Product Information
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 Identifiers
PublisherNew York University Press
ISBN-139781479861958
eBay Product ID (ePID)214337344
Product Key Features
Number of Pages320 Pages
Publication NamePunishment in Popular Culture
LanguageEnglish
SubjectCriminology
Publication Year2015
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaCriminal Law
AuthorAustin Sarat
Dimensions
Item Height229 mm
Item Weight680 g
Additional Product Features
EditorCharles J. Ogletree Jr.
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorAustin Sarat
Series TitleThe Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice