For the uninitiated, Morgan Spurlock is the documentary genius behind Supersize Me, wherein he subjected himself to 30 days of eating nothing but McDonald’s restaurant food morning, noon, and night. And if asked to supersize the meal, he couldn’t refuse. Spurlock took the concept of the 30 day experiment to a whole new level last year when he released a series of one hour documentaries chronicling the events experienced by volunteers or Spurlock himself, as they lived 30 days immersed in a lifestyle very different from their own.
For example, taking a die-hard right-wing Christian and making him live 30 days, not with a Muslim family in a Muslim community, but as a Muslim in a Muslim community. This means the Qur'an, the beard, the praying, the customs, the whole tabbouleh. An atheist free-thinker must live with an evangelical family. A pro-choice clinic worker must live in a pro-life home for mothers led by a very pro-life pastor. You get the picture — challenging people with modern day divisive issues and making them face the issues. For the final segment of this season, Spurlock took it upon himself to live for 30 days as an inmate in a jail.
This couldn’t have been easy. And it sure didn’t look very easy. He would live 30 days with the prisoners, including a 72-hour stint in solitary confinement.
The deal was that he would receive no special treatment from the warden or guards. He was to be treated as a common inmate. And they easily complied. Though he wasn’t sent to a maximum security prison, the admission process alone was dehumanizing enough. He was searched, given clothes and a mattress for his bed, and told to find a cell with space. The poor guy goes in fearing beatings and getting raped (much to the desperation of his girlfriend) and now he has to pick his cell. Not easy when you know whoever you “bunk” with is a criminal, not to mention the overcrowding. Each cell built for two inmates is inhabited by at least three, so you are basically stuck sleeping on the floor until someone leaves or is transferred.
If you can call it sleep. Morgan doesn’t get much sleep for the first few days. The environment is oppressive. No windows, no outside time, just the cell block open area. Oh, and the showers are right in the open area, the same place where they eat, live, and occupy their time. There is nothing to do, literally. All the prisoners can do is play cards, read, watch TV, and sit around and take root. That seems like the true punishment — condemned to boredom. The prisoners, including Morgan, make use of stairs and T-shirts as makeshift bars to do chin-ups. The tables are used for tricep pushups. And mostly they walk around the perimeter like caged animals.
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