This week, W. Kamau Bell takes his camera and crew to San Quentin prison to look at life inside the prison system. He introduces the episode with an observation about going to prison, and comparing not going to prison being like living in New York and never having stepped on dog poop, stating, “doesn’t mean you’re good, just means you’re lucky.”
America has gotten to a place in which society has become polarized on many levels. There are millions of ways to divide the country up. One of the clearest is people who’ve been convicted and those who haven’t. Bell talks about the disproportional representation of African Americans in the US prison population. African Americans make up only 13% of the country’s population, but comprise 40% of the prison population. This statistic is troubling, but to his credit, Bell never uses it to excuse the specific people he interacts with, most of whom are in prison for serious violent crimes. Bell’s task is to give a human face to these men who are branded monsters.
One of the more troubling aspects, which Bell only hints at, is the racial division in the prison system. In the beginning, Lieutenant Sam Robertson, Public Information Officer at San Quentin, takes Bell for a walk in the yard and points out the different communal areas, defined mainly by race. Bell asks if a white guy has a good jump shot, why can’t he play basketball? He’s told that the issue would be with the community he was in. The segregation of the prison system was not mentioned again, although Bell only interviewed one white inmate, and that interview was conducted in an office area.
Bell and the California Department of Corrections seemingly had the same agenda: to put a good face on the inmate population. Except for three occasions, Bell eschewed being critical of the Department of Corrections. First was the mention of racial bias. There was one moment when one of the prisoners talked about how they are a paycheck, which assumes that the California Department of Corrections’ budget is based on inmate count. Bell does talk about spending on the prison and the corresponding increase in prison budgets, but doesn’t go as far as to completely validate or repudiate the predicating assumption: that there’s a prison industrial complex who wants to keep people in prison. Finally, there’s a comic and expected critique of prison food.
Bell clearly doesn’t intend this episode to be a hard-hitting exposé, like the 2007 episode of Breaking Point, part of the “Koppel on Discovery” series.
One interview did stand out. It was with Juan Haynes, managing editor of the prison newspaper. Haynes took Bell to his prison cell, which illustrated just how cramped is that space. In an enlightening exchange, Haynes talks about how he coordinates his bowel movements with his cellmate’s timetable. His cellmate’s usually out by 6:30 am, allowing Haynes time to do what he has to do. It makes sense as the best resolution to a bad situation that never would have occurred to many of us.
The interview then gets touching as Haynes describes why he was in jail. He was a bank robber known by the FBI as “the brown bag bandit”. In talking about his crime spree, he talks about a moral epiphany he had during the trial. One of the people to testify against him was a teller who stated that he terrified her. In talking about it, you hear a sense of guilt and regret in his voice.
Ironically, the episode is unexpectedly predictable. Bell documents how prisoners are people who did bad things, got caught, and are doing time. Like any subset of the US population, there are some extraordinarily decent, earnest, and talented people among this population. On one hand, it’s an important message that needs to be disseminated in as many ways possible. On the other hand, the CNN W. Kamau Bell is starting to feel like the gentrified version of the FX W. Kamau Bell.