Description
Book SynopsisThe way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, and its particular way of responding to evil. Punishment in Popular Culture examines the cultural presuppositions that undergird America's distinctive approach to punishment and analyzes punishment as a set of images, a spectacle of condemnation. It recognizes that the semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both high and popular culture iconography, in novels, television, and film. This book brings together distinguished scholars of punishment and experts in media studies in an unusual juxtaposition of disciplines and perspectives.
Americans continue to lock up more people for longer periods of time than most other nations, to use the death penalty, and to racialize punishment in remarkable ways. How are these fa
Trade Review
[] [T]his collection will reward students who seek insight into the conceptions of justice that animate the ghost in the popular culture machine. * Choice *
[T]here is much to appreciate in this work.Punishment in Popular Cultureis the most recent of the five books Ogletree and Sarat have edited in their series on race and justice. That subject remains possibly the most important area of inquiry in the fields of criminal justice and legal studies. One hopes they will continue toencourage the scholarship that contributes to our understanding of race and justice. * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *
This is a necessary and important addition to the literature of legal studies. Tackling one of the most salient issues of our day, the authors use the most sophisticated interdisciplinary methodologies to tease out the many subtle strands underlying the debates around capital punishment. -- Elayne Rapping,University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
A fluid merging of cultural theory, media studies, and the social facts of mass incarceration, Punishment in Popular Culture is an unprecedented assembly of exceptional and emergent interdisciplinary scholars who take on the cultural life of punishment against the backdrop of the U.S. carceral regime. Disturbing, original, and provocative, this volume reveals how deeply and broadly punishment is enmeshed in the imaginary of everyday life in American society. From the contemporary perspective and across time, we see how punitive images, often overlooked, carry profound cultural force in our socio-political landscape. -- Michelle Brown,University of Tennessee
Eloquently portray[s] the ways in which popular culture and the criminal justice system influence and feed off each other in a way that both impacts and shapes popular opinion but also various laws. * Metapsychology *
The essays in this VERY creative and thought-provoking book force us to think about what movie depictions of punishment represent, how we receive them, and how our consciousness is shaped by them. Highly recommended! -- James B. Jacobs,Warren E. Burger Professor of Law, New York University
Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments ix Imaging Punishment: An Introduction 1 Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat part I. The Popularity of Punishment 1. Redeeming the Lost War: Backlash Films and the Rise of the Punitive State 23 Lary May 2. Better Here than There: Prison Narratives in Reality Television 55 Aurora Wallace part II. Popular Culture's Critique of Punishment 3. The Spectacle of Punishment and the "Melodramatic Imagination" in the Classical-Era Prison Film: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947) 79 Kristen Whissel 4. "Deserve Ain't Got Nothing to Do with It": The Deconstruction of Moral Justifications for Punishment through The Wire 117 Kristin Henning 5. Rehabilitating Violence: White Masculinity and Harsh Punishment in 1990s Popular Culture 161 Daniel LaChance part III. The Reception and Impact of Punishment in Popular Culture 6. Scenes of Execution: Spectatorship, Political Responsibility, and State Killing in American Film 199 Austin Sarat, Madeline Chan, Maia Cole, Melissa Lang, Nicholas Schcolnik, Jasjaap Sidhu, and Nica Siegel viii | Contents 7. The Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib 236 Amy Adler 8. Images of Injustice 257 Brandon L. Garrett About the Contributors 287 Index 289
