Crime,Media,Culture: An International Journal

This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people performing acts of crime and deviance in order to record them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of mediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour.

This article offers a critical appraisal of the widespread argument that violent media content is to blame for deadly school violence. The departing premise of this study is that, because of its reliance on sophisticated technologies, popular culture productions represent manufactured risks. The implications of this approach are three: the ‘impact’ of popular culture will depend on the social risk positions students occupy within the social mapping of the school; there will be risks associated to the observational shortcomings of popular culture as a self-referent system; and the risks implied in controlling deviance in schools, including policies destined to cope with popular culture’s presumed adverse effect on students’ behaviors, must be explored. The risk approach allows us to understand school shooting events as the end result of a series of interrelated social, cultural, and political processes. The point at which these factors intersect tends to produce the conditions under which school shooters may emerge.

This paper focuses on the interaction between a rapidly changing media and the policy responses of UK governments, faced with terrorist violence which has evolved in form and intent. New Labour’s final term in office was dominated by the tension between the competing claims of liberty and security, expressed in Tony Blair’s declaration after the 7/7 attacks, ‘Let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.’ We argue that insofar as crime, justice and civil rights are governed by a normative set of rules, they were subverted by New Labour in the mid-1990s for party political reasons. Thus, after 9/11, they needed little reshaping to meet the challenge of 21st-century terrorism. Our thesis is based partly on primary interviews and partly on analyses of media coverage, parliamentary debates and government responses in the form of press releases and speeches. The purpose of the interviews – with ‘insider’ figures from the world of politics, the police and civil society – was to triangulate the known policy responses to 9/11 with the views and perceptions of these figures to assess whether some of the assumptions about the impact of that event on the UK need to be rethought.

This article draws together two distinct strands within contemporary criminological scholarship by focusing on the encounter between the criminal law and the uncommissioned word or image in public space. The first strand of criminological research involves the study of the processes through which aspects of everyday life have become criminalised; the second is that which has investigated the cultural practices known as graffiti and street art, often approached as manifestations of subcultures, as the products of new social movements, and as ambiguous images straddling the art/crime dichotomy. The article examines the response of law to uncommissioned images and words in public space, and investigates the law’s judgment of illicit art and writing. Based upon research done as part of a three-year study of street art and graffiti in a range of jurisdictions, the article draws upon theories of affect to think through the ways in which the illicit writer or artist is constructed.

For over a decade the media have been reporting in alarmist tones that ‘crystal meth is coming’ to the UK. Using clichéd discourse (‘crazed’, ‘epidemic’, ‘horror’, etc.) and visual images of deformed and disfigured faces, the meanings attached to the drug are clear: crystal meth creates dangerous ‘others’. Yet an identifiable crystal meth problem has hitherto failed to materialise, and press reporting of the issue appears to constitute an exemplary case of what Stuart Hall has described as a double movement within ideological discourse: a movement towards propaganda and a movement towards myth. This article examines how the threat of ‘ice’, as it is commonly known, has been symbolically, aesthetically and textually constructed in the British media, and how this representation has created its own hyper-reality, influencing political debate, drug policy and public reaction. The analysis places particular emphasis on the importance of visual images as a sensory expression of cultural meaning, an aspect of media representation that has too often been theoretically and pragmatically neglected within mainstream criminology.

In 1993, a new trend of memoirs began to emerge in the United States, exploring contemporary street gang life in the ghettos and barrios. The first memoirs in this cycle form the subject of this paper: Sanyika Shakur’s Monster and Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running. There have been polarised debates about such texts which have been variously demonised as violent and sensationalist or, by contrast, praised as offering a pedagogic and preventative anti-gang stance. Such contradictory responses are reflected in the memoirs themselves, emphasising the frisson of violent gang exploits and the sober, salutary reflection of politicised and educated hindsight. The memoirs developed an extensive life in the media, becoming a site for channeling charged discussions about youth, crime, race, and violence, opening up a series of discourses about black/Mexican masculinity, censorship, celebrity, and cultural commerce. This paper seeks to understand how these popular narratives, with their charged themes and topical content, came to be interpreted by commentators.

The documentary film Scrappers, co-directed by Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak, and Courtney Prokopas, is a vérité portrait of Oscar and Otis, two metal scavengers who “search for a living with brains, brawn and battered pickup trucks.” The film encompasses several emerging themes bearing on contemporary crime, media, and culture, including the growing popularity of an American post-industrial aesthetic, the blurring distinction between film—particularly documentary—and social science, and the recent trend of metal theft, which has risen as one of the most prevalent property crimes in the first decade of the 21st century. This interview with the co-directors elaborates on these themes.