Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
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Revisiting Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model: ExPrisoners Respond to Television Representations
of Incarceration
Bill Yousman
To cite this article: Bill Yousman (2013) Revisiting Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model: Ex-Prisoners
Respond to Television Representations of Incarceration, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and
Cultural Studies, 35:3, 197-216, DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2013.803340
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2013.803340
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The Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies, 35:197–216, 2013
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online
DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2013.803340
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding=Decoding Model:
Ex-Prisoners Respond to Television
Representations of Incarceration
Bill Yousman
Almost ninety years ago, Lippmann (1922) posited that the mass media create a
‘‘pseudo-environment’’ in people’s minds. In this pseudo-environment, viewers,
listeners, and readers come to believe that they possess intimate knowledge
about places, people, and events that they may have never experienced. Thus,
the ‘‘pictures in our heads’’ may not reflect the ‘‘world outside’’ very accurately
due to inevitable media filtering and distortions. Lippmann, of course, was writing in the pre-television era, thus his contention should be examined even more
closely in the current era of electronic communication and media saturation.
In this article, I argue that despite the massive prison population explosion
that has occurred in the United States since the 1980s, most television viewers
have not experienced prison life directly. Thus, our primary source of information (or misinformation) about this ‘‘backstage’’ area of our society (see
Goffmann 1959; Meyrowitz 1985) is through cultural products such as television
programs and films. Research has previously established that most people form
their impressions of crime and the criminal justice system based on what they
hear, read, and see in the media (Graber 1980; McNeely 1995; Surette 1998). This
may be particularly true for our impressions of prison because it is the most alien
facet of the criminal justice process for most individuals. As Cheatwood notes,
‘‘Most people in the general public have formed their images of what prison life
is ‘actually’ like from the mass media’’ (1998, 209). This information, images, and
ideas then may become the basis for public opinion on issues related to criminal
sentencing and incarceration.
Because the United States is currently in the midst of an explosion in the rate
of imprisonment unlike any it has previously experienced (Alexander 2010;
Chriss 2007), I also argue that dissecting and analyzing the representations that
are at the heart of the popular imagination about prisons and prisoners is essential to developing an understanding of the current era of ‘‘incarcerate first, ask
questions later.’’ Dyer argues that:
The only way that the war on crime can maintain its political appeal to the targeted
electorate is if it continues to be masked in the illusion that it is being waged primarily
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B. Yousman
against the violent criminals whose actions are greatly exaggerated by their sensationalized depiction on TV and in the movies. (2000, 194)
Or, as Ferrell and Sanders succinctly put it: ‘‘[M]aking sense of crime and
criminalization means paying close attention to culture’’ (1995, 7). Only after
coming to understand the nature of popular culture images of prisons and
prisoners can we then start to analyze the links between images, opinions, and
policy, and begin to call popular notions into question and point the way toward
alternative ways of thinking.
Despite the importance of undertaking this sort of cultural approach to understanding media images of prisons and those who inhabit them, a self-conscious
‘‘cultural criminology’’ (Ferrell and Sanders 1995, 11) is a recent interdisciplinary
development that resides at the many intersections of cultural studies, sociology,
and media studies. Furthermore, although there has been a tremendous amount
of research on crime and the media, a scant amount of it deals specifically with
the representation of the prison industries by the media industries. Surette writes
that, ‘‘An area long ignored and still understudied, is the portrait of corrections
found in the popular culture’’ (1998, xxi). Likewise, Cheatwood (1998) notes
Little previous literature about the relationship of mass media and the correctional system
exists. Almost no one has considered the effect of media presentations of prison life on the
public’s perception of corrections, or the related process by which general public attitudes
toward corrections become crystallized through the influence of these presentations. (210)
FROM TEXTUAL ANALYSIS TO CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Previous research has offered textual critique of U.S. television’s representation
of incarceration (Yousman 2009a). Yet, several scholars from the disciplines of
media and cultural studies have argued that to achieve a full understanding of
the social and cultural roles that the media play in contemporary societies, one
has to move beyond message-based analysis to take a holistic approach to media
criticism (see, e.g., Gerbner 1973; Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, and Shanahan 2002; Jhally and Lewis 2000; Kellner 2003; Wasko 2001). This approach
encompasses three main areas of concern: (1) analysis of the political economy
of media institutions, including the structural=financial=organizational=political
constraints on media production, (2) textual and content analysis of mediated
messages and images, and (3) research into audience interpretations of media
content and the impact that such content has on readers=viewers=listeners.
Kellner (2003) has argued that media research that encompasses production,
texts, and reception provides a stronger, more comprehensive approach to
understanding media culture than more narrowly focused studies. In this article,
I take a step in this direction by building upon previous textual analysis of television’s representation of incarceration by reporting the results of interviews I
conducted with ex-inmates to examine their perceptions of the nature of prison
life, as compared to those images offered in television news and drama.
Although no claim will be made that these interviews generated ‘‘objective’’
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
199
information about life in U.S. prisons, the hope is that they offer alternative
perspectives that can be taken into account when confronting the constructions
of our corporate media system.
The central research question I explore in this article may be stated as What do
individuals who have been incarcerated make of television representations of
prison life? I found my respondents through an alternative incarceration
program located in a mid-sized northeastern city. All of the participants had
served time for serious crimes and had been conditionally released under the
auspices of this program after serving a portion of their sentences. Interviews
were conducted using a focus group format. Because of fluctuations in the numbers of willing volunteers, groups ranged in size from two to seven individuals. I
conducted six focus groups resulting in a total of 26 participants. All but one of
these respondents was male. Racial distributions were similar to the racial
makeup of America’s prison population: twelve blacks, nine Latinos, and five
whites. Ages of the respondents ranged from the early twenties to the early
fifties. Respondents were asked to discuss their prison experiences and then were
shown a clip from the HBO program Oz and asked to comment on it.
