The 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 facts of American penal
life reflected in the portraits of punishment that Americans regularly
encounter on television and in film? What are the conventions of genre
which help to familiarize those portraits and connect them to broader
political and cultural themes? Do television and film help to undermine
punishment's moral claims? And how are developments in the boarder
political economy reflected in the ways punishment appears in mass
culture? Finally, how are images of punishment received by their
audiences? It is to these questions that Punishment in Popular Culture
is addressed.
