Joshuah Bearman wrote a great story for LA Weekly about a
singing competition fashioned after American Idol, but in jail. He says:
Inmates sang, and the judges were the Sheriff, Alice Cooper and Bret Kaiser, a detention officer who was once a hair metal rocker and now is an elvis impersonator and who used his performance background to coach the inmate contestants through all the rounds. All true! There was a little bit of cable news about it when the contest started, but the story didn't really
catch on, so I went to the finals, which was a concert at the Sheriff's
open-air jails and totally bizarre. This was in Maricopa County, where
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is infamous for making the prisoners wear old time
stripes over pink underwear and housing them in tents. The Tent City jail is
where the final concert was.The piece tells the story of the entire contest, from the early 100+
auditions up to the finals. There's a video on each page, with the
contestants final performances after the first break. As strange as the
whole thing was, I loved the undaunted humanity of it all. The inmates'
attitudes in the face of their unfortunate circumstances were great to see,
especially the way they took the eccentric (and, many would argue, sadistic)
sheriff's publicity stunt and made it into something meaningful for
themselves. They really took the opportunity to sing for their fellow
inmates seriously.
