Quiet Riot

What do you get when you take a bunch of men, give them loads of free time, a pinch of opportunity and a tablespoon of desperation? Riots.

On August 6, only a couple of weeks ago, the American news reported that a prison brawl had left 14 criminals dead in Mexico. Early that morning, the biff broke out between two groups of prisoners in a jail in the city of Matamoros. They used homemade blades and weapons to attack each other.

Explanations of this event have centered around the country's thriving drug trade, although a severely flawed prison system is seen to be provoking Mexico's cycles of violence. Some prosecutors even told of prison officials at one Mexican prison in Durango state permitting inmates to leave the jail at night to carry out revenge killings against rival drug syndicates.

When watching the documentary by Louis Theroux, it was made clear that in American prisons racial segregation is the norm. Articles on the Mexican prison riot last week did not state whether racial tension played a part in the events.

My Uncle is a correctional officer at Silverwater jail in Sydney. He showed me some shocking footage from a security camera that somehow made its way to YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxl7iz4fbO8&has_verified=1

Although the footage is from a couple of years ago, it is still absolutely unreal to watch. In this brawl Asian and Aboriginal groups fought, although the reasons behind the attack were unclear. It is interesting to note that the initiator was concealing a homeade shank. Also, that the prisoners stay away from the Officers and do not harm them. My Uncle explained that they have a sense of respect for the officers, as well as knowing better than to lay a hand on them because of the severe consequences of harming an officer. And the fact that this footage made it to YouTube, well, only in this day and age, right?

I found this topic rather interesting, prompting me to research further into prison riots. Coincidentally, the most violent prison riot ever recorded was the New Mexico Penitentiary riot on February 2 and 3, 1980. 33 inmates died, with more than 200 treated for serious injuries. None of the 12 prison officers were killed, but 7 were treated for serious injuries resulting from beatings and rapes.

It seems that prison riots are unavoidable. And the media will always report them as they are the exceptional event, they are newsworthy.

Copy and paste

Does media exposure to crime inspire copycats?



Made popular by the work of John B. Watson in the 1920's, the 'hypodermic needle' model, referred to in media effects literature, is the idea that media descriptions and depictions have such an extensive impact on some people's behaviour. This model focuses on the relationship between people's behaviour and their environment. In terms of stimulus and response, this suggests that social behaviour is powerfully influenced by external factors; the mass media is one of these stimuli.


Like a drug injection, the intake of antisocial or even violent actions may lead to repeating the behaviour.



People are passive recipients. The Copycat Syndrome questions whether there is a direct causal link between media portrayals of violence and these portrayals influencing people to act in a violent manner.



Marsh and Melville (2009) exemplify a number of copycat crimes that have occurred, but upon researching this topic, many more can be found.



When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold massacred Columbine High School in 1999, many people attributed factors of their crime to popular film The Matrix. The criminals themselves were said to of modelled their black mafia trenchcoat costumes on Neo, lead character of The Matrix. But this is where the similarities ended. In the film, Neo practices martial arts, not gun weaponry, and his targets are computer-generated images, not school children.

In cases such as these, parents of the criminals attempt to sue the companies that produce movies such as The Matrix, claiming they are responsible for the crimes their films inspired. Not surprisingly, most of these claims fail as a causal connection cannot be made. But recently a new form of causal connection is emerging-the philosophy of The Matrix interacted with the psychology of the mentally ill, causing them to commit these crimes. So are these criminals 'not guilty by reason of the Matrix'?



The most disturbing part of this emergence is that two defendants have successfully asserted pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity, as the judge accepted the 'Matrix bases' plea.




In November 2008, Canadian filmmaker Mark Twitchell was charged with the murder of a man in a crime that police believed was "life imitating art". Twitchell was an obsessed fan of tv series Dexter, and had also writ en a screenplay, which his murder had copied a scene from.



An executive of Dexter responded to suggestions that their hit show could provoke people to commit copycat crimes by including a copycat criminal, who's crimes come back to bite him, in the storyline of the second season. The shows producers had begun to worry that they were making a skilled serial killer a modern-day hero. "That's our way of saying, 'Don't try this at home,' " Cerone said.


More recently though, certain individuals have employed the media for good rather than evil. In April of this year, Judge Bell in Westmoreland County USA ordered Tyler Gorinski, a 23 yr old on repeat offender on criminal trespassing charges, to watch 2005 film Cinderella Man. The judge has sentenced many juveniles to watch the film with their parents and write him a letter explaining what it meant to them. "It's like chicken soup. Can it help? Maybe. Can it hurt? No," Bell said.



In May this year, the Sydney Morning Herald told of an 8 year old boy in America that knew to scratch an attacker, attempting to kidnap his younger sister, to attain DNA evidence from watching tv show NCIS. A short video listed below shows the boy explaining:



http://www.smh.com.au/world/how-little-nathan-nailed-his-sisters-wouldbe-abductor-20100519-vd14.html


Through providing a vast catalogue of connections and interpretations between events and a range of violent acts depicted by the media, it would appear that the evidence is circumstantial. Little research has been done on copycat crime, yet empirical evidence doesn't support the anecdotal evidence. It is impossible to prove that a particular media depiction that is followed by the occurrence of a similar act of behaviour actually caused that behaviour.

References

Cholodofsky, R 2010 'Westmoreland County Judge orders young offenders to watch inspirational film', Tribune, April

Greek, C 1997, Copy-cat Crimes, Salem Press, Pasadena California

Hilden, J 2003, 'Murder and the Matrix', Counterpunch

'How little Nathan nailed his sister's would-be abductor', Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May, 2010,

Marsh, I & Melville, G 2009, Crime, Justice and the Media, Routledge, Oxon.