In this article, I examine Crimewatch, Singapore's long-running crime-prevention television program, as a state-aligned form of mediated penal power. I argue that the program made punishment beyond the courtroom effective by making real crime watchable. Drawing on scholarship on crimesploitation, mediated humiliation, penal spectatorship, and visual criminology, I analyze 1990s episodes on youth gangs, molestation, drug trafficking, and murder. Across them, Crimewatch produced a visual checklist of delinquency for parents, responsibilized families as auxiliary agents of crime prevention, turned sentencing-stage courtroom exposure into televised shame, and converted forensic evidence into a graphic spectacle, creating disciplined viewers invited to fear crime, recognize deviance, trust police interpretation, and participate in crime control. The Singaporean case extends debates on punishment beyond formal legal institutions, showing how state-aligned crime television fuses exposure, pedagogy, pleasure, and moral judgment. Tracing the program's shift toward scam-oriented formats, I show how it reconfigured viewers from potential witnesses into risk-managing subjects.
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