Crime Culture

There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation "story" than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them. The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity¿from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press. The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.

Dina Siegel and Hans Nelen The term ‘global organized crime’ has been in use in criminology since the mid 1990s. Even more general and abstract than its daughter-terms (transnational or cross-border organized crime), ‘global organized crime’ seems to embrace the activities of criminal groups and networks all around the planet, leaving no geographical space untouched. The term appears to cover the geographical as well as the historical domain: ‘global’ has taken on the meaning of ‘forever and ever’. Global organized crime is also associatively linked with ‘globalisation’. The social construction of both terms in scientific discourse is in itself an interesting theme. But perhaps even more interesting, especially for academics trying to conduct empirical research in this area, is the analysis of the symbolic and practical meaning of these concepts. How should criminologists study globalisation in general and global organized crime in particular? Which instruments and ‘theoretical luggage’ do they have in order to conduct this kind of research? The aim of this book is not to formulate simple, straightforward answers to these questions, but rather to give an overview of contemporary criminological research combining international, national and local dimensions of specific organized crime pr- lems. The term global organized crime will hardly be used in this respect. In other social sciences, such as anthropology, there is a tendency to get rid of vague and abstract terms which can only serve to confuse our understanding. In our opinion, criminology should follow this initiative.

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

What do Canadian films say about crime and justice in Canada? What purpose to Canadian crime films serve politically and culturally? Screening Justice is a scholarly exploration of films that focus on crime and justice in Canada. Crime films are pivotal for understanding and shaping Canadian sensibilities by setting out widely available templates for thinking about crime and justice in Canadian society. Spanning disciplines and examining films from across Canada, Screening Justice is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology’s call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture and society.

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American 'hard-boiled' crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Culture breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and 'true crime', crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of 'senseless' murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.

Working broadly from the perspective of cultural criminology, Crime, Media and Culture engages with theories and debates about the nature of media-audience relations, examines representations of crime and justice in news media and fiction, and considers the growing significance of digital technologies and social media. The book discusses the multiple effects media representations of crime have on audiences but also the ways media portrayals of crime and disorder influence government policy and lawmaking. It also considers the processes by which certain stories are selected for their newsworthiness. Also examined are the theoretical, conceptual and methodological underpinnings of cultural criminology and its subfields of visual criminology and narrative criminology. Drawing on case studies and empirical examples from the increasingly blurred worlds of reality and entertainment, the dynamics of crime, media and culture are illuminated across a range of chapters covering topics that include: moral panics/folk devils and trial by media; fear of crime; cop shows and courtroom dramas; female criminality and child-on-child killing; serial killers; surveillance, new media and policing; organized crime and state crime. Crime, Media and Culture will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in criminology and media studies. The book will also prove useful for lecturers and academic researchers wishing to explore the intersections of crime, media and cultural inquiry.

Exploring the relationship between crime, law and popular culture in Europe from the 16th century onwards, this title looks at how crime was understood and dealt with by ordinary people, as well as looking at to what degree official law and the criminal justice system was rejected as a means of dealing with criminal activity.