Punishment in Popular Culture PDF Download

Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479861952
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Resource added for the Criminal Justice – Law Enforcement 105046 and Professional Studies 105045 programs.

Author: Mary Welek Atwell
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820467115
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Supreme Court has looked to «evolving standards of decency» in determining whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Evolving Standards of Decency examines the ways in which popular culture portrays the death penalty. By analyzing literature and film, Atwell argues that capital punishment becomes much more complex when both offenders and victims are presented as fully developed individuals. Numerous books and films from the last several decades expose flaws in the criminal justice system and provide audiences with stories that raise questions about race, class, and actual innocence in the administration of the ultimate punishment. Although most people will not read legal briefs supporting or challenging the death penalty, many will see films or read novels that raise issues about its fairness. Themes and images gathered through popular culture may ultimately influence whether Americans continue to believe that capital punishment conforms to their evolving standards of decency and justice. Those studying justice issues, corrections, or capital punishment will find this an accessible and provocative work that places the stories read in novels or seen in movies in the context of the legal system that has the power of life and death.

Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479864218
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.

Author: Michelle Brown
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081479145X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments. The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.

Author: Ellen Tsagaris
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527501175
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Art generally imitates life. This book highlights how the death penalty and murder have influenced toy making, pop culture, art, and music. It also addresses issues of equality and injustice involved in death sentencing. Many toys and dolls are illustrated and discussed, including those representing royalty, famous trials and murderers. Included are a brief guide for reading legal cases, an actual United States Supreme Court case, and a brief history of capital punishment theories, exercises and more. Librarians, historians, legal practitioners, museum curators, law professors, criminologists, doll and toy collectors and students alike will find this book useful. Given how often capital punishment appears in everyday life, general readers will find it interesting and engaging.

Author: Anne-Marie Cusac
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The statistics are startling. Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has multiplied over five times to become the highest in the world. More than two million inmates reside in state and federal prisons. What does this say about our attitudes toward criminals and punishment? What does it say about us? This book explores the cultural evolution of punishment practices in the United States. Anne-Marie Cusac first looks at punishment in the nation’s early days, when Americans repudiated Old World cruelty toward criminals and emphasized rehabilitation over retribution. This attitude persisted for some 200 years, but in recent decades we have abandoned it, Cusac shows. She discusses the dramatic rise in the use of torture and restraint, corporal and capital punishment, and punitive physical pain. And she links this new climate of punishment to shifts in other aspects of American culture, including changes in dominant religious beliefs, child-rearing practices, politics, television shows, movies, and more. America now punishes harder and longer and with methods we would have rejected as cruel and unusual not long ago. These changes are profound, their impact affects all our lives, and we have yet to understand the full consequences.

Author: Philip Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226766101
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Philip Smith attacks the comfortable notion that punishment is about justice, reason and law. Instead, he argues that punishment is an essentially irrational act founded in ritual as a means to control evil without creating more of it in the process.

Author: Ronald Kramer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1352010836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This innovative introductory textbook to the growing field of cultural criminology examines the importance of understanding the cultural contexts in which crime and crime control take place. It describes and discusses the field's theoretical and methodological foundations, its links to other theoretical traditions, and its limits and criticisms. By exploring substantive areas such as crime in popular culture, deviance and social control, criminal justice and punishment, it demonstrates the utility of sometimes complex theory to core issues in criminology. Written in accessible language, this is the first text written specifically for a student audience, making it essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate modules on cultural criminology. Moreover, as it evaluates the connections of cultural criminology with wider theoretical developments, it will be ideal for broader courses on criminology, criminological theory and critical criminology. Finally, it will be of interest to anyone analysing contemporary issues and debates through a cultural lens.

Author: Claire Valier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134461054
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: · Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities · The cultural politics of victims rights · Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora · Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age.

Author: Nicole Hahn Rafter
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814745296
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.