We spoke to a mix of current and formerly incarcerated TikTok users who use the app to change the narrative and challenge misconceptions of prison life, which also allows them to reclaim their humanity. But using a cell phone behind bars is a huge risk.
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#12 Samata
The video above makes me feel like I'm watching a firefighter show on Hulu called "9-1-1" with different types of scenarios that go on. Shows and real life can be different and the shows on tv are used to show people in prison as scary and mean people because they want people to stay away from prison and ending up like someone on the show, whereas the TikTok videos show that they are nice people and they live their best life in there. Tv and big popular movies can twist the narrative in many ways.
#12 Samata
This video reminded me of the TV show “The Rookie” because in the series they should multiple different types of prisoners. This just makes me think about how in the show they make it seem a lot more dramatic and the prisoner’s scary criminals. While the people who are posting tiktoks about being in prison have usually changed or were wrongly convicted but this isn’t to say that all prisoners are innocent. This goes to show that you shouldn’t really believe everything you see on TV because not everything can be true and is just made up for your entertainment.
#21 Robinson
After watching the video some questions that I asked myself were "have conditions in prisons improved since these videos became popular?" I asked this question because millions of people have seen these "prison videos" and would reasonably be outraged by the poor conditions. From this outrage change could be made if enough people spoke up about the issue. So, at least since this video was made, has any tangible change been made? Another thought I had about the video was about the need to clarify what prisoners should experience. Should the prison experience be borderline torture, or should it be closer to house arrest?
#25 Robinson
There's this series in Netflix called "Unlocked: A Jail Experiment" and I kept thinking about it as I watched this MISC. Unlocked is this series where a sheriff makes this program granting inmates more freedoms. The inmates get more freedoms, but they have to be responsible for every new freedom they get. They threatened to take those freedoms away if they misbehaved making it super high risk for the inmates. By the end they noticed better behavior between the inmates.
Robinson (8) I feel like the main theme of this video is to show how that the people inside prisons are not all completely evil and are human as well. Through the video you can see many of the prisoners who are on TikTok just going out through their daily lives or doing something special like cooking their own food. At 3:10 it talks about how that if they are caught with cellphones can get sent to solitary confinement or even get years added to their sentence. Another thing that it talks about is how the family on the outside of the prison live their lives and communicate with their family inside the prison. And at the 7:37 mark of the…