RT Article
T1 The ‘worst of the worst’: punitive justice frames in criminal sentencing clips on YouTube
JF Contemporary justice review
VO 24
IS 4
SP 436
OP 456
A1 Revier, Kevin
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1782405429
AB Courtroom media is a longstanding genre of news and entertainment, in radio, film, television, and print. Digital streaming platforms such as YouTube, which boasts over 2 billion users, have become a prominent source of courtroom content. In this research, I examine popularized YouTube sentencing clips: fairly short videos (often no more than a few minutes) which generally include a sentence-reaction formula, have little context (case, social, or individual), and are digitally shared, edited, and distributed online, primarily by news outlets and private channels. Specifically, I conduct a frame analysis of 53 sentencing clips from United States’ courtrooms. I find that sentencing clips reinforce dominant punitive justice frames, including justice-as-retribution, justice-as-victim-advocacy, and justice-as-entertainment. Moreover, as the majority of clips feature defendants sentenced for violent acts, including sexual assault, murder, and child abuse, they depict the ‘worst of the worst’ being brought to justice. Thus, in a time of criminal justice reform, of which there has been popular concern regarding the ‘relatively innocent,’ the criminal bogeyman remains alive and well on digital media platforms like YouTube. Punitive frames associated with the ‘worst of the worst,’ in turn, reinforce a punishment paradigm constitutive of contemporary U.S. criminal justice as a whole.
K1 Youtube
K1 Court media
K1 Sentencing clips
K1 Criminal Sentencing
K1 Frame analysis
K1 Visual Criminology
DO 10.1080/10282580.2021.1981135