Throughout participant accounts of establishing the PRA and NPR, managing external misconceptions and misrepresentations emerges as a significant discursive theme, one which warrants further investigation in relation to the challenges faced by those trying to enact change within a beleaguered prison system. PRA founders described an acute awareness that negative mainstream media attention could lead to the withdrawal of institutional and political support at a critical time in the process of establishing NPR. Mistrust of mainstream media outlets is mirrored across the criminal justice sector, with scholars and practitioners recognising the simplified and negative portrayal of prison issues as a barrier to innovation and change (Sparks 2001; Di Ronco 2016). As a team of experienced media professionals, PRA founders chose to keep a low profile throughout early development, focusing instead on developing quality radio for a unique target audience and only producing outside media campaigns on their own terms, based on major achievements.

The role of mainstream media in creating and sustaining moral panics around crime and punishment is well documented (Hall et al 2013 [1978]; Howitt 1998, pp.25–27; Jewkes 2015), leading to a mistrust among criminal justice practitioners, scholars and activists (Barak 1988; Di Ronco 2016). This position is addressed in Barak's ‘Newsmaking Criminology’ theory which calls for criminologists to directly engage with mass media, highlighting the role they can play in creating more realistic representations of the social, political and economic conditions of crime and crime control (Barak 1988, p.566). However, today's dispersed and democratised media landscape provides increased opportunities to both disrupt and create newsmaking processes. This chapter uses the PRA experience to illustrate the ways in which criminal justice practitioners, scholars and activists can bypass simplistic, dramatic mass media representations of prison issues and contribute to the production of alternative discourses, shifting the prison narrative from failure to positive change.

The PRA experience illustrates the problematic relationship between mainstream media and prison practice. Its subsequent response demonstrates the potential to reclaim media power through producing more realistic and nuanced representations of prisons and prisoners. First, the PRA position is used to examine the interplay between media and public opinion, and the resulting impact on criminal justice policy and practice.