These interviews were conducted in a manner that encouraged the
participants to freely discuss their experiences while simultaneously encouraging
them to stay focused on my research concerns. As Kvale (1996) suggests:
The purpose of a qualitative research interview was described earlier as obtaining qualitative descriptions of the life world of the subject with respect to interpretation of their
meaning. The interview form treated here is a semistructured interview: It has a sequence
of themes to be covered, as well as suggested questions. Yet at the same time there is an
openness to changes of sequence and forms of questions in order to follow up the answers
given and the stories told by subjects. (124)
Thus, I organized the interviews as structured conversations, following the
guidelines suggested by Kvale (1996) in regard to managing the interview situation, conducting a quality interview, and making the interview subjects feel
comfortable while simultaneously guiding the interview.
Interviews were recorded on audiotape and transcribed for analysis. During
the interviews, I asked participants to describe their daily routines in prison
and their relationships with other prisoners and prison staff. Specific questions
focused on concrete situations related to the prison experience: sexual relationships, friendships, violence, upheavals, privacy, punishment, race relations,
drugs and drug abuse, visitation, work, education, recreation and leisure, food,
sleep, hygiene, health, safety, and therapeutic and rehabilitative programs. These
issues have been identified as central to the lives of prisoners throughout much of
the vast literature about life in America’s prisons that has been created by prison
inmates and those who work closely with them (for just a small taste of this abundant literature, see Abbott 1981; Abu-Jamal 1995; Burton-Rose 1998; Cleaver 1968;
Conover 2000; Girshick 1999; Jackson 1970; Leder 2000; Prejean 1993; Rideau and
Wikberg 1992; X and Haley 1964). Finally, I showed the participants clips from
the HBO prison drama Oz and asked them to comment on their perceptions of
the reality=fantasy aspects of this television representation of prison life. The
attempt throughout was not to determine the ‘‘objective reality’’ of prison life
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but to establish how those who have experienced prison first-hand describe their
experience in relation to media stories about incarceration. The theoretical basis
for my subsequent analysis can be found in Hall’s encoding=decoding model of
how audiences respond to television content.
THE ENCODING/DECODING MODEL
Hall’s (1980) influential encoding=decoding model of television messages
incorporated both the power of the media to function as an ideological agent
and the power of the audience to resist the ideological messages of the media.
As such, this model represented an important advance over theoretical
approaches to media power that granted all-consuming power to either media
institutions or media audiences.
In the article, ‘‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse,’’ Hall (1980)
theorized a model of mediated communication and meaning that would be much
cited, discussed, and debated by scholars of media and culture in the years to
come. This model was an attempt to depict the process of meaning construction
in television texts in a manner that would account for both the process of encoding meaning into textual forms (textual production), and the often complex
process of decoding these messages that frequently lead to very disparate readings (textual consumption). After some discussion of how the structural aspects
of media institutions put limits and constraints on the encoding process, Hall
then delineated the various ways that audiences may respond to those texts:
accepting the encoded messages outright (dominant reading), accepting the messages globally while rejecting particular aspects (negotiated reading), or flat-out
rejection of the messages entirely (oppositional reading).
Hall (1994) would later admit that the original impulses behind the model
were polemical in nature, a way of contesting the overly simplistic, linear models
of communication that were considered foundational to communication studies
(see, e.g., Shannon and Weaver 1949). These models ignored the complexity of
meaning and implied that receivers of messages could pick up on the sender’s
intent perfectly, if only all the ‘‘noise’’ could be eliminated from the system.
Drawing on semiotic theory, Hall’s primary intention was to refute this notion
and point out that meaning is much more complex than mainstream communication models suggested (Hall et al. 1994).
The polemical nature of this article, however, resulted in a number of simplifications on Hall’s part as well. To begin with, Hall has noted that the way the
notion of representation is discussed in this article suggests that media representations are merely reflective of reality (Hall et al. 1994). For example, at one point
Hall states ‘‘The ‘message form’ is the necessary ‘form of appearance’ of the event
in its passage from source to receiver’’ (Hall 1980, 129). Throughout most of his
work Hall has advanced a position of contextual constructivism rather than strict
constructivism. As such, he admits to the reality of the material world, but he also
argues that this world can only be understood through discourse, and that representation is more than just a reflection of the real, it is in actuality constitutive
of what comes to be accepted as reality (Hall 1997; Hall et al. 1994). Yet, this
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
201
position is not clearly articulated in the ‘‘Encoding=Decoding’’ article. This can
mislead a reader of the article by suggesting a simplistic notion of media
representations as merely reflective of reality.1
Another area of this model that Hall later would clarify is the notion of three
potential reading options for audiences who encounter a television text:
preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. Hall has since stated that these
positions are, ‘‘ideal-typical or hypothetical-deductive positions. They’re not
empirical positions . . . they are not sociological groups’’ (Hall et al. 1994, 256).
No one is simply a negotiating reader, or an oppositional reader. In fact, these
positions can operate almost simultaneously within audience readings of various
moments in a single text. The purpose behind outlining these hypothetical positions was to point out that the act of decoding a mediated message is multivalent
and can happen in many different ways. There are many different legitimate and
reasonable readings of a single text.
Furthermore, Hall (1994) has acknowledged that the notion of decoding in this
article does not take into account the important issues of pleasure, subjectivity,
and the unconscious that psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structuralist theory
have highlighted. The limitations of the model are not confined strictly to the
decoding side, however. As Sparks (1996) points out, this article also seems to
take the moment of encoding for granted, and in subsequent revisions Hall never
offers a theoretical exposition of encoding as a process. Subsequently, the encoding side of the model is much more complex than this model suggests. As Hall
(1994) admits, a wide variety of ideologies are actually represented in and
through media institutions, and a considerable amount of struggle and resistance
is involved in the production of media texts. This calls into question any simple
empirical analysis of the preferred meaning on the encoding side, as well as the
various readings on the decoding side.
