Showing papers in "Crime, Media, Culture in 2006"

The ‘chav’ phenomenon: Consumption, media and the construction of a new underclass

Abstract: This article argues that the decline of the ‘underclass’ discourse in the UK, and the rise of the ‘chav’, are not unconnected. We contend that there are numerous homologies between the meaning content, objects and tenor of these two terms, and suggest that the ‘chav’ represents a popular reconfiguration of the underclass idea. However, we are also keen to note the way in which the concept of social marginality is reconfigured in this substitution. Specifically, we argue that the discourse of the underclass turned crucially upon a (perceived or real) pathology in the working classes’ relations to production and socially productive labour. Its emergent successor, the concept of the ‘chav’, is in contrast oriented to purportedly pathological class dispositions in relation to the sphere of consumption. In a bid to highlight this shift we consider the emergence of debates upon social marginality and consumption practices, and attempt to locate popular media discourse surrounding the ‘chav’ within this frame, i...

‘The body does not lie’: Identity, risk and trust in technoculture

Abstract: The article suggests that surveillance of the body is gradually becoming a major source of identification, as well as a vital element of late-modern mechanisms of social exclusion. The increasing d...

Communicating the terrorist risk: Harnessing a culture of fear?

Abstract: Following the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid and London, state agencies have been bound up with the problem of how to effectively communicate the risk of terrorism to the general...

From invisible to incorrigible: The demonization of marginalized women and girls

Abstract: Two disturbing recent trends in the media and popular constructions of girls, women, and aggression are analyzed in this article: the media attention to ‘aggression’ and ‘violence’ of girls with th...

Framing homicide narratives in newspapers: Mediated witness and the construction of virtual victimhood

Abstract: This article identifies ways in which newspapers invite readers to identify with victims and victimhood as a route to engaging them in ‘human interest’ stories. Within this framing of homicide for readers as ‘mediated witness’, some of the authorial techniques are explored whereby newspapers engage readers in a stylized dialogue that contributes to the construction of public narratives about homicide. It is argued that researchers, as well as working at a macro level, need to research at the micro level of textual analysis when researching media (including visual media) in order to understand the framing that contributes to public narratives; hence there is analysis of techniques of (a) defamiliarization and (b) objectification of homicide victims. These are some of the means by which the reader is placed as witness, both apparently ‘experiencing’ crime for personal consumption yet, publicly, allowed to recover (unlike real victims of major crime). The recognition of a need for micro-level analysis raises questions about the functions of public narratives, particularly in expressing, exploring and containing public or social emotion, in an era in which public responses to crime have been placed at the top of a highly politicized crime agenda.

Cultural criminology and kryptonite: Apocalyptic and retributive constructions of crime and justice in comic books

Abstract: The current study utilizes a cultural criminological approach to examine paradigms of justice portrayed in American comic books Based on a review of the literature, we hypothesize that the dominant crimes depicted in comic books are violent street crimes and that the portrayed responses to these crimes are executed outside the rule of law by an avenging protagonist According to the literature surveyed, comic book protagonists seek to restore public order as a means of returning the community to a constructed, nostalgic ideal Moreover, the implied policy message in comic books is one of vigilantism, in which moral justice trumps legitimate criminal procedure Based on a content analysis of 20 contemporary best-selling comic books, themes of organized crime, often involving complex transnational networks, are more prevalent than street crimes, contrary to our hypothesis However, the response to crime remains focused on vigilante methods and on the restoration of a constructed utopic community that espouses the rule of law Language: en

Lies, distortion and what doesn't work: Monitoring prison stories in the British media

Abstract: This article argues that the populist and highly punitive penal policy in the UK is promoted by media discourses around prison. The combination of over-reporting of violent and sexual crime in the media and fictional constructions of imprisonment has been a highly significant factor in the growth of the prison population in late modernity. Providing a discourse analysis of one month’s UK media output on prison, it argues that through a discourse of dangerousness delivered to a fearful public, prison is constructed unproblematically as a solution to crime, echoing the ‘what works’ mantra of New Labour. The meaning of prison, it argues, is shifted from a place of pain delivery to one which treats and trains. The article further contends that media discourse of the prisoner precludes any rational debate about alternatives to prison. Media representations of incarceration as an institution full of murderers, rapists and paedophiles precludes a long overdue debate about prison suicides, the erosion of prisoners’ rights and the rising number of women and children incarcerated.

