Spectacles of Policing, Crime, and Punishment in the United States

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together scholars interested in past and present representations of policing, crime, and punishment in American culture. Our papers address a common set of concerns about the relationship between storytelling and the politics of criminal justice. How do widely-disseminated and personally-recounted experiences of policing, crime, and punishment reveal, reinforce, or contest power relations at a given historical moment? How do they capture and remake dominant imaginings of state actors, offenders, and the institutions and technologies of policing and punishment? What do narrativized imaginings of lawful and lawless violence reveal to us that other discourses on policing, crime, and punishment do not?

Sub Unit

• Area V. Perceptions of Crime and Justice / 48. Media and the Social Construction of Crime

Individual Presentations

• The Spectacle of Punishment and the Melodramatic Imagination in the Classical-Era Prison Film: I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947) - Kristen Whissel, University of California, Berkeley

• Urban Warfare Policing and the Emotional Entanglements of the Shield - Joshua Page, University of Minnesota; Ben Fleury-Steiner, University of Delaware

• Crimesploitation - Paul Kaplan, San Diego State University; Daniel LaChance, Emory University

• The Supermax Prison: A Blunt Means of Control, or a Subtle Form of Violence? - Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine

Chair

• Paul Kaplan, San Diego State University

Discussant

• Michelle Brown, University of Tennessee