Portrayals of the dehumanization of the American prisoner in Miguel Pinero's 'Short Eyes' and Tom Fontana's 'Oz'.

摘要

This thesis analyzes the way in which Miguel Pi?, through his 1974 play Short Eyes, and Tom Fontana, through his television series Oz, portray the way in which inmates in American prisoners are transformed by a racially-defined code of behavior. This code of behavior, defined by Miguel Pinero as "the program" forces inmates to over-identify themselves in terms of race and forces them to engage in behavior that contributes to their dehumanization. In the first chapter, the introduction, I establish the social, political, and theoretical concepts through which it's possible to analyze the process of prisoner identity transformation in these two works. In chapter two, I describe the process in which a prisoner's identity is divided through a reading of the both works using social identity theory. In the third chapter, I describe the way in which the program and its emphasis on race affects the creation of prison identities.