Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s, we highlight how incarcerated artists used satirical humor to convey the harms of imprisonment and express their agency in the face of penal oppression. In so doing, we draw attention to the importance of visual data, which go beyond traditional narrative and numeric data by capturing the imaginations of people in prison.
Institution: George Mason University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
OpenAlex ID: W4403318859