Graffiti media and the perpetuation of an illegal subculture

Abstract: From the early 1970s to the late 1980s graffiti murals graced the outsides of New York city subways. This controversial form of name-based painting began as simple ‘tags’ or signatures done with magic marker and quickly evolved into complex aerosol murals, which writers called masterpieces, or ‘pieces’ for short. A writer’s reputation was based on the frequency and the style of ‘getting up,’ which in turn produced subcultural fame.1 While this movement drew the interest of teenagers, gallery owners, journalists, filmmakers, photographers and artists, it drew the ire of politicians.2 New York city mayors declared two separate wars on graffiti-writing urban teens, insisting that such writing constituted harmful vandalism (Austin, 2001), and New York politicians utilized the ‘broken windows’ model to argue that graffiti, not poverty, created an environment for subway crime.3 By the late 1980s painting on New York subways had nearly ceased, but the movement had made a significant mark on kids all over the world. In 1989 the New York city train era officially came to a close. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) refused to put painted trains into service, and so the subways could no longer be used as a medium of communication. Soon thereafter writers stopped painting exclusively on trains because they no longer produced fame. Although writers quickly began to paint on walls all over the city, there were no longer central locations, like the so-called Writers Bench at 149th Street, where writers could view graffiti. The movement, though, found a new medium for producing fame: photographs. Photographs made ephemeral graffiti pieces permanent, allowing writers to view the work of others without attachment to a specific place or time. The inclusion of these ‘flicks’ in magazines created a space where graffiti pieces from all over the world could come together to be judged, critiqued, and offered as instruction.4 The transition from moving underground trains to city walls, and then to the world, by way of photographs and magazines is a significant development which has received scant attention. Many observers, and even some practitioners of the graffiti culture, trace a slow decline from its early heyday. Yet the end of the train era also freed writers from underground tunnels, and turned them into graffiti experts known in cities around the world.

Exposing Enron: Media representations of ritualized deviance in corporate culture

Abstract: This article argues that rituals are an important part of corporate culture. However, they can involve deviance. Employing multiple media sources, this study identifies symbolic themes expressed through daily work rituals at Enron's corporate headquarters. The themes involve risk, gratification, pride, and fantasy imagery. Utilizing structural ritualization theory, this article suggests that ritualized symbolic practices expressing these themes extensively influenced Enron employees. They shaped their cognitions, patterns of behavior, and social interaction. They also led to the normalization and reproduction of deviance. The findings of this study contribute to research on organizational deviance and structural ritualization.

There’s no glamour in glue: News and the symbolic framing of substance misuse

Abstract: The symbolism of substance misuse is a familiar theme. However, relatively little attention has been paid specifically to the nature of the symbolic frameworks through which substance misuse is represented and even less attention to the part played by the news media in the reproduction of these symbolic frameworks. This article takes volatile substance abuse (VSA) and ecstasy as examples through which to explore the ways in which news production processes, together with the symbolic and inferential frameworks employed by journalists, intersect with structures of disadvantage, to reproduce particular news discourses or ways of understanding substance misuse. It suggests that VSA receives very little attention in the United Kingdom national press in comparison to ‘spectacular’, or ‘glamorous’ drugs such as ecstasy, despite the evidence available that VSA represents a problem of, at least, equivalent magnitude, if recorded associated annual deaths are taken as the measures of ‘seriousness’. It is suggested t...

Smart on crime: The new language for prisoner release

Abstract: This exploratory study of news media reports examines language of incarceration shifts from ‘tough on crime’ to ‘smart on crime’ as a feature of broader, contextual meanings about: (1) the costs and benefits of prison and incarceration; (2) the moral meanings and ‘practical reasoning’ associated with imprisonment; (3) the language of deviance and respectability. This work is linked to two long-term projects. One is the ‘discourse of fear’, the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. The other is ‘the language of justice’, or a discourse analysis of justice speech and the construction of social control. Our aim in this project is to explore the changing discourse of incarceration. News reports were selected and analyzed using ethnographic content analysis and ‘tracking discourse’, or following certain issues, words, themes, and frames over a period of time, across different issues, and across different news media. We find tha...

