ABSTRACT
Criminology, public or otherwise, always exists in relationship to the carceral state. As cultural criminologists have detailed in recent years, images are always central to that legitimacy and the efforts of public criminology to address the problem of legitimation. This chapter reads some pivotal works of public criminology to discuss the power of images to delegitimate and relegitimate carceral state practices. While criminologists are exploring the tactics and strategies of producing such counter images, the question of what allows such counter measures to break through the visual legitimacy of the carceral state requires its own exploration. John Howard's State of the Prisons is a visual document, or one might say a "visualizing" document, through and through. Brown v. Plata was the first major institutional reform prisoner case involving an actual population cap to emerge after that rights diminishing legislation. The case permitted the prisoners to allow their experts to fully examine the prison system and its records.
