The Hurricane is an emotionally charged drama, which takes a look at the life and wrongful incarceration of boxing legend Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. The film starts by recalling Carters’ defeat of welter- weight champion of the world Emile Griffith, while the story simultaneously flashes to Carters’ incarceration. The next scene is of the crime in 1966 that Carter is wrongfully convicted of committing where three people are killed in a local bar. Consequently, Rubin Carter and John Artis are both tried and convicted of three counts of murder. The film then shows Carter writing his memoirs, which lead to release of his book “The Sixteenth Round”. Seven years later a teenager (Lersa Martin) from Brooklyn, New York

Lets now analyze this film through the scope of two other of the three major paradigms of sociology, Marxism and Structural Functionalism. The Marxist approach would affirm that Carter is the proletariat in a bourgeois society. When Carter stabbed the powerful child molester (bourgeois) as young boy, the law should have been on Carters side. Yet, a young Carter was convicted because in the Marxist approach those who control the means of production (the child molester and Det. Della Pesca) use that to benefit themselves. Being that the child molester was powerful and had friends within the law, the law served as his vehicle to use to hide his perversion and to subjugate anyone (Carter) who could be a possible hindrance to him. The very definition of crime had changed here. The fact that the man was a child molester was not the crime here because the man had the “means” of manipulating the meaning of crime. The crime became the fact that the young Carter might possibly leak out the perverted secret of the powerful child molester, thus he was punished for that “crime”. The structural functionalist might read into this film manifest functions as criminal behavior on the part of the legal system, yet at the same time bringing justice to Rubin Carter after many years. It seems that in the structural functionalist view those who make the law can be criminals but view the law as an entity apart from those who create it, thus eventually the law serving not those who create it but those who abide by it.

The meaning of crime that I picked up from this film is that crime is not what the law dictates as crime but the blatant disregard for the rights and sensibilities of people by those who are in power, by those whom careers are to protect and serve the peace. Obviously their job is to protect and serve their own peace of mind.

Once Carter is imprisoned he becomes apart of a totally different society within the prison walls. Another one of Mills’ questions is addressed here. “What types of men and women prevail in this society?” In this case Carter refuses to put

Some topics in this essay:
Rubin Carter, , Della Pesca, Wright Mills’, Sam Lisa, Emile Griffith, Functionalism Marxist, John Artis, Carters Carter, child molester, rubin carter, York Canadian, ethnic class, and/or victimization, crime and/or victimization, crime and/or, ethnic class stratifications, carter stabbed, meaning crime, mainstream economy, powerful child, freedom held valuable, powerful child molester, sociological imagination,