In addition to the influence of Barthesian semiotics, Hall also drew inspiration
from Marx’s ‘‘1857 Introduction’’ in developing this model (Hall et al. 1994). Hall’s
(1974) reading of Marx’s essay foregrounds the circuit of production, circulation,
consumption, and reproduction that Marx suggests in regard to capitalist production. Hall reads this as a model of articulation, which establishes how the various moments are linked together and interdependent. The encoding=decoding
model was also intended to be an articulated model in regard to the production
of meaning rather than the production of capital. Without eliminating the idea
of determination all together, Hall was consciously responding to overly determinist readings of Marx by arguing that each moment is in fact determinate on the
next, and that the moment of production is not the single determining moment
but a logical point at which the circuit can be entered for analytic purposes.
Bearing all of this in mind, it is actually quite odd that Hall did not draw the
encoding=decoding model as a circuit. Hall expresses his regret about this rather
straightforwardly: ‘‘The encoding moment doesn’t come from nowhere. I make a
mistake by drawing that bloody diagram with only the top half. You see, if you’re
doing a circuit, you must draw a circuit’’ (Hall et al. 1994, 260). The appearance of
the model as it is suggests that encoding is the starting point of the production
of meaning, not just analytically but in practice, and this is not at all what
Hall intended to suggest. Rather, meaning is being constantly produced and
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reproduced throughout. There is no ‘‘beginning point’’ that is outside of
discourse and signification. Human beings are always already there—embedded
in the world of symbols and signifiers (Hall 1980; Hall et al. 1994). This returns us
to the concerns noted above, that the encoding=decoding model may suggest a
simplistic reading of representation as merely reproductive of the ‘‘real world,’’
when in fact phenomena are constituted by, and can only be understood through,
representation and signification. Understanding the encoding=decoding model
as a circuit is essential to understanding it as a model of articulation where each
moment is determinate upon the next without there ever being a complete
guarantee of meaning.
The idea of a circuit of meaning should not, however, suggest that each side of
the circuit is in perfect equilibrium with the other. Hall is adamant that the concept of power not be removed from this equation. Furthermore, he states that ‘‘I
don’t think audiences are in the same positions of power with those who signify
the world to them’’ (Hall et al. 1994, 261). Thus, although audiences may interpret
the meaning of a media text in a number of ways, in the act of encoding there is
always an attempt to fix meaning in a particular way. This is how ideology
works; as it sets the limits and boundaries for interpretation and pushes one
particular meaning over any possible alternatives (Hall 1980; Hall et al. 1994).
The notion that there is no guarantee of meaning from the encoding moment to
the decoding moment does not mean that there is no correspondence whatsoever
from one moment to the next. Hall accepts the Derridean notion that meaning is
not fixed but always deferred, always ‘‘sliding,’’ but he does not accept the notion
that there is always an infinite play of meanings, each as likely as the next (Hall
et al., 1994). Ideology comes into the picture at exactly that moment—to attempt
to stop the slide of meaning, to pin it down, to say ‘‘Here. This is what this photo,
this image, this sound-bite means.’’ Although this attempt is never completely successful, thus the concept of negotiated and oppositional readings, Hall does not want
to deny that the encoders, media institutions for example, do have a tremendous
amount of power to set limits on what meanings may be drawn from media texts.
Hall does not cede all power to media institutions, however, as critical scholars
such as Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) have been accused of doing, by arguing
that the meaning of a text is guaranteed. Rather, he suggests that the messages
encoded in a text set the terms of the argument and define the field that meaning
will be played out upon: ‘‘Unless they [audience interpretations] are wildly
aberrant, encoding will have the effect of constructing some of the limits and
parameters within which decoding operates’’ (Hall 1980, 135). Thus, it is essential
to Hall that the notion of preferred meaning is retained on the encoding side of
the model, because only by holding onto this conceptualization of the model can
the excesses of pluralism be denied. Although Hall’s model has been influential
to a wealth of research on how audiences decode media texts, his attention to the
power of media institutions to represent ‘‘reality’’ also lends support to my concern with media images and the messages about prisoners and prison that are
encoded in U.S. television news and dramatic programming. While research
on audience interpretations of media content has firmly established that audience
members often decode the meaning of media texts differentially, it is important
to note that this line of research has also demonstrated that media texts retain a
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
203
level of hegemonic power despite, and sometimes because of, their apparently
polysemic nature (see, e.g., Condit 1989; Jhally and Lewis 1992; McKinley 1997;
Morley 1992; Press 1991; Radway 1984).
To really understand this hegemonic power, textual analysis of media messages must be situated in a larger sociopolitical context. In other words, we must
move beyond merely textual analysis to contextual analysis. In this study I
attempt to provide a sense of context to television representations of incarceration through interviews with members of the television audience who have
actually experienced life in America’s prisons. In addition to talking about their
lived experiences in prison, I also asked my interviewees to discuss their own
responses and interpretations of television images of the U.S. prison system.
Although this group represents a very particular subset of the larger television
audience, their intimate connection to the world that is represented in television
images of incarceration suggests that their responses and insights are particularly
germane. Although most Americans will not have access to alternative sources of
information about incarceration, these respondents have first-hand knowledge of
the backstage world of imprisonment.
INMATE RESPONSES TO OZ—THE POWER OF MEDIA IMAGES
Media scholars such as Ang (1985), Katz and Liebes (1985), Fiske (1987), Press
(1991), and others, claim that members of particular sub-cultural groups are likely
to interpret programs quite differently than the general public might. Thus I now
move to a discussion of the results of my interviews to examine how individuals
who have experienced incarceration respond to the spectacle of violence promoted
on the HBO program Oz. Oz debuted in 1997 and at the time was the only ongoing
U.S. television series that was set inside a fictional maximum-security prison. Textual analysis of Oz suggests that it is a hyperviolent program that features racially
charged imagery meant to evoke a sense of terror associated with prisons and
prisoners (Yousman 2009a).
