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.
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