Punishment & Society

This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing and distributing such images may indicate a significant change in the penal enterprise. In the end, I suggest that this phenomenon further reshapes contemporary penality into a form of visual entertainment commodity, and as such, may be converging with several other social transformations to fundamentally reconfigure the penal subject.

This article focuses on the controversial ‘We on death row’ campaign launched by Benetton in January 2000. The campaign featured photographic images of prisoners from death rows in the USA. The campaign, which has been dismissed by Austin Sarat as an old and failing abolitionist strategy, poses a number of challenges for our understanding and assessments of the potential ‘reformist’ efficacy of representations of punishment. The article sets out to explore the ways of seeing and strategies of knowing the death penalty in the USA and the contingent and unpredictable consequences of local ways of seeing and strategies of knowing of these global spectacles of punishment. It argues that despite the effectiveness of the cultural policing of representations of the death penalty in the USA the Benetton campaign allowed a ‘witnessing’, a seeing through the pretences behind the sanctioning of the death penalty at a moment which may prove resistant to the normalization of disturbing images of punishment - the liminal state of death row.

Today we live in a celebrity culture, in which images of stars, people who are famous for being famous, are circulated and consumed as a daily practice by people across the world. This article explores the cultural reception of celebrity victimization, relating this to the twinned processes of globalization and commodification. The arguments made are illustrated through an analysis of the case of Charles Lindbergh, whose infant son was murdered during the inter-war years. Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight of 1927 was a global media-event in which the new mobilities of persons and images were highly condensed. Mediated visibility launched him into unprecedented acclaim, yet his fame unfolded in part as a negative status, as a kind of victimization. Analysis of this case permits a study of the relationships between images, celebrity and victimization.

This article sets out to question the relationship between criminal law, punishment and prohibition. The argument is made that criminal law is not founded upon prohibitive grounds but rather on permissive grounds. Criminal law does not operate as a set of prohibitive rules, whereby the rule breaker is punished, but rather as a system that is indexed by permission and particularly by the slogan ‘enjoy without restraints!’ If criminal law is viewed in this way, it can be read as a manual of citizenship. The article articulates this reading through the use of psychoanalytic myths. The aim is to open up a space whereby one can articulate and criticize the wider project in which criminal law is engaged, one whereby it creates the conditions for citizenship.

When the call for justice comes through the grief-stricken plea of the mother of a murdered child, it carries a potent affective charge, levying an unassailable demand for our concern and commanding urgent action. Today we are regularly confronted with images of suffering and vengeful crime victims. What kind of response can be envisioned as just? This article stages some encounters arising from press photographs of mothers bereaved by violent acts of criminality. The reflections presented here pose a grave test to the theory of the face. How to respond to the face of the hater, and specifically to the black wrath of the mother of the murdered child? How is the passage from ethics to justice to be negotiated?

In this article, I use the tenets of media studies scholarship to reformulate David Garland’s account of the shifts in sanctioning policy that began in the 1970s. I address the media’s prominent role in shaping public mentalities and sensibilities that were incompatible with penal welfarism and supportive of more punitive policies. In particular, I analyze media coverage of the policy debate and also dramatic depictions of crime. I argue that the media were more influential in shaping public attitudes toward sanctioning policy than Garland suggests.