Johnny Cash's San Quentin

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Explain your choice of topic. What is the topic of the book?

The topics I am choosing to focus on are the conditions of prisons and the impacts of incarceration on an individual. Many prisons are overcrowded to an unhealthy extreme. Prisons themselves fail to prepare their inmates for release, whether it is job skills or educational opportunities; there are some that have measures in place and programs to run that help prisoners prepare, however, they do not always reach everyone in the same manner, and some prisons do not have these things in place. The Sara Wakefield and Christopher Uggen reading made some good points on the impact of incarceration on a person’s experience with social inequalities. The labor market, in particular, is difficult …show more content…
Depending on the other identities a person has, these issues can compound to make life extremely difficult for the individual.

Present and explain your chosen art.

The piece of art I have chosen to analyse is Johnny Cash’s San Quentin. This song, released on June 16, 1969 and first recorded in February of the same year, is the sixth track on his 31st studio album, At San Quentin. It is a country song with older rock influences that is generally in the key of C, a key that has a strong, ear-catching tone that invokes an earnest emotion in the piece. Some of Cash’s songs regarding prison and the justice system are framed in a more jovial light, put in a way that is not inherently inflammatory and easier to get by to the general public; San Quentin is decidedly not one of those. The song takes a more upfront approach to its message, calling out the condition of both the prison itself and the prisoners’ experiences behind bars. Quickly, Cash establishes the
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