Blog 4

I wrote about Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Really Care About Us, specifically dissecting the prison version of the music videos. In Core Assignment 1, I specifically delved into the way the music video director used montages to depict civil rights movements and human rights violations all over the world. He then tied it back to the United States, where black men are more likely to be arrested for false allegations of petty crimes. Michael Jackson even incorporates his past interaction with the police, prison, and justice system, and reflects on how dehumanizing it was, despite him even being a celebrity who can afford the resources to get out. My Core Assignment 2 focuses on the role of mass incarceration in poor communities. These poor communities are almost always people of color because of the way laws from the legacy of slavery impede upon their social and economic mobility. I also delved into the prison system’s exploitation of its prisoner for cheap labor and dehumanizing treatment, instead of rehabilitating them into people who can assimilate back into society. Instead, these prisoners are more likely to go back because they experience financial and emotional instability, leading them to do illegal things to survive.

For my film, I am debating on whether I should focus on tough-on-crime laws that lead to mass incarceration or the quality of life for released prisoners. Either way, the purpose of my film would be to feel empathy. While thinking about a plot, I thought back to the trailer of “That Hate U Give”, and how much of a rollercoaster the TRAILER was. Similarly I want to invoke similar emotions where a main character’s life gets upturned because of unfair laws that are normalized in this society. 

The plot focuses on a college freshman, who is constantly stopped at his campus gate and questioned, despite having his college sports uniform and ID on him. He’s fed up and vents to his friend about how he is tired of being one of the 4% black students at the school and having to deal with racial profiling. He constantly feels like he doesn’t belong. Things soon escalate when he is falsely arrested for a petty crime he didn’t commit. He is soon let out and decides to spread awareness about his humiliating experience. In order to explore mass incarceration, I’d like to have him grow up and become an attorney that fights for unfair cases that impartially criminalize black people. That way, I can shed light upon the people he meets and what they have to endure in the prison system. Alternatively, I want to explore a new “dystopia” where tough on crime laws affect anyone, so no one is off the hook for petty crimes or being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Eventually this will evolve into communities being adversely affected and society becomes unproductive. However, I feel like this situation would urge the government to take actions and invest into programs that assist former prisoners. The moral of the story would be to imagine a new world that effectively brought down crime rates without perpetuating racial injustice and threatening innocent lives.