I showed respondents brief clips of Oz, including a number of scenes of
extreme violence and chaos, and asked them to comment on the program. To
allow the conversation to proceed naturally, I asked wide-open questions such
as, ‘‘What do you think?’’ When more probing was needed I asked if participants
thought the program in general, or a specific scene, was ‘‘real’’ or how the images
compared to what they had experienced while incarcerated. A wide-range of
responses were generated from these interviews, from complete rejection of the
veracity of the program to an embrace of even some of the most extreme images
as quite reflective of prison life. These responses seemed to cover the spectrum of
what Hall (1980) has termed dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional
decodings of the messages encoded in television representations.
EMBRACING OZ
As noted above, Hall (1980) accounted for both the power of media discourse to
structure meaning for audiences and the ability of viewers to arrive at their own
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B. Yousman
conclusions within the limitations established by the encoded messages. When
viewers accept the terms of the text without question, they are said to be operating
within the dominant code. Oz works very hard at establishing the veracity of the
program’s construction of prison life. Viewers are thus positioned to accept that
the program provides a ‘‘real’’ peek behind the scenes in a maximum-security
prison. Many of the respondents seemed to accept this even when they were
shown scenes of repeated acts of outrageous and bizarre violence. As Frankie2 said,
‘‘That show Oz, that shit real.’’ Respondents also frequently made comments such
as ‘‘That’s true right there . . . oh, that’s true, that’s true’’ while viewing clips from
Oz. Tony, for example, in response to images of extreme violence such as numerous and repeated stabbings, murders, attacks on prison officials, people getting
kicked down elevator shafts, explosions, and even the entombment of a prisoner
behind a brick wall, said,
That’s a little accurate right there. All that stickin’ stuff—and debts being owed—and
people being buried and all that. All that happened up at ———. People getting hit with
canisters . . . And that happened. That stuff happens . . . I seen that, I seen all that.
Similarly, in this dialogue, three ex-inmates agree that daily prison life is as violent as that depicted on Oz, even when it comes to frequent homicides:
Interviewer:
Mike:
Francisco:
Interviewer:
Francisco:
Interviewer:
Francisco:
Interviewer:
Francisco:
Pete:
Mike:
So what do you guys think?
Half of that is what jail is.
Yeah! That’s what jail is.
In what ways?
A lot of ways. ——— is like that. That one jail ——— is like that . . .
Can you see that kind of thing happening there? The kind of things they
showed?
That’s why they always locked down.
Have you heard of people actually getting killed while they’re in prison?
Well yeah, you got prisoners that got killed. In ——— during the riot they
got killed.
You got people dying in there every day . . .
All that stuff happens in the real big top of prisons, like San Quentin. They
know they’re there for a while—Texas.
What is particularly interesting about this conversation is that although there
is some acknowledgement that not all prisons are the same, reflecting a more
negotiated response to the images (see further discussion below), there is still
a general acceptance that prison life is just as violent as Oz represents it to be.
This can be seen most clearly in Pete’s really extraordinary statement that,
‘‘You’ve got people dying in there every day.’’
Thus, throughout the interviews there was a strong tendency for ex-inmates
to embrace even the most extreme images as an accurate reflection of life in U.S.
prisons. This occurred despite the overall tendency for respondents to indirectly
refute the images and stories of Oz when recounting their own prison experiences.
All of my interviewees described prison as being a much more restrictive
environment than Oz makes it out to be, with strict supervision and severe consequences for disruptive behavior. Similarly, even though they often accepted the
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
205
hyperviolence of Oz as representative of a truth about prison life, some ex-inmates
also were able to simultaneously state that they had not witnessed, relatively
speaking, very much violence while they themselves were incarcerated:
Antoine: But like I’m sayin’, real fighting, actually man, tell you the truth, the only
real fight I ever seen in jail was the one I was in . . . As far as up here, the only
time I think I really—that I can remember—as far as stabbings—maybe three
stabbings over the whole three years—yeah!
At times, respondents seemed to have to work at making their own experiences gibe with the images of hyperviolence prevalent on Oz. For example, in this
dialogue, Antoine equates a murderous assault on a warden that occurred in one
episode of Oz with a much milder real world incident:
I think that happened in ——— one time. They assaulted him, but they didn’t hit him. But
they threw somethin’ at his ass, or somethin’—like a milk or somethin’. Yeah—they hit
him with a milk carton, but they caught us—like you say, that shit could happen.
Thus, although the incident Antoine had experienced seemed to be a relatively
minor event (throwing a milk carton at a warden) he was able to invoke it to
justify why he felt the brutal assault depicted on Oz was a realistic portrayal.
It seems that the differences in severity between the two incidents got lost in
Antoine’s willingness to embrace even the most brutal images of Oz as true to life.
Many of the respondents thus seemed to accept the program’s images of
extreme violence without much questioning. Perhaps these interviewees were
also trying to present themselves as well versed in the brutality of prison life.
There may have been a certain tendency to want to represent their own experiences behind bars as something they could take pride in having survived.
An ‘‘I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks’’ discourse, if you will. Still,
whatever the motivation for their embrace of these images of chaos and hyperviolence, there was a clear tendency on the part of many ex-inmates to accept
Oz’s images even in their most extreme manifestations.
