Things TV And Movies Get Completely Wrong About Prison Life

We're all familiar with this Hollywood trope: a meek new arrival enters prison only to be surrounded by tough and violent criminals who are all out for blood. This depiction isn't accurate, though. Sure, there are hardened convicts behind prison walls. Of course there are people who've committed violent offenses just brimming with anger and indignation.

But there are also people who simply made bad choices or got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Relatively minor drug abusers, for instance, make up a disproportionate number of incarcerated individuals. Many of those offenders are nonviolent in nature. The idea that prisons are stacked to the rafters with monsters is inaccurate, not to mention damaging.

A prison riot makes for a very thrilling cinematic experience. The tension in an already-tense environment reaches a breaking point, and the whole place seemingly erupts into violence. In reality, however, riots are not commonplace in most penal institutions. They are by no means a regular or routine part of prison life. In fact, the number of prison riots has been decreasing over the years. Prison guards are constantly being trained to better quell and prevent riots.

There are plenty of feel-good movies and television shows that depict a prisoner pulling himself or herself up by the bootstraps for a monumental life change. The character might go back to school, take part in support groups or therapy, or learn a trade. However, in real life, there is little focus on rehabilitation. Most prison stays are meant to be punishing, not reintegrating.

This is not an effective way of curbing dangerous or undesirable behavior, but this is how most prisons choose to operate.

Long-running series like Orange Is the New Black can be very misleading. Even though the show compresses time a bit, we see the same characters from season to season. No one, it appears, ever gets out of Litchfield. Again, this is not reality as most inmates will eventually be released.

Those convicted of major felonies are exceptions, but 95% of state prisoners will be released at some point.

There are a lot of gray areas in life, and very few people are all bad or all good. Furthermore, humans are all complicated. This is no more or less true for people behind bars, despite what movies and television might suggest. Consider the most violent prisoners you've seen in a movie or TV show: they were portrayed as monsters, right? In real prison, the most violent inmates tend to have serious, often lifelong struggles with mental illness. Actually, the incarcerated population tends to have much higher incidences of mental illness than the population at large.

There's no way to properly capture a prison's aroma. We rarely see prison characters in movies or TV shows reacting to the smell, but those who know describe the scent behind bars as, in a word, pungent. Hundreds of men or women eat, sleep, and breathe shoulder to shoulder, and they often go days without showers. Sometimes inmates wear the same clothes for days in a row—a musty environment that rarely creates fragrant conditions.