ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to both raise and answer the question of how to translate the experiences of working-class life onto the screen in a way that privileges working-class perspectives. It explores the concept of the event in relation to a prison sentence. The chapter also explores how the intervention of a pedagogical project such as Inside Film can provide a framework within which to view prison not as a punishment for wrongdoing but to understand it as an ideological practice linking dominant conceptions of crime and punishment to the treatment of the working class. It broadens the discussion to consider the Gramscian notion of hegemony and the culture of the working class, both nationally and globally, in relation to neoliberalism. In the institutional and punitive space of the prison, prisoners are caught in an unstable identity position between what they are and what they might become—their status as prisoners is generally speaking a temporary one.