NEGOTIATING OZ
However, not all of the responses reflected this much acceptance of the world
presented by Oz. Hall (1980) notes that it is common for audiences to accept
the global terms of media discourse, the general over-riding worldview, while
simultaneously noting contradictory understandings of their own personal, local,
relationship to the images or events covered in the text. Thus, as in the example
above, when Mike says, ‘‘Half of that is what jail is,’’ and, later, suggests that only
the worst prisons are really like Oz, he is engaged in a negotiation with the program’s central thematic notions, simultaneously accepting yet placing restrictions
on the dominant understanding of the world embodied by the text. Further
examples of this type of negotiation can be found in the comments offered by
other respondents.
Several interviewees, for example, made comments suggesting that the images
of chaos on Oz, and in other films and television shows, represent how prison
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‘‘used’’ to be but that it is no longer like that due to more severe penalties and
restrictions that have been imposed. For example, even before viewing the clips
from Oz, this dialogue occurred during one interview:
Interviewer: We see lots of scenes of prisons on television and in the movies . . .
Johnny: It ain’t like that no more. They’s played out.
Luis: That’s back in the days.
Several interviewees seemed to feel that prisons were much more violent and
chaotic in the past than now. There was a tendency to imply that authorities have
cracked down on prison violence in recent years. This may represent a certain
glorification or romanticization of both violence and the past. On the other hand,
it may also reflect their own experiences and their perceptions that inmates have
actually been subject to more restrictions in recent years.
At other times, respondents accepted certain elements of the program while
rejecting others. For example, in response to images of prisoners being left alone
without supervision where they could then harm each other, interviewees agreed
that this does happen in places like the showers but, in reference to a specific scene
of violence in a gym Antoine, for one, responded, ‘‘In the weight room, hell no.’’
Similarly, some interviewees were able to accept all of the images of
outrageous and extreme violence they were shown except for one:
Carla: I don’t know about the pipe bomb.
Tony: That pipe bomb is kind of outrageous.
And in a subsequent interview:
Evan: I know how to make zip guns—toilet paper tubes and stuff like that in prison—but
you’re not going to find no canisters like that, or anything like that, or wiring—like
twelve cent penny wire like that to make a bomb like that.
These sorts of comments, objecting only to a sequence when a prisoner
attempts to blow up the prison with a bomb, were made after the respondents
were also shown scenes from Oz of prisoners bricking each other up in a
wall, poisoning each other, kicking each other down elevator shafts, electrocuting each other by shoving each other’s heads into television sets, and so
on. Despite this, the respondents were generally able to accept the veracity of
the program’s images, drawing a line only at the attempted use of an explosive
device.
Another way that this negotiation with the worldview presented by Oz manifested itself was through some respondents’ insistence that the images were
reflective of the reality in some prisons but not all. An example of this is offered
above in the quote from Mike: ‘‘All that stuff happens in the real big top of prisons, like San Quentin.’’ Similarly, when Frankie said, ‘‘That show Oz, that shit
real.’’ Fred responded, ‘‘Depends on what prison you go to.’’ A couple of
moments later Fred also said, ‘‘It’s more fake than it’s real. But there’s parts that
are real.’’
Interestingly, despite Fred’s somewhat skeptical stance he also noted that Oz
is his favorite show. Thus, even when respondents seemed to be rejecting the
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
207
premises of the show outright, they often ended up negotiating with the worldview presented in the program as in this comment from Evan after viewing
several clips of violent scenes from Oz:
No! That’s like totally over-exaggerated. If you’re going to San Quentin or something like
that in Cali—or if you have to stick with your own race—otherwise you’re going to get
killed as soon as you walk through the door.
Evan starts by stating that the images of Oz are not a reliable reflection of
reality yet he quickly implies that the program’s images of racial animosity
and violence accurately represent life in California’s prison system. Although
he never indicates that he himself has been incarcerated in California, he is correct in his assumption that there is a great deal of racial violence in California’s
supermax prisons (see Parenti 1999).
Thus, it was common for respondents to accept the global propositions offered
by Oz, of prison as a place of untrammeled chaos and hyperviolence, even as
they might object to particular examples or premises.
REJECTING OZ
Again, however, not all of the reactions represented an acceptance of the program
even on a negotiated level. There were also some moments of outright rejection of
the program’s overall worldview. These sorts of responses are indicative of Hall’s
(1980) contention that at times viewers employ an alternative understanding of
the images they encounter and end up therefore refusing to ‘‘buy into’’ the basic
premises of the message.
This sort of rejection of the program’s claims occurred when ex-inmates were
shown a scene where inmates rioted in the cafeteria after being told that the facility
would no longer allow smoking:
Harry: If somethin’ like that was to kick off today, this joint would be locked down
for 30 to 60 days and the majority of the people who kicked it off would be
getting 20 years and going to Texas or Virginia, right off the bat.
Daryll: No questions asked.
Harry: You get 20 for a riot and you’re getting transferred. No question about it.
Things have changed. That’s why it don’t happen because the penalties—
before you go to seg [segregation], before you end up in seg, 20–30 days,
100 days, say whatever, you get a 90 day ticket or a 40 day loss of good time,
whatever, 45 days. Now you’re getting hit with 20 years for inciting a riot
and you’re getting transferred way the hell to Virginia or Texas. Going on
the chain gang.
Interviewer: You mean like something they showed in the cafeteria . . .
Johnny: Yeah, Yeah! Just like that.
And in a subsequent interview:
Antoine: That’s kind of off the hook right there. It don’t just happen like that . . . No, if
anything they’d be beefin’ with COs. Give me my cigarettes. Something would
more likely jump off when they try to take people who like got crates and stores
of cigarettes. That’s when somethin’ like that starts goin’ . . . Like I say, that riot
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shit—now that don’t happen like that. It usually a riot happens when gangs
start riffin’ with you.
