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.
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
