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Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorWendy Wright
DOI10.1177/1462474510383465
Published date01 October 2011
Date01 October 2011
Subject MatterBook Reviews
untitled
Punishment & Society
13(4) 489–501
! The Author(s) 2011
Book Reviews
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474510383465
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Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle, New York University
Press, 2009; 249 pp.: 139780814791004, $24.00 (pbk)
With the number of prisoners, the cost of the criminal justice system, and the bald
racial disparities that plague modern American penality, punishment is obviously
problematic. The average citizen comes into contact with penality primarily
through television shows, f‌ilms, recreational opportunities, and politicized media
imagery, not with actual penal practice or theory. In The Culture of Punishment,
Brown argues that this distance between the reality of punishment and the cultural
production of punishment creates a disorienting disconnect in the individual minds
and the collective culture of contemporary society, resulting in a permeating alien-
ation that makes it nearly impossible to ref‌lect critically on the status of penality
in the USA and undermines the potential for solving problems presented
by punishment.
With both the specter and the reality of penality looming large in contemporary
society, Brown claims the ways in which the cultural understanding of punishment
are produced and mediated in the social imaginary create a ‘penal spectator’, or a
subject that, because of how the penal world appears in the social sphere, f‌inds
itself ‘caught between passivity and engagement, lacking the cultural vocabularies
and political will to interrogate that tension’ (p. 190). She def‌ines the penal spec-
tator in multiple settings, reveals the paralytic ef‌fects of the spectator role, and
suggests ways individuals interested in critical engagement may resist the reifying
ef‌fects of the penal spectator’s position and how they can enter the discourse as
witnesses, activists, and real critics of the carceral in all arenas of society. The
author employs a case study method,...

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