These respondents were very in tune with what they perceived to be distortions
in the program’s representation of prison life. In the first excerpt, ex-inmates
objected to the manner in which Oz often fails to depict the negative consequences
that prisoners face for violent behavior. In the second, Antoine objects to the very
premise that the announcement of this policy change would spark a riot and
instead points to what he believes are more likely causes of prison upheavals.
In another interview respondents similarly objected to what they thought was
an inaccurate representation of a lack of supervision and easy access to items that
could be used as weapons:
Fred: See where you see a hammer there—you don’t get none of that in prison . . .
Hammers and shit. Especially that kind of prison.
Tim: I’m pretty sure they got maximum security.
Fred: That’s supposed to be a maximum-security prison. All them people out on the turf at
one time—that don’t happen either. They usually let upstairs out or downstairs out.
Hall argued that the moment that negotiated readings begin to slide into more
explicitly oppositional decodings is extremely important politically because,
‘‘Here the ‘politics of signification’—the struggle in discourse—is joined’’
(1980, 138). Hall’s notion that a radical potentiality exists in this struggle over
representation and meaning is evident in the example noted above. The U.S.
media tend to tell a story about incarceration that suggests that penalties and
prison conditions should be much more severe and that out-of-control prisoners
do not receive adequate punishment for their violent behavior (Yousman 2009b).
These stories support a particular, harshly punitive, approach to criminal justice.
When the respondents quoted above reject images from Oz that reinforce these
premises, that rejection may be seen as the first step in political activation.
However, it should also be noted that this sort of response was relatively rare
in comparison to the tendency for ex-inmates to arrive at dominant or negotiated
responses to the images they were shown, accepting, for the most part, the hyperviolent and chaotic picture of prison life painted by Oz. Thus, despite the claims
of some media scholars such as Fiske (1989a, 1989b) that audiences are constantly
engaged in semiotic rebellion, it was much more likely for the people I spoke
with to accept dominant media discourses than it was for them to arrive at their
own alternative readings. This was apparent not just in their responses to Oz but
also to various references to other media images that arose spontaneously during
the conversations.
ACCEPTANCE EVEN IN THE FACE OF SKEPTICISM
Importantly, respondents’ willingness to accept Oz’s images as ‘‘real’’ and
a tendency for respondents’ perceptions of incarceration to be shaped by films
and television programs they had seen (discussed below), occurred despite
a countervailing tendency toward a skeptical stance on media’s representation
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
209
of prison life. For example, when asked the following question, Frankie spontaneously brought up the media:
Interviewer: After you first got there, was there anything about it that surprised you?
That was different than what you thought it would be like?
Frankie: It ain’t nothin’ like on TV.
Interviewer: Tell me about that. How is it different?
Fred: It depends on the prison . . . Every jail you go to here is different. None of
them are the same.
This dialogue occurred before I had even mentioned media at all. Fred’s insistence that there is a great deal of difference between institutions was echoed
throughout many of the interviews. This is one aspect of the homogenous image
offered by film and television that is clearly misleading (Van de Bulck and Vandebosch 2003). Another may be in the depiction of prison sexuality. For example,
when asked to elaborate on how real prison life is different than media images of
prison life, another respondent (Tim) added, ‘‘Everybody thinks everybody is
gay. Everybody thinks you drop your soap you’re gonna get in the butt and I
mean that’s what everybody thinks. Everybody think . . . Not even like that at
all. I ain’t seen not one time.’’
Other ex-inmates also refuted the stereotypical image of prison rape while still
admitting that it does happen on occasion. Yet, respondents also seemed aware
that prison sexuality is much more complex than media images of constant gang
rapes suggest, making reference to consensual relationships as well as relationships of convenience and of intimidation.
Skepticism about media images of prison was apparent in other interviews as
well. Carla, for example, twice insisted that prison life is worse than what is
depicted on television and Will chimed in to agree with her contention. Similarly,
in another interview, Fred was quite adamant that the picture offered by the
media does not reflect the reality of prison life:
When I first got out of jail and everybody I talked to: ‘‘Tell me stories about this, this like
that? You gotta see this movie, you gotta see that movie.’’ Get the fuck out of here. You
want to know what it’s all about- go there, you know what I mean?
One respondent explicitly noted the power of media to shape public opinion,
and, therefore, the political implications of distorted media images:
Cal: You got to realize the media, the media makes everything look so bad and they make
the Governor like he’s doing a great job. Department of Corrections, the Commissioner is doing such a great job. So everybody votes for him—everybody—you
know what I’m saying—everybody believes that. So they’re going to believe what
the media tells them and what they read in the newspapers and therefore . . . keep
up the good job. Great job.
Cal’s skepticism here is indicative of an understanding of the connections
between media images, audience perceptions, and politics. However, what is
perhaps most significant about the respondents’ reactions to mediated images
of incarceration is that despite a general tendency to suggest that they do not
buy into media messages, references to specific television shows and films that
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they enjoyed and seemed to accept as ‘‘realistic’’ came up frequently during these
interviews.
THE POWER OF MEDIA IMAGES
Thus, despite these oppositional sorts of responses, the overall tendency seemed to
suggest that respondents were still heavily influenced by media images of incarceration. In addition to a general tendency to accept the veracity of Oz’s representation
of incarceration, throughout the interviews ex-inmates also frequently brought up
other prison-related films and television shows they had seen. What is important
about this is that these references often occurred in the context of a discussion about
their own personal experiences. Even when I had made no reference to media,
respondents invoked media stories when discussing prison life. The centrality of
media culture as resources of ideas, knowledge, and descriptors in our everyday
lives was clearly apparent in these comments. As Van de Bulck and Vandebosch
noted in a study of Flemish inmate responses to media images of incarceration:
It is noteworthy that the expectations of most of the inmates on entering the system were
mainly based on television and movie images of prisons in the United States. They realized where they got their information from. They made explicit references to American
audiovisual fiction. From it, they seemed to have been led to expect that the majority of
inmates would be convicted of very serious crimes, that the experienced inmates would
subject newcomers to an initiation ritual and that rape and violence were part of the daily
fare of prison life. (2003, 108)
During the interviews, ex-inmates even called on media images completely
unrelated to prison life when they were explaining events they themselves had
experienced while incarcerated. For example, when describing a confrontation
between a group of inmates and COs he had witnessed, Antoine said,
I mean, ever see that movie, Braveheart? It was just like that. They was on the hill—they
was at the top of the compound—brothers at the bottom of the compound. COs was like
this: Hey Yo! You gotta move man! You gotta move! Fuck you! You understand? I ain’t
movin’ no motherfuckin’ way. So they had to back up. They made the COs back up.
Similarly, at the tail end of another interview, Tim spontaneously said, ‘‘You ever
seen Training Day? There’s a lot of cops out there like him.’’
Interviewees also showed a tendency to blur media stories with supposed real
world experiences even when the interviewer had asked questions specifically
about what they had witnessed themselves. For example, during the previously
noted interview, Antoine and another inmate had this dialogue after being asked
about whether they had seen stabbings while in prison:
Antoine: Like I said the only one was like the one I was telling you about earlier, about
the guy with the TV, they were trying to bust him and stabbed him on his head.
Miguel: It like they flush you down the toilet if they want to . . .
Interviewer: They what?
Miguel: They had a movie just like that. They’ll cut you in half, then into little pieces.
That shit happens in Puerto Rico.
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
211
Antoine: Yeah! That’s the Puerto Rican jail. That’s one jail you do not want to go to.
I seen a documentary on that, man. I was watchin’ the Discovery Channel
one time . . . they showed this documentary on the Spanish prison, the
Puerto Rican prison. That shit was like there ain’t no COs. It’s like that Escape
from New York shit. They just throw you in there, that just y’all. There ain’t
no COs man, and they look at it like this, like he said, they will hack
you up into pieces.
This is a fascinating bit of dialogue, as the respondents slide perhaps unconsciously into a discussion of media stories, both fiction and non-fiction, even
though I had specifically asked to discuss their own experiences. Antoine refers
to both a documentary and a science fiction film about a futuristic prison in the
same breath. So although Antoine says he had only witnessed one stabbing and
Miguel refers to no personal experiences at all, they quickly turn the discussion
to a situation of extreme violence that could have come straight from Oz—a
prisoner being chopped into little pieces and flushed down a toilet.
Similarly, in another interview, ex-inmates began discussing the film Lockdown
even though I had asked what their own experiences with supervision by corrections officers were like:
Mike: You seen Lockdown? You see how the dude dropped the weights on his chest and
broke his arm? And stuff like that can happen. That’s why they tried to take the
dead weights out of jails now. That can easily happen. That whole room is nothing
but metal.
Mike’s point was that inmates being left unsupervised in a weight room, as
depicted in Oz, is likely to happen in real prisons too. Yet he seemed to almost
naturally invoke a media image to provide evidence of his point, rather than
something he himself had witnessed in person.
I quote the following dialogue at length because it is an important example of
how closely some inmates identify with media images of even the most dramatic
prison stories:
Ray: I’ve watched Woods—the movie Woods—last week, you saw it right, Norm? That
was a good movie. It’s about a prison, and this guy he was an artist, and at first
he was a drug dealer out in the street, and he got in jail and everything, and he
became an artist. He met this other prisoner, but the prisoner he was a white guy,
but he was a nervous white guy, so his mother had money, so she owned an art
gallery, so he painted the whole story since he been down, and all these COs and
all that, they were sending him to work in a factory, with asbestos, he was getting
mad cancer and all that, and so he found out about it, and he started drawing all
this stuff and he told the guy all I want you to do is when your mother comes was
to have her put this stuff in her art gallery. So they planned to escape. So the
white dude was going to help him escape so he backed out at the last moment.
So he let him go. So they escaped, and one of the guys stabbed the guy that . . .
Norman: The white guy stabbed him.
Ray: No, no, no—it was the black guy stabbed the other black guy.
Norman: Oh, yeah!
Ray: Because he cut his face over a basketball game... look at that over a basketball
game he cut his face swish! He cut his face from here to here—he had mad cuts
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in his face—over a basketball game. So he let that go. The last day that they was
going to escape he killed the guy that cut him, while they were escaping.
Stabbed him up. So the other guy, he died, his friend, not the guy that stabbed
him but his other friend, and the one is off in the show . . . the police shot him
because he didn’t want to stay alive cause everybody else escaped, except
him, the one that mapped the plan. The man of the whole movie. He charged
the fence with a screwdriver, and they blasted him, and that’s how it ended.
His whole life story in jail was the art gallery and people’s was looking at it . . .
Like wow . . . you know. That was a good movie. Woods.
Nomar: That dude had a chance to escape—they had the door open, but he wanted to
come back because of his friend. Know what I’m sayin’? After that he got killed
on the door.
Ray: You got to take the chance.
This was an animated conversation, with Ray and the other respondents
showing excitement about the particulars of the film and the fate of the characters. Toward the end of his recounting of the film, Ray was obviously emotionally
moved by the story. During his long description he seemed to almost lose sight of
the fact that he was talking about a film and not a real event that he had experienced or real people that he had personally known (see Horton and Wohl 1956,
on a related tendency—parasocial relationships with media figures).
As this and the other examples noted above demonstrate, throughout the
interviews it was apparent that media images of prison life were influential in
shaping the respondents’ perceptions of even their own prison experiences.
These results are consistent with what Van den Bulck and Vandebosch (2003)
found in their interviews with inmates of a Flemish prison. As noted above, their
study demonstrated that inmates’ expectations of prison life were heavily influenced by their exposure to television stories about incarceration. This was also
the case for many of the ex-inmates I spoke with who were clearly willing to
accept the images of Oz even at their most bizarre and who easily and frequently
called on other media discourses when they had actually been asked to discuss
their own personal experiences.
