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Abstract

In this paper, we examine the role played by popular media in propagating myths around policing and buttressing the prison-industrial complex (PIC). We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how policing logics are amplified, contested, and resonate through popular media as part of a hegemonic process to sustain the PIC. We suggest that the scaffolding for these logics is built through rhetoric that normalizes the routine violence of policing (copspeak), the ways in which police create and control their own image (image work), and the widespread tendency of popular media to portray policing in a sympathetic light (copaganda). We disambiguate these distinct yet overlapping concepts and offer a framework to illustrate how discursive challenges, or ruptures, to PIC hegemony are absorbed and repressed essentially foreclosing abolitionist imaginings.

Keywords

Abolition copaganda copspeak image work prison-industrial complex hegemony war on crime

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From defund to refund the police: The hegemonic rupture and repair of policing logics

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