Captured by the Media

Captured by the Media explores 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 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 punishmentits contested meaning and its politics of representation demands investigation. Alongside contributi