Monday, May 20, 2024, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Daniel LaChance

Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, and Director of Undergraduate Studies

“Cuffs of Love:  Punishment and Redemption in Crimesploitation Television”

Crime-focused reality television exploded in the 1980s, depicting the commission, detection, prosecution, and punishment of crimes committed by “real people,” that is, non-actors. I call this genre of television programming “crimesploitation,” spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting criminal behavior and its consequences for those who engage in it. By the 2000s, a new wave of crimesploitation focused on jails and prisons gave viewers a glimpse of people after they have been arrested for a crime. Shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter, Lockup, and Lockdown depicted the experience of being returned to jail by bounty hunters or serving a sentence of incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons. In some scenes, offenders are constructed as dangerous predators who will never change. Yet in other scenes, they are depicted as vulnerable people endowed with qualities of love, self-discipline, and remorse that make them worthy of rehabilitation and capable of redemption. By offering a balance of skepticism and hopefulness in their depiction of captured or incarcerated people, I argue that these shows work to make the punishment of incarceration meaningful. By depicting some prisoners as violent and the incorrigible, these shows reinforce a sense of necessity about the prison. But by depicting some prisoners as capable of change and prisons as sites of moral regeneration, these shows keep incarceration from seeming like the very source of the pollution they purport to contain.