Captive Audience

This volume is concerned with the media's role in everyday life, power relations and the construction of masculine identities in the context of prisons.

It is based upon research into the nature, impact and consequences of a situation where most prisoners in English prisons have access to some media resource, whether radio or television, or with communal or individual access to it.The book charts the way in which prisons use media in coping - or failing to cope - with the pressures of prison life, exploring the impact of the media in terms of prisoner identities, shaping power relations between prisoners and their fellow inmates, and in helping them "get through" a prison sentence.At the same time, it raises a range of broader issues of theory and practice on the nature of the relationship between prisons, criminal justice systems and society more generally, and on the ways in which the media are conceived in everyday life.

This book should be of inyterest to all those concerned with prisons, criminology and the criminal justice system, the social role of the media and the construction of identity.