Explores the issue of media and discourse on prisons and punishment, and its relationship to public attitudes and government penal policy. This book engages with what might be termed the 'cultural turn' of criminology and discusses the relationship between prison, public and government. It is useful for students of media studies and criminology.

Zusammenfassung
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.

Inhalt

Turn on, tune in, slop out 2. The function of fiction for a punitive public 3. Red tops, populists and the irresistible rise of the public voice(s) 4. Crime sound bites: a view from both sides of the microphone 5. What works in changing public attitudes: findings from rethinking crime and punishment 6. Delivering death: capital punishment, botched executions and the American news media 7. 'Buried alive': representations of the separate system in Victorian England 8. Undermining the simplicities: the films of Rex Bloomstein 9. Creating a stir? Prisons, popular media and the power to reform 10. The violence of images: inside the prison TV drama Oz 11. The anti-heroines of Holloway : the prison films of Joan Henry and J. Lee Thompson 12. Relocating Hollywood's prison film discourse 13. Future punishment in American science fiction films