My goddaughter is a big fan of Justin Bieber. According to her, he is a musical “genius.” I try very hard to keep a straight-face as she tells me this. At 11 years old, one can be forgiven for such heresy.

Anyway, today she e-mailed me a link to an article about said Bieber. I always try to keep up with what she is interested in so I opened the link. It was an article from CBS News titled Justin Bieber Tweets He's a "Bad Man," Picture of Him in Prison Jumpsuit.

The article included this photograph apparently tweeted by the teen heartthrob Bieber.

According to the article

The 16-year-old “Somebody To Love” singer tweeted pictures of himself from the set where he was seen in a prison jumpsuit with his hands behind his back. The caption to the photo read in part: “I told you I was a BAD MAN!!”

This blog is called Prison Culture because I believe that penal institutions permeate and structure all aspects of American society. This incident is actually a prime example of the portrayal of prison in popular culture. Bieber has been taught that prisoners are BAD MEN. Obviously, he is posturing and the term BAD is probably being used by Bieber to promote his “STREET” cred and to increase his cool quotient.

My goddaughter and all of her friends were all a-twitter (pun intended) about this photo today. They were fascinated by Bieber in prison orange. This is particularly troubling to me because I don’t believe that my goddaughter has a clue about the truly dehumanizing and often violent experience of youth incarceration. This is in part my fault. She has a vague idea about my work but we only talk about it in passing from time to time. I had been putting off any serious conversations about the destructive effects of the PIC until she was a teenager. It looks like that conversation will now have to be accelerated by a couple of years.

So what will I say to her when we talk this weekend…

I plan to ask her about what she finds so interesting about seeing Bieber in the orange jumpsuit. What does the orange jumpsuit denote to her? I plan to tell her that it is much more likely that someone who looks like her is actually behind bars rather than someone who looks like Bieber. How many young people of color are locked up in America? I plan to tell her that prisons are not actually filled with “bad” men and women contrary to the label that Bieber attributed to himself. I plan to tell her that on any given day in the U.S. that we are locking up 90,000 youth.

Perhaps Justin Bieber can choose to shed some light on the plight of these young people instead of shamelessly promoting his appearance on CSI this fall.

P.S. Because I haven’t lost my sense of humor yet… Here’s Justin Bieber promising all of us that there will be one less lonely girl in the world…