The Longest Yard

The film raises the question of how much punishment is enough in prison

by Junius

The Longest Yard starts out well with the hero, in drunken scorn of affluent commodity-driven society, totaling a Bentley—that’s a $200,000 car, eh?—by backing it violently into a police car that had stopped him. In the penitentiary he continues not to care about personal deprivation—or the film doesn’t give him time, thrusting him immediately into a gladiator role as the coach of the inmates in an inmates versus guards football game, a dirty fantasy of the Warden’s, dirty in that it is a device for furthering his political plans.

In signing up for the team, inmates throw away the usual comforts and luxuries that form the underground currency of prison life, symbolized in the film by the Big Mac, which amazingly appears more than once in its pristine wrapper in its obviously appetizing role as a leak-in from the outside economy.

We don’t have to be serious all the time, and The Longest Yard is a good movie to relax with. But let’s be serious. This imitative prison economy, which is taken for granted in the film (and transcended in the main action) is both a pathetic clinging to the mores of consumer society and also, if viewed progressively, the basis for re-thinking punishment.

The film gives us a clue in that the Warden can think of climbing from his post into the US senate. Prisons are big business and he is a CEO who makes profit for shareholders through a commodity called convicts. The only way these CEOs can work it is by having the inmates run the prisons themselves and turning a blind eye on the contraband that oils the wheels, while having in reserve heavy artillery for anything that might disrupt the flow of commerce. In other words, the trade-off for this cost-saving efficiency is an increasing atmosphere of freedom and comfort within the walls.

It’s a vicious circle: in order to be profitable, prisons cram inmates together, creating a social life where little luxuries are manipulated by experienced cons but one which is all bearable for the general populace. What is the result? For one thing, more crime. Sean Connery, in one of his more thoughtful roles, once said, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” Conversely then, if things aren’t unbearable in prison, “time” is not so threatening, and more crime can be contemplated. Of course, this circle doesn’t seem so vicious if you are in the prison business.

In order to break the vicious circle there must be some change, and it can’t be an inmates versus guards football game every week. Is it too much to propose that a convict’s months or years in jail should be less comfortable rather than more? I’m not talking about torture and inhuman treatment. I’m suggesting no drugs of any kind, including tobacco—only proven healthy food and activity; no TV or movies—bore the people into reading books; no email and cell phones—cut people off from the milieu that surrounds them. Two results: prisons become daunting again and there is less crime, and a convict has a chance to walk out a better person, more self-reliant, less dependent on consumer goods, having felt the inner rewards of deprivation. In this view, punishment isn’t part of the old mentality but the beginning of the new; it becomes a gift of great value. Ex-convicts could be leaders in our necessarily anti-consumerist future. They will have been there.

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