Product Description

This book aims to explore the increasingly important issue of media and popular discourse on prisons and punishment, and its relationship to public attitudes and government penal policy. In providing such an analysis this book draws upon work from academics, prison and media practitioners, addressing questions of cultural constructions and consumptions of penal discourse in media and culture. This book turns on the television, opens the newspapers, goes to the cinema and assesses how punishment is performed in media culture and investigates the regimes of penal representation. It places media discourse on prisons firmly within the penal policy/public opinion complex and suggests 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 contributions concerning the construction of popular images of prison and the death penalty in television and film, "Captured by the Media" offers contributions from prison reform groups and prison practitioners, which discuss forms of media intervention in penal debate. These inter-disciplinary and dynamic essays offer an important intervention in the field for students and practitioners and of prisons, criminal justice, criminology and media culture. At the same time this book engages with what might be termed the 'cultural turn' of criminology and offers an original contribution to discussion of the relationship between prison, public and government. It will be essential reading for students of both media studies and criminology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #659843 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages