Punishment in Popular Culture. Eds. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $27 paperback.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12256
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

system—the majority of them Black and Brown—desperately seek,

and yet rarely find, a measure of justice and recognition of their

common humanity.

Van Cleve’s book is nothing less than a tour de force, and a clari-

on call for bringing egalitarian principles of racial and social justice

to our most overlooked of criminal justice institutions, the courts. It

forces us to confront “the everyday miscarriages of justice” that per-

vade today’s courts, asking us what has become of Gideon’s trumpet

in the age of spatially and racially concentrated “mass incarcer-

ation.” The book is destined to become a classic, and ought to be on

the mandatory reading list for citizens, law and society scholars and

all sentient social scientists.

***

Punishment in Popular Culture. Eds. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin

Sarat. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 320 pp.

$27 paperback.

Reviewed by Jessica Silbey, Northeastern University

The editors of Punishment in Popular Culture remind us that

“through practices of punishment ... cultural boundaries are

drawn, that solidarity is created through acts of marking difference

between self and other, that these processes proceed through dis-

identification as much as imagined connection.” (p. 2) This is no

doubt true about the organization, justification and reception of

various forms of punishment in society. It is no less true about the

creation and cultivation of popular cultural forms of entertainment

such as television and film. To be sure, punishment acts directly on

bodies. And cultural forms—visual or texual stories about punish-

ment or justice—act on bodies less directly. But both act on us, con-

stituting individuals and communities as subjects, shaping our

expectations and desires, implicating us in the moral points made.

“Narratives do not stand outside social authority – they are part of

it.” (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 23)

Punishment in Popular Culture is a collection of essays about the

representation and circulation of stories about punishment and jus-

tice. The essays take as given the constitutive force of popular cul-

ture and combine it with the deeply rooted discourses about

punishment to demonstrate their interdependence. Contributors to

the volume are legal scholars, cultural critics, and social justice

206 Book Reviews