arrest yourself

Ezra Klein's latest posts on prison rape have got me revisiting an old hobbyhorse: the dual maintenance of public concern and public apathy towards prisoners' rights, an economy of cynicism that's tended through frequent, popular culture iterations of totalitarian laughter.

Most people seem to know that prisoners get raped, recognize that it's a pervasive and horrific and, I would argue, constitutive element of a monstrous disciplinary-industrial complex, and tend to treat it as a serious subject in serious conversation. But the second the mood shifts, prisoner rape is suddenly hil-AR-ious. For some reason, it's a topic whose reception is exceptionally contingent on the framing genre: in Office Space, Half Baked, Arrested Development, and the musical episode of Oz, the prospect of the protagonists being raped is just so much grist for the 25-year-old white guy comical mill. In The Shawshank Redemption, 25th Hour, and the rest of Oz, prisoner rape is the horror that dare not speak its name.

So the problem seems not to be so much about Americans being batty for institutionalized sodomy as about us turning with a quiet desperation to any psychic relief we can get from this scarifying knowledge. I mean, EVERYBODY knows about this shit. Unlike misogyny, it doesn't have a specifically partisan provenance - not only does everybody know it happens, but everybody considers it a problem. Also unlike misogyny, it happens to men (specifically, in the movies, white middle class men), so even Miller Lite connoisseurs are expected to show concern. Ultimately, it's not just that "people think that a man getting raped is kind of funny," as a commenter at Ezra's suggests; it's that people keep getting told that a prisoner being raped is funny.



How exactly do those of us who live in Pangloss's America, where civil liberties are only suspended in the event of eternal war and justice is firm-bosomed and blind, cope with the cognitive dissonance that this immensely ugly knowledge must create? There's just no reconciling a jingoist's vision of America with a country where drinking and driving can de facto be punishable with HIV. Luckily for Americans, there's no reason we can't have our outrage and roll on the floor laughing too. We're constantly being interpellated into a comedic sadism where "it's the horrible that makes it funny." The principle is the same as when the coyote falls off the cliff or Ben Stiller meets new people, but the content is specific: once we know we're watching a comedy, prisoner rape triggers laughter (think of the poster for instant classic '06, Let's Go To Jail: a big sudsy bar of soap sitting over a shower drain. That signifier alone has become sufficient to activate a comedic relationship with the audience).

The result is a target demographic that can't imagine itself ever having to experience prison or sexual assault, laughing at the spectacle of their on-screen surrogates being thrown outside the dignity and physical security of middle class maleness. Those movies certainly aren't targetting anybody actually likely to have been caught in the wide net of, say, the Rockefeller laws - they're directed at people for whom the idea of being dropped in the middle of someone else's class nightmare is so absurd as to be laughable. The audience is simultaneously being told through comical inversion what the privileges of its status are, and being conditioned to think about prisoner rape in terms of the unlikelihood of their being affected by it in a non-fictive world. So despite its apparent ubiquity in popular culture, the reality of prisoner rape remains largely invisible to bourgeois consciousness. We know it looks unimaginably bad on paper, but its on-screen representation is a familiar brand of unimaginable.