Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration. Bill Yousman. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009. 200 pp.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the number of incarcerated Americans quadrupled, resulting in two million-plus citizens in prisons and jails. Bill Yousman, former managing director of the progressive nonprofit Media Education Foundation and now a lecturer in communications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, takes the mass media to task over the invisibility of this vast population of prisoners. He situates the gap in the larger context of a critical social problem—the incarceration of millions nationwide—and the distortions that are rife in media representations of multiple aspects of crime in general. Analyzing both nonfiction (news) and fictional (drama) representations, he finds little to commend.  [Read more...]