Note to inmates with rapping side gigs, filming a video in the jail won’t end well, despite what Empire will have you believe. A group of South Carolina inmates were collectively hit with 20 years worth of solitary confinement for making a rap video in the bing in 2014.
Reports the New York Daily News:
South Carolina’s Kershaw Correctional Institution officials punished the group heavily, giving a combined sentence of over 7,000 days — almost 20 years — in solitary confinement.
Public documents revealed by Dave Maass, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, showed the inmates would each spend, on average, 1,000 days in solitary confinement for the viral video stunt.
The nearly six-minute video was viewed more than a million times on World Star Hip Hop, and features the seven inmates humming and beatboxing with the chorus, “I’m on . . . I’m on fire, I’m on fire” inside a cell.
One inmate is standing with his back to the camera, with the SCDC prison shirt on. Most of the rapping inmates are wearing white shirts and du-rags dancing in the background.
The viral video stunt came with harsh consequences, as the inmates were punished for throwing gang signs in the video, having a cellphone to film it with and accessing social media to post the clip, prison documents showed.
Yes, the inmates were wrong. The punishment seems rather harsh, no?
It seems like officials are trying to make up for the embarrassment of inmates being able to pull this off in their prison.
Of course, the video initially went viral on World Star. Read more about the tomfoolery going on in South Carolina prisons in the NYDN story right here.
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Photo: World Star
