Death Race Statistics 101

When Roger Corman's classic movie Death Race 2000 debuted in 1975, word on the science-fiction street was that the end of the 20th century would see the total collapse of both the U.S. economy and any national sense of decency or shame. Apparently, we would throw our enthusiasm behind gladiatorial deathsport and never look back. Clearly that didn't happen, so this year's semi-remake, Death Race—written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson with Corman serving as executive producer—pushes the date out to 2012. I'm betting it won't happen then, either. Dystopian futures have their place in science fiction, but in real life there's always more to the world than simple doom and gloom.

Be that as it may, Death Race certainly qualifies as a smola*, setting modest goals for itself and then knocking them out of the park. Despite paying homage to a variety of cinematic influences, from the Mad Max series to Rollerball (both the original and the remake) to Escape from New York, the movie nevertheless has an undeniably video-gamey quality to it. Which is maybe not an accident, as Anderson directed Mortal Kombat back in 1995, and both wrote and directed the surprisingly tense Resident Evil (2002), where he managed to spin some very thin zombie-blasting source material into 100 minutes of actual plot that actually made sense. Anderson has produced a lot of stinkers, too, (don't get me started about Alien vs. Predator), but I really kind of liked Event Horizon and Soldier, and in many ways I think Death Race is a perfect vehicle (so to speak) for the things he does well. Death Race 2000 is a lean movie with a simple message, requiring only that the writer/director not eff it up. And mercifully, he doesn't.

But is all this possible?

Yes. One of the nicest, most refreshing things about this flick is how little strain it places on the suspension of disbelief. Can you soup up old muscle cars and race them in a demolition derby? Certainly. Can weapons be fitted with electronic lockouts that keep them from firing until enabled by a central authority? Sure. Would prisoners facing a life sentence be willing to risk their necks for a chance at freedom? Absolutely. Would people pay good money to watch it on live webcast? You bet. And yeah, a private corporation charged with running our nation's prisons would be a lot more likely than any government to come up with such a scheme. What's not to believe?

Little death coupe

I do have a handful of nits to pick with Death Race, though. First and foremost, I think it would take a lot more than four years of economic turmoil to turn America into the country we see on Anderson's screen. Good people really do outnumber bad ones by a significant margin, and they usually do a decent job of keeping excesses like this from happening.

Think of the trouble today's TV networks have with minor incidents of foul language, ethnic stereotyping and accidental nudity! The V-chip (mandatory in all U.S. TV sets since 2000) was supposed to make it easy for parents to regulate their children's intake of TV sex and violence, and thus make it easier for broadcasters to show adult content without fear of reprisal. In fact, though, studies have shown that only 15 percent of households bother to turn the chip on, while special interest groups like the American Family Association have actually increased their legal and administrative attacks on TV networks. And that's just for the consenting-adult type stuff; if we're talking about actual prison murders taking place on screen, we start running afoul not only of the Communications Decency Act, but of the ACLU, Amnesty International and articles 3, 4 and 5 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm not saying it can't happen, just that there would need to be an extended period of social, moral, legal and economic decay before anyone could get away with it on U.S. soil.

Also, on a purely technical level, I can't help wondering what kind of fancy suspension these gladiatorial vehicles have been fitted with. Bulletproof armor—especially the simple steel plating used in Death Race—raises a vehicle's center of gravity, making it more prone to rollover. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. Army found that up-armored Humvees were nearly three times as likely to be involved in rollover accidents as their unarmored kin. Throw in the sharp cornering and bumper-to-bumper crowding of a road rally in an old, abandoned factory and you've got a recipe for some really catastrophic crashes. And yet, none of the deaths we see are due to vehicles rolling over. Even more puzzling is the fact that the cars do not drag their bumpers with a "tombstone" of heavy steel mounted on the back, and they do not raise their tails in the air when the tombstone falls off or is ejected. It isn't hard to imagine a system of shifting weights, smart shock absorbers, and traction-control clutches to help the car run level and keep all four tires on the ground, but these features do not come standard on a '68 Mustang!

And then there are the tyres. They seem to be ordinary tyres, capable of blowing out or going flat, but I'm not buying it. By the end of the second lap the track is covered in jagged debris and shell casings, and I just don't believe anyone could finish an entire race unless their tyres were made of solid rubber or something.

If only Jeff Gordon was a convict ...

