Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo (Doc 2009)
Director: Bradley Beesley
Even though I lived in wicked New York City I saw a rodeo every year until I was about 9 years old. Madison Square Garden, you see. After that, I didn’t care much anymore.
But, the rodeo lives on, beloved by westerners (including Oregonians) and despised by animal rights activists. In fact, the rodeo is one of the few places where humans come out worse than the animals in many instances.
This film is about the Oklahoma state prisons annual rodeos. It is one of only two prison rodeos left. Oklahoma leads the nation in per-capita incarceration, and jails twice as many women as any other state. (Texas must be very jealous.) Including women in the prison rodeo is a recent phenomenon.
We get to meet several women, and a few men, who participate in this annual event, and like any other prison movie, it is by turns heartbreaking and depressing. We get the usual prison life portraits, denied paroles and tough breaks. One woman, who is a promising prospect for bull riding, loses her chance to participate because she is caught with “contraband,” i.e., lipstick. Not only is she barred from the rodeo, she gets two weeks in solitary. Sheesh...
We get to see the training and the actual event. The families of the inmates are permitted to attend, and they are proud of their men and women. But, the attitude can best be summed up by an off-hand quote from a spectator: You don’t want anybody to get hurt or killed, but if they do you don’t want to miss it.
If this is supposed to be uplifting, I didn’t get it. If it is supposed to clue us once more about the way our prisons operate, it was very subtle in that respect. The inmates themselves look forward to their participation. It is a glimpse of freedom.
I recall Oscar Wilde’s comment about his own imprisonment. “If this is the way Her Majesty treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.”
B-