Socially Disorganized Rural Communities

Abstract: Across the globe, rural communities and small towns are undergoing fundamental, and at times rapid, change. Within some rural areas of the USA, the decline of the family farm and the housing development of the countryside race along. In addition, the Wal-Marting of rural America and the demise of locally owned and operated businesses alter the smalltown landscape. Once-quaint hamlets are becoming vastly different places to those of only a generation ago. Living where I do and as a rural dweller, I likewise am not immune. I often am confronted with these changes of structure and how they affect my life, my family, and our anxiety about what may come. Over the past year and a half, I have set out to document these events within some areas of central Appalachia by paying visual attention to the downturn in farms and farming; to the disappearance of independent businesses; to local governments’ diffi culty in providing infrastructural resources to a growing rural population; to the aggressive invasion of big-box retail stores; to the decaying, abandoned, and forgotten symbols of community now awash in change; to the decline in civic community within rural villages and small towns; and to local social disorganization (Quinney, 1991, 2001; Tolbert, 2005). Family farming in the USA has been on the decline for decades, with farmers’ numbers dropping by 16 million since 1950 (Deavers and Hoppe, 1992). Farms likewise have decreased by over 4 million during the past century (USDA, 2005). Similar developments have occurred in central Appalachia. In Kentucky alone, the number of farms has decreased 67 per cent across the past century (USDA, 2005). Tobacco farming has been a major income crop in Kentucky, but with the abolition of federal subsidies, tobacco farming and market prices remain unpredictable. The 2005 Burley tobacco crop, for example, dropped 30 per cent from the 2004 levels – the lowest productivity since 1937 (National Public Radio, 2005). Meanwhile, rural land prices dramatically increase. With globalization an economic reality and land and labor costs cheaper elsewhere, family farmers inhabit a weak competitive location. Rural communities within an hour’s drive or so of large cities are experiencing postagrarian development. During the past decade, the population of rural dwellers increased by more than 3 million, primarily from young suburban and ex-urban professionals

Hybrid History and the retrial of the painful past

Abstract: If ‘the primary impetus’ of reality television is to entertain (Holmes and Jermyn, 2004: 2), what ethical implications flow from its inherently hybrid aesthetics? This article addresses this question by examining the 2002 televised ‘retrial’ of Louis Riel, a man executed by the Canadian government in 1885. The retrial's producers encouraged viewers to vote (through a website) on the merits of Riel's conviction ‘according to the laws of Canada today’. As an aesthetic form that diverted and informed the audience, the programme was a test of ‘post-documentary's’ ethical dimensions. In this case it was not hybridity of form and intent that undermined the programme's potential to effect corrective justice; rather the deliberate insertion of false information about the death penalty's application misrepresented the criminal justice past and present.

‘We might be locked up, but we’re not thick’: Rex Bloomstein’s Kids Behind Bars

Abstract: Kids Behind Bars (2005) is the latest documentary by Rex Bloomstein, who has been making prison films for over 30 years. This article argues that media representation of prisons plays a role in sha...

Car stereos, culture and criminalization

Abstract: ‘Boom boys’, ‘audio thugs’, and ‘sonic terrorists’ are some of the pejorative terms used to describe those who modify their car stereo systems to produce music at high volume. For those within the car stereo culture, it is a hobby and a passion, with some spending thousands of dollars to create a system that may win them acclaim in the competition circuit or at least the rush of ‘outlaw’ sound pressure levels.1 However, there is a growing grassroots movement across the United States as well as other countries to quell the ‘noise’, with accusations that the musical assault constitutes an ‘acoustical rape’.2 Loud car stereos are one of the most common sources of noise complaints in many US cities (Scott, 2001). Like other issues in criminal justice, determining the extent of the problem is difficult when researchers rely on official reports. According to Berglund et al. (1995), only 5 to 10 per cent of the people bothered by noise violations file an official complaint. However, numerous websites claim to have complaints from around the country. According to the action group Citizens Against Audio Trespass (CAAT), the majority of complaints come from California and Florida. CAAT has also begun a petition to urge Congress to pass tougher laws targeting not only the motorists, but those who manufacture and distribute amplifiers and subwoofers (see http://www.ipetitions.com/ campaigns/No_Booms/). This Research Note – which, although largely quantitative, attempts to apply some of the concepts used by cultural criminologists – examines official police responses to 678 car stereo noise violations in the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, over a three-year period, 1998–2000 (see also Crawford, 2000).

