Against the Carceral-Entertainment Complex

What happens when entertainment joins forces with law enforcement? Who gets hurt, and who--or what--evades accountability? In Episode 3 of Unmaking the Prison Image, host Pooja Rangan is joined by filmmaker Davit Osit, critical criminologist Michelle Brown, and formerly incarcerated policy advocate and founder of America on Trial, Inc. Vidal Guzman to discuss the social costs of carceral entertainment, from reality TV shows filmed inside prisons to self-appointed vigilantes and "predator catchers." Davit Osit reflects on the ethical contradictions of documentary filmmaking, including his own film Predators, and walking the tightrope of complicity and challenge. Michelle Brown situates "carceral entertainment" within a broader political landscape that exhausts our imagination and normalizes punitive responses to harm. Vidal Guzman talks about how incarcerated people experience the physical and legal harms of incarcerated reality shows like 60 Days In and his work on the #AIRS (Abolish Incarcerated Reality Shows) campaign.Citations:AIRS Campaign (Abolish Incarcerated Reality Shows)America on Trial, Inc.The Appalachian Justice Research CenterRuth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle Michelle Brown and Travis Linneman, Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the MoviesPaul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance, Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality TelevisionAngela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?Pooja Rangan, The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of AccountabilityMedia Resources:Predators (dir. David Osit, 2025)The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story, 2016)Bulletproof (dir. Todd Chandler, 2020)Riotsville, USA (dir. Sierra Pettengill, 2022)Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College. Full transcripts for all episodes are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/.Theme music for Visualizing Abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s still/here.