Skip to main content
Article
Doing time in “Camp Cupcake”: Lessons learned from newspaper accounts of Martha Stewart’s incarceration.
USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications
  • Dawn K. Cecil, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Dawn Cecil

Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Abstract

Popular media images of women in prison are rare and often distorted. Newspaper articles on women in prison are also rare yet potentially offer an alternative view of these women. To understand how female prisoners are depicted by the news media, this research examines newspaper articles written about Martha Stewart’s incarceration. While several themes were identified, this article examines messages related to the correctional system and the effects of incarceration. These articles project distorted and damaging images of female prisoners. By failing to acknowledge how Stewart is different from the typical female inmate these articles normalize her experiences. Overall, these articles send messages that female offenders are not being punished and that they easily transition back into the community after incarceration.

Language
en_US
Publisher
State University of New York at Albany. School of Criminal Justice
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0
Citation Information
Cecil, D. K. (2007). Doing time in “Camp Cupcake”: Lessons learned from newspaper accounts of Martha Stewart’s incarceration. Journal of criminal justice and popular culture, 14(2), 142-160.