The first lesson I learned at Rikers was brutal: no one survives the island without a fight. On the bus ride to the facility, an older guy—an OG—warned me and a few other new kids: “Y’all are going to gladiator school.” He wasn’t lying. Violence wasn’t the exception at Rikers; it was the rule, and avoiding fights could make you a target. If you were seen as a sheep instead of a wolf, you were done.
Worse, the culture of fighting was part of an organized system of violence. From 2007 to 2008, a group of officers at Rikers ran an illicit extortion ring that they called “The Program,” recruiting teens as enforcers called “The Team.” As a sixteen-year-old, I witnessed the consequences of The Program myself, watching “Team members” extort commissary money, clothing, and phone privileges from other incarcerated people. Those who didn’t comply were beaten, with officers overseeing or directing punishment. Fights were often carefully planned in corners where cameras couldn’t see, where no one would intervene. It felt like the violence was inescapable.
Such graphic and premeditated abuse is not unique to Rikers. Across the United States, carceral facilities, including Central California Women’s Facility and the Souza‑Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts, have been implicated in systemic violence perpetrated by guards. Within these institutions, punishment, strip searches, lockdowns, and publicized incidents of abuse turn daily incarceration into a spectacle of suffering. Just as prisons turn the pains of incarceration into survival theater inside their walls, reality TV now turns that same pain into entertainment for millions at home. In an extreme way, this phenomenon echoes the connections many scholars, such as Michel Foucault and Angela Y. Davis, draw between prison and spectacle.
Today, numerous reality shows mine incarceration for profit in front of millions of viewers—a phenomenon many, myself included, call carceral entertainment. Shows such as 60 Days In and Beyond Scared Straight sensationalize life behind bars, while programs such as From Inmate to Roommate and Love After Lockup dramatize the struggles of reentry. What began in the 1980s as a niche genre has grown into a profitable industry that enjoys low production costs and thrives on human suffering.
I know firsthand that our lives are not entertainment. When I came home from Riverview Correctional Facility after serving five years, I was twenty-four. I was handed $40 in gate money and released into uncertainty: Where would I live? How would I apply for food stamps? How would I even begin to heal from prison trauma—after surviving violence, gang wars, and systemic neglect? Yet even in the chaos, I held onto positivity, believing I could create a different future.
Carceral reality TV thrives on the negative: toxic relationships and emotional, psychological, and physical violence. It often leans into racist stereotypes that depict Black and brown people as terrifying, uneducated, and violent. I remember watching A&E’s Beyond Scared Straight for the first time when I was fifteen, thinking: How could encouraging incarcerated people to scream at youth possibly change anything? Our young people don’t need fear—they need mentorship. They need opportunities: jobs, education, and exposure to a world beyond survival. There’s no reason they should see incarcerated individuals as irredeemable villains. Beyond Scared Straight almost never showed the real work of transformation: the caring, leadership, and storytelling that help youth imagine a better life.
It has been thirteen years since that show premiered, and while newer carceral shows are notably milder in tone, they still rely on the same core dynamic: turning incarceration into consumable drama. In general, participants in reality TV shows sign highly restrictive contracts that give producers broad authority over their stories. Many of them face financial and emotional exploitation, and have limited access to legal or mental-health support. Many reality shows set in prisons consider participants “unpaid actors” and do not compensate them. In others still, production companies “compensate” cast members with meager commissary funds.
Former cast members have raised concerns about the filming process, highlighting the exploitation inherent in such productions. In the documentary for Abolish Incarcerated Reality TV Shows (AIRS), a campaign launched by the organization I founded in 2022, Charles Onaki—known as “Lucky Chucky”—spoke candidly about his experience. A former participant of 60 Days In, Onaki recalled: “They exploited me and they took my story and they twisted it to make it fit their narrative.”
While many reality TV shows profit from human pain and struggle—some might call it the defining characteristic of the genre—carceral entertainment takes it a step further by helping fund the very system it portrays. Prisons and jails are often paid for the rights to film inside their facilities. For example, in 2016, A&E paid Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, $500 per day for filming the first season of 60 Days In, totaling around $60,000 overall. Clark County sheriff Jamey Noel told reporters that he’d use the money to update the jail’s camera system, and possibly purchase a new body scanner. In 2019 the Sacramento Bee reported that the producers of Jailbirds were billed $42,211 to cover 482 hours of overtime for jail staff, including guards and supervising sergeants. And in 2023 Netflix paid $1,000 per day to the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility in Little Rock, Arkansas, for filming Unlocked: A Jail Experiment—again totaling around $60,000. (The check was later returned amid a legal dispute.)
