him, during which time they are screaming ”Comply--stop resisting!”… meanwhile the prisoners who are now in an immense amount of pain are crying out: “I’m not resisting, you’re breaking my arm!” A calm, intelligent person would be able to deal with 90% of these scenarios without it leading to physical violence against a fellow human being. But who has that kind of patience?

The thing is, it’s easy to dismiss these people as losers, drunks, addicts and criminals and therefore not give a shit about what happens to them. It’s easy to laugh at their pain. But if a society is really to be measured by how it treats its prisoners, then we are in trouble.

Here’s what concerns me. I can only assume that these corrections facilities are allowing cameras to show what they think is perfectly acceptable violence against prisoners. In other words, we are seeing the nice stuff they consider to be reasonable and well within the legal and ethical boundaries of such an environment. What happens when the cameras are off?

This assumption of hostility that invariably creates the hostility in the first place is endemic to government institutions everywhere. From the police to the impound lot to the DMV. This is why people hate government; it’s unnecesarily controlling, mean-spiritied and one-sided. This is why people don’t care, don’t vote and give up being productive members of society. Which is, of course, how they end up featured on the show “Jail”.