Captured by the Media
Prison Discourse in Popular Culture

Explores the issue of media and discourse on prisons and punishment, and its relationship to public attitudes and government penal policy. This book engages with what might be termed the 'cultural turn' of criminology and discusses the relationship between prison, public and government. It is useful for students of media studies and criminology.

Alongside contributions concerning the construction of popular images of prison and the death penalty in television and film, "Captured by the Media" offers contributions from prison reform groups and prison practitioners, which discuss forms of media intervention in penal debate. These inter-disciplinary and dynamic essays offer an important intervention in the field for students and practitioners and of prisons, criminal justice, criminology and media culture. At the same time this book engages with what might be termed the 'cultural turn' of criminology and offers an original contribution to discussion of the relationship between prison, public and government. It will be essential reading for students of both media studies and criminology.

1. Turn on, tune in, slop out, Paul Mason
2. The function of fiction for a punitive public, Anna King
and Shadd Maruna
3. Red tops, populists and the irresistible rise of the public voice(s), Mick Ryan
4. Crime sound bites: a view from both sides of the microphone, Enver Solomon
5. What works in changing public attitudes: findings from rethinking crime and punishment, Rob Allen
6. Delivering death: capital punishment, botched executions and the American news media, Chris Greer
7. 'Buried alive': representations of the separate system in Victorian England, Helen Johnston
8. Undermining the simplicities: the films of Rex Bloomstein, Jamie Bennett
9. Creating a stir? Prisons, popular media and the power to reform, Yvonne Jewkes
10. The violence of images: inside the prison TV drama Oz, Brian Jarvis
11. The anti-heroines of Holloway : the prison films of Joan Henry and J. Lee Thompson, Steve Chibnall
12. Relocating Hollywood's prison film discourse, Paul Mason
13. Future punishment in American science fiction films, Mike Nellis