ABSTRACT
Consisting of a hidden set of practices and institutions, modern punishment necessarily assumes a special relationship to representation. Indeed, we have largely come to know the history, forms, and functions of modern punishment through images. With a view to broadening or even challenging common understandings of punishment, this chapter takes the reader to the realm of contemporary documentary, analyzing efforts by filmmakers to represent the conditions of confinement and the role of the state in the production of those conditions. Documentary has recently experienced an intense revitalization, from the sudden popularity of reality television to the expansion of news commentary programming and the return of major documentary box-office draws. Film scholar Linda Williams argues such shifts to be evidence of a “remarkable engagement with a newer, more contingent, relative, postmodern truth – a truth which, far from being abandoned, still operates powerfully as the receding horizon of the documentary tradition” (1998, 382). Crucially, transformations in documentary converge with dramatic shifts in the history and practice of punishment, particularly in relation to new and emergent modes of penality manifested in the post-9/11 new war prisons.
