Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
1 - Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Abstract
What is mass incarceration? What does it have to do with mass media and popular culture? This chapter synthesizes some of the most influential lines of research on mass incarceration and ties its rise over the second half of the 20th century to racialized representations of crime, policing, and punishment. It traces the development of genres which routinely pit hardened police or aggrieved white vigilantes against the so-called dangerous classes. I argue that these conventions tended to both energize and legitimize the punitive turn in criminal justice policy, coalescing into a hegemonic representational mode I call “punitive realism.” I end by ruminating on popular media's potential to not only reinforce but also unsettle these racialized spectacles of crime and punishment.
Keywords: Mass Incarceration, crime and punishment in popular culture, punitive realism, crime genres, prison
Captivity by the Numbers
It is all too easy, but instructive nevertheless, to read off the troubling statistics: starting in the 1970s, the U.S. began to witness a drastic rise in its incarceration rate, skyrocketing from 161 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents behind bars in 1972 to about 767 per 100,000 near its peak in the second half of the 2000s (National Research Council 33). Due to the patchwork nature of the American criminal justice system, which includes a federal system, a system for each state, over 3,000 counties and more than 25,000 municipal systems, it is difficult to say just how many people are under state supervision at any given time. However, as of 2018 the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that in addition to the 2.3 million people held in prisons or jails in the United States, there are an estimated 4.5 million more on probation or parole (Wagner and Sawyer). Already in 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that one in every thirty-seven adults in America had been to prison in their lifetime (Bonczar 1). While recent years have seen a slight decline in overall incarceration rates, it has been estimated that it would take nearly 65 years for the current rate of decline to halve the prison population (Ghandnoosh 3). The costs of maintaining such a system, both in terms of financial expenditures and human wellbeing, are immense if not immeasurable.
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- Chapter
- Information
- American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality TelevisionCaptivating Aspirations, pp. 29 - 52Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022