An Analysis of Oz

Central to the second season of Oz are two major course themes covered throughout the semester: the gap between criminal and social justice and the requirement of social deviance. Characters of interest involving these themes include Kareem Said, Kipekimi Jara, Simon Adebisi, Governor Devlin, and Jiggy Walker. Within the second season of Oz, prisoners are able to produce social justice and use social deviance to set the actions and culture of the prison population. Social justice is officially defined as this: “the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within a society” (dictionary.com, np). Throughout the semester, it has been stated that there is a gap between criminal justice and social justice. Basically, we as a class through discussion and weekly reading folders have allowed the following reality to nestle into our brains: criminal justice is achieved by pouncing on those who have disadvantageous resource access, physically and emotionally. Within the second season of Oz, it is somewhat apparent that the creators of the television show are attempting to exemplify that the prisoners viewed in both Emerald City and gen pop are capable of creating social justice, very similar to the ideas that “one man can make a difference” and “ anybody is capable of anything.” As is apparent, prisoners are able to produce social justice, but are also able to represent elements of the carceral society and prison-industrial complex through production of docile bodies either by choice or by coercion from correctional bodies.

The first character that represents the idea of prisoners producing social justice while in prison is through Kipekimi Jara. This man is able to produce social justice in two separate ways within the prison, dir...

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...nstead of the community, and were also able to reproduce the production of docile bodies and recidivistic behavior themselves through coercion or choice. Ultimately, it may have been easier to highlight in the second season of Oz the reproduction of criminal behavior in correctional officers or even to analyze the strictly recidivistic behavior of inmates such as Poet or Schillenger, but the subset of characters mentioned fulfill the three ideas mentioned above according to the information given by Erickson, Durkheim, Foucalt, and Reiman.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Print.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories, 2003. Print.

Reiman, J. H., & Leighton, P. (2010). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (10 ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.