Punishment in Popular Culture - The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; 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. Table of Contents: ContentsAcknowledgments ixImaging Punishment: An Introduction 1Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Saratpart I. The Popularity of Punishment1. Redeeming the Lost War: Backlash Films and theRise of the Punitive State 23Lary May2. Better Here than There: Prison Narratives inReality Television 55Aurora Wallacepart II. Popular Culture s Critique of Punishment3. The Spectacle of Punishment and the MelodramaticImagination in the Classical-EraPrison Film: I Am aFugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947) 79Kristen Whissel4. Deserve Ain t Got Nothing to Do with It: The Deconstruction of Moral Justificationsfor Punishment through The Wire 117Kristin Henning5. Rehabilitating Violence: White Masculinity andHarsh Punishment in 1990s Popular Culture 161Daniel LaChancepart III. The Reception and Impact of Punishmentin Popular Culture6. Scenes of Execution: Spectatorship, Political Responsibility, and State Killing in American Film 199Austin Sarat, Madeline Chan, Maia Cole, Melissa Lang, Nicholas Schcolnik, Jasjaap Sidhu, and Nica Siegelviii - Contents7. The Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib 236Amy Adler8. Images of Injustice 257Brandon L. GarrettAbout the Contributors 287Index 289"Review Quotes: "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 YorkReview Quotes: "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 UniversityReview Quotes: "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"Biographical Note: Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Previous collaborations for NYU Press with Austin Sarat include From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006), When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarraiges of Justice (2009), and The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (2010). Publisher Marketing: 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. Contributor Bio:  Sarat, Austin Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Previous collaborations for NYU Press with Austin Sarat include From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006), When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarraiges of Justice (2009), and The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (2010). Contributor Bio:  Ogletree, Jr Charles J Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Previous collaborations for NYU Press with Austin Sarat include From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006), When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarraiges of Justice (2009), and The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (2010). Contributor Bio:  Ogletree Jr, Charles Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Previous collaborations for NYU Press with Austin Sarat include From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006), When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarraiges of Justice (2009), and The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (2010).