Still, the biggest problem for the corporate proprietors of Death Race is a lack of raw material. Races are held monthly, and each one puts 10 drivers down on the track with the expectation that eight or nine of them are going to buy the farm. Problem is, at a little over 2 million people, the U.S. prison population is already the highest per capita in the entire world. No one locks up more people than we do, and yet, even if a dystopian future somehow manages to quadruple that number, only about 20 percent of convicts are violent offenders and only about 15 percent are serving life sentences. In other words, the pool of available death drivers is certainly less than 1.2 million people, and probably more like 300,000, many of whom are elderly.

Too, their average age at the time of incarceration is between 28 and 32 years, and most of them are coming back to prison for their second or third conviction, with the average sentence for their earlier convictions being 7.5 years. Working the numbers, we find that the "average" lifer has spent less than three years out of jail since he was old enough to drive. If you're looking for lifers between the ages of 21 and 50 who have at least five years of ordinary U.S. driving experience, the number drops to less than 50,000. But it's worse than that, because there are only 50,000 licensed auto racers in the entire U.S., despite a total population of 350 million. Only one driver in 14,000 has the skill to race professionally, and even among those few, how many are really worth watching? By that math, the entire U.S. prison system holds approximately 3.6 people capable of putting on a decent death race.

If the prisoners are desperate and the viewers are bloodthirsty enough to watch B-listers in mortal danger, we can probably multiply that number by 10 or 20. Throwing in some cannon fodder—mediocre drivers who are only there to die in the opening laps—we can probably double or triple it on top of that. Still, we're only talking about maybe 200 people, who would be used up within the first 25 races, leading to an even more dystopian future where a public drunk on bloodsport suddenly finds itself with nothing to watch!

A bloodsport's thinning numbers

There's nothing new about these statistics, either; the Romans had the same problem filling their Coliseum. One of the most common misconceptions about gladiators is that they fought to the death. They didn't, or the empire would have run out of them in no time! Watching untrained prisoners fight to the death was the sort of low sport you'd find across town at the Forum Romanum. Gladiatorial combat was an actual professional sport, like boxing, and even a mediocre player (well, slave) would have a year of training and special diet before he was ready to take the field. The special diet was barley gruel and lots of it, to build a layer of fat under their skin, to protect against sword cuts and spear thrusts, and the training included not only aerobic and anaerobic workouts and weapons handling, but also showmanship. The point was not to kill the other guy—really!—but to defeat him in a long, bloody, crowd-pleasing spectacle. So a newbie gladiator—even a poor one—represented a substantial investment of resources (probably equivalent to a college football player today) that could not be lightly wasted.

This is not to say gladiators didn't die. They did. Take all the worst elements of boxing, football, hockey, fencing and cage wrestling, add real swords and a demand for real blood, and someone is definitely going to get hurt. The fights were not rigged, and, statistically speaking, the average gladiator would be lucky to survive 10 of them without dying or suffering a career-ending injury. But as with NASCAR racing today, death and dismemberment were unfortunate side effects of the show, not the central point of it. And with the possibility of freedom dangling in front of them, not to mention the Roman honor that even slaves took very seriously, most of them fought well and hard for their gods, their team owners and for the cheering crowds. And, in return, they really were loved, perhaps as much as professional athletes are today. Only the weakest and least spirited were seen as disposable. In fact, very often a free man would sell himself into slavery just to have a chance at that kind of fame.

So if there's a credibility problem with Death Race, it's in the grim statistics of the race itself. Do you burn up all your good drivers in a one-time orgy of death and destruction? Do you stack each race with a handful of sandbaggers against a veritable army of peons? Or do you bow to the inevitable, and build a sustainable sport that gives the racers a decent chance of survival? This also happens, by lucky coincidence, to be the decent thing to do. And yet, and yet ... aren't we animals deep inside? Don't we love the vicarious thrill of other people's danger? Death Race proves its own point handily enough; if the racers are (a) volunteers, (b) not innocent, and (c) fictional characters in a B movie, it's no sin to enjoy watching them die. Hmm.

* Successful movie of low ambition

Sources:
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org): "V-chip", "American Family Association", "Prisons in the United States"
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948-1998 www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
Martinez, Louis: "Extra Armor Causes Humvee Rollovers", ABC News, 13 June 2006
Durose, Matthew: "Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2004", U.S. Department of Justice, July 2007
Califorina Legislative Analyst's Office: "A Primer: Three Strikes—The Impact After More Than a Decade", October 2005
"NRHA: The World's Largest Racing Organization", www.nhra.com/content/about.asp?articleid=6566&zoneid=101
Meijer, Fik: "The Gladiators: History's Most Deadly Sport", Thomas Dunne Books, 2003
The Internet Movie Database: "Paul W.S. Anderson"