This book examines various programmes across the genres of drama, comedy and horror that utilize prison as a central theme or setting to show how they conform to or challenge the standard conversation about the prison industrial complex and the common understanding of prisons as violent spaces where we house the worst among us.

Victoria M. Bryan is the Honors Program Director and Associate Professor of English at Cleveland State Community College, USA. She is also founder and director of the Turn the Page Literacy Initiative that operates in Southeast Tennessee. Dr Bryan earned her PhD in English from the University of Mississippi in 2014.

Introduction - "A False Solution": Understanding Prisons through Pop Culture, and the Potential of Prestige Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration 1. "Daniel Has Risen from the Dead": Solitary Confinement, Social Death, and the Fallibility of Memory in Rectify 2. "Not for Correction, but for Storage": Incarceration as Cultural Trauma in American Horror Story 3. "We Need the Prison": Troubling the Age of Mass Incarceration via the Undead Body in The Walking Dead 4. "I Got a Lot of Prisons in My Life": Using the Prison Industrial Complex to Complicate Ideals of American Freedom in Orange Is the New Black Conclusion - "Revenge Isn't Justice": The Master's Tools and the Siren Song of Reform