ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the persistence of the spectacle of punishment from public displays to global media such as film, news, but more specifically the television image. It considers how this spectacle contributes to a 'politics of amnesia', which presents criminals in certain ways that can often be concurrent to strategies of penal reform or rehabilitation. With the displacement of a carceral corporeality, the notion of 'spectacle' has become fundamentally tied up with its technological mediation. The programme presents a comic stance upon many fundamentally serious issues, such as prisoners struggling to maintain relationships with their friends, wives and children on the outside. The camera technique further spectacularizes these harrowing events for us as television (TV)-viewers. Fast cutting, close range shots of the activities in the bull ring connote chaos and replicate the real-life pace of the action. During visiting time prison officers, who offer varying attitudes to the penal system and their role within it, observe them.
