Punishment in Popular Culture

by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. (Editor), Austin Sarat (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479833528
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2015
Series:	The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice , #4
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor)
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America.

Austin Sarat (Editor)
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written or edited dozens of books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution (Stanford 2022), Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law (NYU 2021), and Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era (Oxford 2001), which won the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award.

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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

From the Publisher

"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

"[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 to encourage the scholarship that contributes to our understanding of race and justice."

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"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

"[T]his collection will reward students who seek insight into the conceptions of justice that animate the ghost in the popular culture machine."

Choice