This is to say nothing of the revenues these shows generate. Sites such as Growjo, Zippia, and LeadIQ suggest A&E’s annual revenue may be between $750 million and $1.1 billion, though exact figures aren’t public. Similarly, Lucky 8 TV, which produces 60 Days In, is estimated to generate millions or tens of millions annually. With nine seasons and roughly eleven to eighteen episodes per season, the total production spending could conceivably reach tens of millions of dollars, though precise figures are not publicly disclosed; additional revenue typically comes from advertising, streaming rights, and syndication.
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With such wide reach and high visibility, perhaps the greatest harm of carceral TV is how it distracts us from the systemic roots of incarceration: racism, poverty, overpolicing, broken schools, and the prison–industrial complex. These shows focus on individual behavior while ignoring the conditions that drive incarceration. They make incarceration hypervisible as spectacle but largely invisible as a societal failure.
Reentering society after incarceration is an uphill battle, marked by obstacles like finding employment, securing housing, and rebuilding relationships in a world that often views formerly incarcerated people with suspicion and stigma. One study tracking more than 50,000 people released from federal prison in 2010 found that about 60 percent were jobless at any given point during their first four years back home. In general, people who have been incarcerated experience an unemployment rate almost five times higher than that of the general U.S. population. Discrimination, stigma, and lack of opportunity make it nearly impossible for many to rebuild their lives.
Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people deserve media representation—not as stereotypes, but as whole human beings. When it comes to this vulnerable demographic, ethical storytelling means transparency, fair pay, collaboration, and access to mental health support. Several recent documentaries exemplify this approach. Time (2020) follows a woman’s decades-long fight to free her husband from prison in a poetic, personal, and humanizing way. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) examines how incarceration shapes everyday life without ever showing a prison cell. Both center lived experiences, portraying incarceration with dignity and depth.
My experience behind bars drives my commitment to speak out and advocate for ethical representation. In 2022 I founded America On Trial Inc. (AOT), a grassroots movement dedicated to healing the harms caused by incarceration. We’ve made progress in our battle against carceral TV. Through our #AIRS Campaign, we’ve challenged harmful media portrayals and recently won a major victory: A&E has not released new seasons of 60 Days In or Inmate to Roommate.
While the network has not officially stated these shows are cancelled—or attributed any decisions to AOT’s influence, we believe our continued organizing has made an impact. Our coalition’s rallies in front of A&E’s headquarters, combined with national advocacy, exemplifies the kind of community pressure that works. To date, our coalition of twenty-four organizations across twenty-nine states fights for ethical storytelling, decarceration, prison labor reform, and dignity. We relentlessly rally, speak out, and organize to expose how carceral entertainment feeds mass incarceration.
But the fight isn’t over. New carceral reality TV shows continue to pop up. In August, A&E released Family Lockup, a show in which family members spend two nights in jail with their incarcerated relatives to confront and work through their issues face to face. Like many A&E shows, it seeks to profit off fighting and drama. The intersection between prison and spectacle is made explicit in the show’s description. According to A&E, the show is part of an initiative instituted by the sheriff of Hampden County, Massachusetts, where the show is filmed.
Comparing Family Lockup to 60 Days In, writer Andy Dehart pointed out: “If anything, this show seems like a way for A&E to get effectively a very similar show for far less money.” According to his reporting, the incarcerated cast members will not be paid, while the production company will cover salary and overtime expenses for correctional officers helping facilitate the production.
If prison is a performance of state control, carceral entertainment embeds a performance within a performance. It blurs the line between punishment and programming, turning the mechanisms of incarceration into narratives that normalize and even glamorize state violence.
Pushing back against this phenomenon—through boycotting carceral entertainment, regulating exploitative media contracts, and demanding transparency from productions—is a step we can take to challenge how incarceration is packaged for profit. Rikers Island, which is legally required to close by 2027, along with hundreds of similar facilities, turned our pain into theater inside their walls. Reality TV does the same in the outside world, for millions of viewers and unthinkable profit. But through advocacy, storytelling, and community action, we can confront the systems that profit from our pain—and insist that the stories born behind bars be treated with dignity.
Image: Guy West / flickr