CONCLUSION
Speaking to individuals who have experienced the era of rampant incarceration
first-hand provides a sense of social context that helps to illuminate the power
and influence of television images and narratives of prisons and prisoners.
Television is the central storyteller in American culture (Shanahan and
Morgan 1999), but it is only one potential source of stories about incarceration.
Those who have actually experienced life in America’s prisons have their own
stories to tell, and the ex-inmates I spoke with told stories about incarceration
that were often quite disparate from the stories told by U.S. television. Exinmates, for example, described prison environments that are much more controlled than those depicted on U.S. television—with close supervision, limited
freedom of movement and strict routines to follow. While acknowledging that
many prisons can be very violent places, these respondents also tended to refute
television’s hyperviolent image of incarceration where rapes, murders, and riots
Revisiting Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
213
are routine occurrences committed by naturally brutal and sadistic hypermasculine individuals. Instead, the stories told by ex-inmates offer insights into
how the structural aspects of the U.S. penal system often encourage rather than
discourage brutality, and the complex nature of prison violence and sexuality.
Interviewees also spontaneously brought up many issues that are rarely or
never dealt with in television programming. Issues such as poor nutritional
and health care services; limited opportunities to participate in educational,
vocational, or other rehabilitation programs; frequent verbal and physical abuse
by corrections staff; complicity of corrections staff with the prison drug trade; the
difficulties released prisoners have in finding employment; and high turnover
rates and inadequate training programs for COs, came up in every interview.
Other issues that arose during these interviews, issues that television programming does not deal with at all, included the additional hardships that female
prisoners must face in U.S. prisons, and the problems caused by the placement
of non-violent prisoners alongside offenders with violent records.
It should be noted that it is not really surprising, however, that television
stories about incarceration do not address key issues such as those noted above.
For television news producers, for example, to even consider these sorts of potential stories as newsworthy, the entire culture of commercial journalism in the U.S.
would have to change. A move away from purely episodic reporting of dramatic
events and conflicts, a move away from the reliance on the public relations of
corporate and government spokespeople as sources of information, a move away
from celebrity news and gossip, all of this would be required before the concerns
of these inmates had any chance of being aired on American television.
Furthermore, in broadcast network dramatic programs, the focus is not on the
lives of inmates. The focus of popular television legal and crime dramas such as
The Good Wife, CSI, and Law and Order: SVU, are the attorneys and police who
function as the protagonists and subjects for audience identification. The inmates
who appear as props are entirely one-dimensional figures. Therefore, the issues
that concern real inmates are irrelevant in terms of how these dramas represent
the incarcerated. It is particularly noteworthy, however, that Oz, which does
focus on the lives of inmates and purportedly takes viewers inside to show them
what really occurs in a maximum security prison, also does not ever touch on
issues that are of central importance to real inmates. After all, much was made
of producer Tom Fontana’s pre-production research inside maximum-security
prisons. Instead, this program seems to take the easy and cynical way out by
reveling in unlikely stories of bizarre conflicts and over-the-top violence as
a strategy to lure curious viewers to HBO with the promise of a spectacle of what
prison life supposedly is ‘‘really like.’’ The ex-inmates I spoke with, however,
related stories that suggest that nowhere on television do audiences get a view
of what prison is ‘‘really like.’’
Yet, despite the tendency for ex-inmates to tell stories that ran counter to the
stories about incarceration told by television, when respondents were shown
segments of Oz, a program familiar to many of them, and asked to comment,
there was a definite tendency to embrace the images as true-to-life—even when
multiple scenes of intense, bizarre, over-the-top of violence were included in the
clips that interviewees viewed. Although some of the interviewees did take
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exception to certain specific aspects of the scenes they were shown, there was
relatively little outright rejection of the veracity of the program. Even when commenting on how unlikely it was for someone to have the means to build a bomb
while incarcerated, for example, the respondents still embraced other images of
extreme and unchecked chaos and violence as an accurate representation of
prison life. This occurred despite conversations that came up earlier in the interviews suggesting that many of the ex-inmates had not themselves experienced
much violence while they were incarcerated, and general, spontaneous, comments that prison life was nothing like what television and movies might lead
one to expect.
However, without seeming to realize that they were doing so, respondents
also made frequent references to film and television programs throughout the
interviews—even when they had been specifically asked to speak about things
they themselves had experienced or witnessed while incarcerated. The interviewees thus often seemed to filter their own personal experiences through media
images, rather than drawing on their membership in a specific subculture to
reject or reinterpret media images of that culture, as Fiske (1987, 1989a, 1989b)
and other theorists of audience resistance have proposed as a likely scenario. This
tendency indicates that the stories and images of television, and other forms of
media, possess a tremendous amount of power to potentially influence our
perceptions of the world—even when it comes to events and situations that we
have experienced directly. Contrary to what commonsense might tell us, media
images have become such a crucial part of everyday life that they may at times
trump non-mediated ‘‘real’’ experiences. This understanding of the power of
media images highlights why television stories about incarceration may be instrumental in indirectly shaping criminal justice policies and procedures. As such,
the distortions of these programs (Surette 1998; Yousman 2009b) must be taken
seriously and ideological analysis and critique of the tendencies in television
representations of prisons and prisoners is a necessary step in combating the
abuses of the U.S. prison-industrial complex.
NOTES
1. Although it should be noted that Hall may be a bit too critical of himself on this point, because the
article does note the problematizing effects of the naturalization of codes and signs (see Hall 1980,
132–133).
2. All interview participants are identified through pseudonyms. The names of actual institutions that
they served time in are indicated by blank lines. This was at the request of my respondents.
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