How to explain a suicide

Abstract: This polemic explores a newspaper article about youth justice. It suggests that a dominant discourse holds a powerful hegemony over large parts of the British media through which young people generally, and those in trouble with the law, in particular, are demonized. When events take place which threaten to disrupt that discourse, strenuous journalistic efforts have to be made to counteract that disruption and to reaffirm established understandings, however flawed those understandings might be. This article anatomizes that process in operation and in relation to a particular event - the suicide, in 2004, of Adam Rickwood, the youngest child ever to take his own life while in the care and custody of the modern British penal system.

Wheel of torture: A play in one act

Abstract: Picture the set of the popular American TV show, Wheel of Fortune. Imagine a Vanna White substitute named Veri White, sleek, blonde and fair. – A large wheel is displayed, standing vertically, with numbers representing prison sentences and symbols that represent other sanctions, from probation to house arrest and even corporal punishment. (The death penalty is available on another show, Wheel of Death). The wheel, bright red, has black leather arm and leg straps. Fastened to the wheel is a contestant, whose fate will be decided by the studio audience. – Veri steps forward and says, with growing emphasis, ‘Welcome to WHEEL – OF – TORTURE’ – APPLAUSE, UPBEAT MUSIC – The announcer, Bob Jones, clean-cut and nondescript, ordinary and comfortingly familiar, strides to the center of the stage in a sensible if unremarkable suit. – ‘Here’s our First Contestant’, says Bob. All eyes are on Veri and the contestant. That’s the way the producers want it. – Victima de Concepcion, strapped in tight, is a single mom, Black and Hispanic, in her mid-thirties. She looks older. – ‘People probably call her Vicky’, says Bob, ‘when they call her by name’. Bob talks as if anonymity or undue familiarity were normal for the likes of Victima.

Borders Breached, Conventional Claims Questioned

Abstract: Welcome to Volume 2 of Crime Media Culture: An International Journal. At a time when many of our geographical and cultural borders are ever more closely guarded, it seems apt to reflect on the intellectual and artistic borders breached and intersected across the pages of CMC. As the scholarship appearing in CMC suggests, these borders – most notably, but not exclusively, between criminology, media studies, and cultural studies – are often porous, and at times fully permeable. Indeed, this journal could scarcely exist otherwise. The diverse contributions to Volume 1 of CMC, we feel, clearly illustrated the high quality of academic research, intellectual debate, political commentary and artistic engagement that can result from a truly cross-disciplinary interrogation of crime, media and culture. We are pleased to report, then, that the eclectic, cross-cutting intellectual revolution we spoke of in our first editorial appears to be well under way. Despite this, though, we would suggest that meaningful and sustained analysis between and across disciplines remains an important and pressing challenge. Even the most cursory glance at publishing catalogues and university prospectuses reveals that mediaand culturally-oriented criminology is a rapidly expanding area. Yet how many criminologists possess the methodological and conceptual tools to adequately deconstruct a crime film? How many have the journalistic or literary training to untangle the complexities of popular crime writing? At the same time, while scholars working within the realms of media and cultural studies routinely speak of issues of crime, deviance and control, how many can claim the socio-political and historical understanding of crime and penality so central to the work of many criminologists? Answers to these questions suggest that while there is clearly a burgeoning body of work exploring the interrelations between crime, media, and culture, we have only begun the conversation; there is still much to be gained from a critical and reflexive dialogue between people working at this crucial nexus. Continuing to stimulate and nourish such a dialogue remains one of CMC’s key aims. Recently, one of us attended the launch of a book which collects contributions under the heading Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University

