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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.
The Supreme Court has looked to «evolving standards of decency» in determining whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Evolving Standards of Decency examines the ways in which popular culture portrays the death penalty. By analyzing literature and film, Atwell argues that capital punishment becomes much more complex when both offenders and victims are presented as fully developed individuals. Numerous books and films from the last several decades expose flaws in the criminal justice system and provide audiences with stories that raise questions about race, class, and actual innocence in the administration of the ultimate punishment. Although most people will not read legal briefs supporting or challenging the death penalty, many will see films or read novels that raise issues about its fairness. Themes and images gathered through popular culture may ultimately influence whether Americans continue to believe that capital punishment conforms to their evolving standards of decency and justice. Those studying justice issues, corrections, or capital punishment will find this an accessible and provocative work that places the stories read in novels or seen in movies in the context of the legal system that has the power of life and death.
Resource added for the Criminal Justice – Law Enforcement 105046 and Professional Studies 105045 programs.
America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments. The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.
Art generally imitates life. This book highlights how the death penalty and murder have influenced toy making, pop culture, art, and music. It also addresses issues of equality and injustice involved in death sentencing. Many toys and dolls are illustrated and discussed, including those representing royalty, famous trials and murderers. Included are a brief guide for reading legal cases, an actual United States Supreme Court case, and a brief history of capital punishment theories, exercises and more. Librarians, historians, legal practitioners, museum curators, law professors, criminologists, doll and toy collectors and students alike will find this book useful. Given how often capital punishment appears in everyday life, general readers will find it interesting and engaging.
Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: · Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities · The cultural politics of victims rights · Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora · Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age.
This book turns on the television, opens the newspaper, goes to the cinema and assesses how punishment is performed in media culture, investigating the regimes of penal representation and how they may contribute to a populist and punitive criminological imagination. It places media discourse in prisons firmly within the arena of penal policy and public opinion, suggesting that while Bad Girls, The Shawshank Redemption, internet jail cams, advertising and debates about televising executions continue to ebb and flow in contemporary culture, the persistence of this spectacle of punishment - its contested meaning and its politics of representation - demands investigation. Alongside chapters addressing the construction of popular images of prison and the death penalty in television and film, Captured by the Media also has contributions from prison reform groups and prison practitioners which discuss forms of media intervention in penal debate. This book provides a highly readable exploration of media discourse on prisons and punishment, and its relationship to public attitudes and government penal policy. At the same time it engages with the 'cultural turn' within criminology and offers an original contribution to discussion of the relationship between prison, public and the state. It will be essential reading for students in both media studies and criminology as well as practitioners and commentators in these fields.
This new Second Edition of Law and Popular Culture: Text, Notes, and Questions maintains the most appreciated features of the First Edition published in 2007. Each of the chapters begins with a list of readily available Hollywood films that are relevant to the particular chapter. After an introduction to the study of popular culture and an outline of the goals of the book, the chapters themselves fall into two categories. Half concern the pop culture portrayals of legal institutions and actors -- law schools, the legal profession, clients, witnesses, judges, and juries. The second half concern various areas of law -- Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Torts, Business Law, Family Law, and International Law. Well over one hundred excerpts from articles by the leading law and popular culture scholars still are included. A majority of these excerpts appeared in the First Edition, but many appear for the first time in this Second Edition. Film remains the most prominent medium. The Second Edition also adds these exciting new features: An original chapter on "Punishment" explores the surprisingly large body of pop cultural works related to imprisonment and capital punishment. Law-related imagery and portrayals in such other media as television, inexpensive fiction, children's literature, and the comics receive much greater attention in the text's notes and comments sections than was the case in the First Edition. Emphasis on the reasons, forms, and ramifications of law related popular culture, moving away to some extent from attempts either to point out the legal errors in popular culture or to teach the law using popular culture.
The Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture will be an essential reference point, providing international coverage and thematic richness. The chapters examine the real and imagined spaces of the prison and, perhaps more importantly, dwell in the uncertain space between them. The modern fixation with ‘seeing inside’ prison from the outside has prompted a proliferation of media visions of incarceration, from high-minded and worthy to voyeuristic and unrealistic. In this handbook, the editors bring together a huge breadth of disparate issues including women in prison, the view from ‘inside’, prisons as a source of entertainment, the real worlds of prison, and issues of race and gender. The handbook will inform students and lecturers of media, film, popular culture, gender, and cultural studies, as well as scholars of criminology and justice.
The statistics are startling. Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has multiplied over five times to become the highest in the world. More than two million inmates reside in state and federal prisons. What does this say about our attitudes toward criminals and punishment? What does it say about us? This book explores the cultural evolution of punishment practices in the United States. Anne-Marie Cusac first looks at punishment in the nation’s early days, when Americans repudiated Old World cruelty toward criminals and emphasized rehabilitation over retribution. This attitude persisted for some 200 years, but in recent decades we have abandoned it, Cusac shows. She discusses the dramatic rise in the use of torture and restraint, corporal and capital punishment, and punitive physical pain. And she links this new climate of punishment to shifts in other aspects of American culture, including changes in dominant religious beliefs, child-rearing practices, politics, television shows, movies, and more. America now punishes harder and longer and with methods we would have rejected as cruel and unusual not long ago. These changes are profound, their impact affects all our lives, and we have yet to understand the full consequences.