© 2007 School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 14 (2), 2007. 142-160 Doing time in “Camp Cupcake”: Lessons learned from newspaper accounts of Martha Stewart’s incarceration By Dawn K. Cecil University of South Florida, St. Petersburg 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. Keywords: media, female prisoners, women and media, women and prison INTRODUCTION Currently there are more than 104,848 women incarcerated in our nation’s prisons (Harrison & Beck, 2005). The population of incarcerated females has increased dramatically since the 1980s, yet these women remain an invisible correctional population, especially to the general public. Since most people do not come into direct contact with the criminal justice system, their knowledge of and opinions about the correctional system are based on the images they receive from the media. However, the correctional system is the component of the criminal justice system that is the least likely to be depicted by the media (Surette, 1998). Given an ever- growing institutional population one might think that prisons and inmates would be an important news item, nevertheless, news stories rarely focus on these topics. The scarcity with which these stories appear is likely due in part to the restrictions placed on media access to prisons and prisoners by administrators and/or state legislation (Lipschultz & Hilt, 2002; Sussman, 2002). When prisons are in the news it is due to rare events such as riots or escapes (Chermak, 1998; Lipschultz & Hilt, 2002). Even less common than general stories concerning the correctional system are those featuring women in prison. Female prisoners rarely riot or escape. Since women also make up a small percentage of the correctional population, female prisoners are rarely considered newsworthy. According to Clark (2005), “news organizations are much more likely to sensationalize individual crimes than to examine the truth behind the 182,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. So stereotypes go unchallenged by serious news analysis, and the public image of women in prison is at the mercy of pop culture dreck…” (p. 37). The image of female prisoners most readily available is contained in Hollywood films. Since the 1950s films about women in prison have focused on girls-gone-bad plots using exploitation-style filmmaking.