Book Review: Masculinities and Violence in Youth Cultures

Abstract: This wide-ranging and consistently readable book investigates the links between masculinities and violence in youth cultures in Russia, Finland, Mexico, Britain and Sweden. The authors take into account the specificity of different cultures as well as the specific structures, ideologies and discourses of the subcultures they investigate. The book also refers to interrelated gender issues, such as the position of girls within subcultures and the links between subcultures and the parent culture or the class system. The chapters are mostly based on qualitative research, which is related to the socio-economic context and gender studies. The chapter on Russian gangs is placed at the intersection of sociological and gender studies. It gives a brief description of the socio-economic changes in recent years in Russia and establishes the differences between the gangs’ subculture in Russia and that in the USA. Through the findings of their research and brief allusions to Foucault, Alexander Salagaev and Alexander Shashkin shed light on the structures of reproducing a collective hegemonic masculinity within the gangs’ subculture, explaining the exclusion of girls. The next chapter deals with the ‘milieu’ in Finland, calling attention to its loose organization and the position of girls at its margins. The research is based on information accumulated in connection with an anti-racist project. Although girls participate in it, they seem to be generally marked off or considered to be false subculturalists. Sini Perho gives a thorough account of the ways in which participants in the milieu define and therefore construct ‘ordinariness’ and the value they ascribe to it. The milieu’s acceptance of skinheads and some rockers, and its intolerance of hippies and punks are also noted. Youra Petrova covers a wide range of subcultures in France, focusing on the socioeconomic heterogeneity among them. The chapter briefly investigates the phenomenon of female delinquent groups who aspire to the masculine values of power, speed, prestige and toughness; yet they mostly shoplift and forge cheques. The chapter expands on the ideological differences among youth subcultures, focusing more on alternative punks and extreme right-wing skinheads. Autonomous punks call for democratic changes, while

Book Review: Surviving Russian Prisons: Punishment, Economy and Politics in Transition

Abstract: Approaching this review of Surviving Russian Prisons by Laura Piacentini feels a bit like jumping on a large and densely packed bandwagon. To heap further praise on a book that has already won the 2004 British Society of Criminology book prize risks allegations of unoriginality, not to mention tardiness. For the latter I apologize, but, as for the former, it gives me nothing but pleasure to join the throngs expressing admiration for this remarkable book. There are three aspects of Piacentini’s study that struck me as being of particular interest and importance. The first concerns the author’s personal journey from being a student with a love of Russian literature to entering some of the toughest penal environments in the world, via a crash course in Russian and many colourful encounters with prison officers, governors and other gatekeepers along the way. Her anecdotes about sharing vodka and singing traditional songs with prison officers, and being required to recite Russian poetry in front of a roomful of senior prison personnel before being granted an interview with the governor, are just two of the ‘strange behaviours’ (p. 19) she encountered which only served to strengthen her resolve to peel back the layers of bureaucratic obstinacy and reveal the humanity to be found within Russian penal colonies. In discovering the extent to which prison labour is ingrained in the Russian psyche, she reveals much about the extent to which Russian prisons and their occupants have ingrained themselves in her own psyche. Even the photographs adorning the book’s cover are her own and reveal crumbling buildings, rusted trains and a stark uniformity of everything, including the prison inmates (in this case, poignantly young-looking women who were held at Ryazan where the pilot research was conducted). That said, I still struggled to make the connection between ‘a personal interest in Russian literature’ and the full-blown study of post-Soviet penal colonies that this turned into (a lesser person would surely have opted for a weekend break in Moscow or St Petersburg and a subscription to the complete works of Solzhenitsyn). In this case, then, a little more autobiographical detail would have been justified.

Book Review: Football Hooliganism

Abstract: This is a very useful book. While not without some serious weaknesses, it offers the best available introduction to the complex subject of football ‘hooliganism’, shedding valuable light on a variety of key issues and analysing and synthesizing a huge range of existing positions, including those of the authors. Its explicit aim is to provide ‘the only academic text on football hooliganism aimed particularly at the student market’ and to ‘present a clear, unbiased but critical review of the literature on football violence in Europe’ (p. 8). The book goes a considerable – though not complete – way to achieving these ambitious goals. Various chapters set football ‘hooliganism’ in a historic context, detailing the nature and extent of the ‘problem’ in Britain and Europe. They include chapters on fan profi les, outlining competing theoretical perspectives, examining the roles of the media, alcohol and racism in football violence and exploring how to reduce ‘hooliganism’. Chapters vary in quality and depth. The exploration of the nature and extent of ‘hooliganism’ is particularly good. It suggests that levels of disturbance at football matches were never much of a problem even in the 1970s, with crime levels ‘marginally higher’ than they would be if no games took place (p. 33). Available statistics suggest the number of arrests in later decades were similarly tiny, amounting to 1 in 5000 of those attending matches (p. 39). In citing the previous work of Marsh, it is noted that