Today the United States imprisons more people than any other country. The fifth edited collection by esteemed scholars Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Austin Sarat, Punishment in Popular Culture, offers a timely and probing investigation of the nation's ever-growing culture of incarceration. Divided into three parts – (1) “The Popularity of Punishment,” (2) “Popular Culture's Critique of Punishment,” and (3) “The Reception and Impact of Punishment in Popular Culture” – this interdisciplinary volume begins with a useful introduction on “Imaging Punishment,” in which the editors theorize the interconnections between culture and punishment. Drawing from the pioneering work of David Garland, they argue that punishment “is not only shaped by cultural processes, but is itself a cultural agent” (3). It “teaches us how to think about categories like intention, responsibility, and injury, and it models the socially appropriate ways of responding to injury done to us” (3). Punishment, as Ogletree and Sarat productively define it, helps constitute society and social relations, while cultural texts provide a distinct perspective into its operations.

The eight chapters making up the book explore “the semiotics of punishment” (2) in popular culture, primarily in terms of film and television. In the words of contributor Daniel LaChance, who focusses on both kinds of media, “As widely circulating expressions of a culture's anxieties and fantasies, popular culture offers us unique insight into the sources and meaning of the punitive turn” (161). Chapters by Lary May, Kristen Whissel, Sarat, and LaChance powerfully explore the iconography, spectacle, and staging of punishment in movies from the dawn of cinema through the early twenty-first century. Sarat and his coauthors, for instance, zero in on the execution scene and its rhetorical effects in a host of films from The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895) to the Dark Knight Rises (2012). May, adopting a different approach, historically traces the emergence of “backlash films” from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (1971) and Charles Bronson's Death Wish series (1974–94), that responded to the liberal counterculture of the 1960s and the failed military operation in Vietnam by promoting a “right-wing populism and ethos of law and order” reminiscent of the “containment ethos of the 1950s” (32). Whissel, from yet another perspective, offers a close reading of two “classical-era prison films” (79), I Am a Fugitive (1932) and Brute Force (1947). In her theoretically savvy and nuanced analysis, Whissel connects melodrama's moral and aesthetic dimensions to the development of the modern US penal system. She draws from theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks, and Garland to highlight “the aesthetics of astonishment” (85), “the spectacles of punishment” (110), and “the epistemology of the depths” (91) that one finds not only in prison films but also in US penal institutions themselves.

Other contributions by Aurora Wallace, Kristin Henning, and LaChance examine the semiotics of punishment on the small screen. Whereas LaChance traces themes of sexual and racial violence in representations of prisons in the HBO series Oz (1997–2003) and the films The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and American History X (1998), Henning examines HBO's The Wire, with its sixty episodes over five seasons, as a microcosm for a representative American city that allows for an unprecedented study of crime and the criminal-justice system. Wallace, in contrast, turns to supposedly nonfictional representations of punishment in reality television –namely the National Geographic Channel's series Locked Up Abroad, which chronicles the horrors that ne'er-do-well Americans encounter when imprisoned overseas for crimes like amateur drug smuggling. By attending to the program's use of docudrama, staged reenactments, interviews, and postproduction effects (such as orchestral soundtracks), Wallace astutely underscores the fictive elements that belie the show's so-called reality. In addition, she demonstrates that while the program intends to expose the squalor and inhumanity of foreign penal institutions to tout the more enlightened (and exceptional) practices in the US, the narratives of repentance and rehabilitation usually told by these “reformed” Americans imprisoned abroad ironically suggests that foreign prisons often succeed where US ones fail.

Punishment and Popular Culture concludes by moving beyond the realm of film and television. Amy Adler, engaging a Freudian theory of the pleasures of punishment, offers a dynamic reading of the controversy surrounding the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib – one that historically links the photographs documenting the abuse to “torture porn” and the emergence of “humilitainment” as a dominant genre of reality television at the turn of the twenty-first century (239). Moreover, she explains the scandal by way of sadomasochistic desires in which viewers identify alternately with the victims and the perpetrators in the pictures. Also focussing on reception, Brandon L. Garrett attends to the ways in which visual evidence (e.g. forensic exhibits, photographs or video lineups, and confessions) has led to the lawful conviction of innocent suspects. Analyzing “Images of Injustice” and the so-called CSI effect in three cases where DNA evidence later exonerated those convicted, Garrett shows how a theoretically sophisticated understanding of visual imagery and evidence can dramatically impact the use of evidence in both the court of law and the court of public opinion.

Taken together, Punishment and Popular Culture provides a compelling model for future work in the interdisciplinary field of law, culture, and the humanities. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary criminal law and media studies, as well as general readers who want a more critical understanding of the popular entertainment we often uncritically consume. The volume's one shortcoming, however, is that it does not take up more traditional literary forms such as drama and especially the novel – even though “novels” are referenced both in the editors’ introduction (2) and on the book's back cover, along with “television and film,” as constituting an essential part of the semiotics of punishment in popular culture. Certainly crime or legal novels, mysteries, and detective fiction still greatly affect our cultural imaginary of crime and incarceration, and they do so in ways that film and television perhaps cannot. Despite this oversight, literary scholars interested in law and critical legal studies will also benefit from reading the splendid work included in this collection.