Punishment, legitimacy and taste: The role and limits of mainstream and social media in constructing attitudes towards community sanctions

Abstract

Although criminologists have studied public attitudes to community sanctions, and there has also been some attention to media representations of them, there has been no serious examination of the relationships between media and public understandings. This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis (drawing on sociology, media and communications and organisational studies) of the potential influence of media consumption practices on penal tastes among diverse participant groups. We aim to develop a clearer understanding of how these processes shape the public legitimacy of community sanctions. In particular, we report on original research employing innovative methodologies to explore the dynamic set of practices deployed by audiences in the process of making meaningful the media landscape on punishment and community sanctions. Our findings offer some confirmation of the primacy of the prison in the popular imagination; community sanctions' media profile is delimited by their perceived banality, in turn leading to confusion surrounding their purpose and potential. However, this study suggests that the legitimacy problem for community sanctions may be far more complex than 'newsworthiness'. Community sanctions, we argue, may be subject to appraisal in line with penal 'tastes' in which the function of moral censure is of central significance. However, we also uncover some evidence about how traditional markers of taste are disrupted by processes of media convergence (of appropriation, circulation, response) in ways which can operate to limit deliberation even amongst more liberal audience groups, and conversely open it up amongst those who are more punitive.

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“…5 The potential victimization of innocence embodied in children present at Okimah Ohci simply cannot be justified in public discourses, and a bureaucracy allowing “child killers” to serve their time among children is constructed as necessarily incompetent. The offense to “established penal tastes” (Happer et al, 2019) that such transfers produce, recoded publicly as an insult to common sense, can dispense moral communications of any argumentative moment; one can simply state the “idiocy” of the bureaucratic decision (Toronto Star, 2018).…”

A legitimate business? Representations of privatised probation in England and Wales

“…One oft-cited feature of ‘probation’ is the absence of a recognisable visual iconography (Robinson, 2016a; Happer et al, 2018; Mawby and Worrall, 2013). Probation officers do not wear badges or uniforms, and probation offices are not readily identifiable places (Shah, 2015).…”

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“…Han Zhang, Qiongyu Zhu and Yajuan Zhu. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences, 9(1) (2024)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] …”