American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television, by Lee A. Flamand

Abstract

The mass expansion and racialisation of the American carceral system began in the late 1970s, took root in the 1980s, and had become a cultural fact within the American way of life by the 1990s. The 1994 Crime Bill, the largest U.S. crime bill to date, was championed by the, at the time, democratic senator Joe Biden and ultimately passed—Hillary Clinton’s now notorious comments on urban “super predators” on the senate floor was made in defence of this bill. An American turning their TV to the news in the 1990s would see images of sensationalised urban violence and overtly racialised stories—the beating of Rodney King or the OJ Simpson trial for example—within a cultural landscape housing the world’s largest incarcerated population. Alongside this, in the late 1990s Americans could choose instead to tune into new “quality” television shows differentiated by their critical approach to American subject matter.

Keywords

• mass incarceration
• carceral studies
• quality television
• prison film
• prison series