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Lies, distortion and what doesn’t work: Monitoring prison stories in the British media

Cardiff University, UK

This article argues that the populist and highly punitive penal policy in the UK is promoted by media discourses around prison. The combination of over-reporting of violent and sexual crime in the media and fictional constructions of imprisonment has been a highly significant factor in the growth of the prison population in late modernity. Providing a discourse analysis of one month’s UK media output on prison, it argues that through a discourse of dangerousness delivered to a fearful public, prison is constructed unproblematically as a solution to crime, echoing the ‘what works’ mantra of New Labour. The meaning of prison, it argues, is shifted from a place of pain delivery to one which treats and trains. The article further contends that media discourse of the prisoner precludes any rational debate about alternatives to prison. Media representations of incarceration as an institution full of murderers, rapists and paedophiles precludes a long overdue debate about prison suicides, the erosion of prisoners’ rights and the rising number of women and children incarcerated.

Key Words: abolition • criminal justice • journalism • media • prison

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