Vol. 14 No. 7 (July 2004), pp.513-516

CRIMINAL VISIONS: MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIME AND JUSTICE, by Paul Mason (ed.).  Cullompton, Devon and Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2003.  310 pp.  Cloth.  £40.00 / US $59.95. ISBN 1-84392-014-X.  Paper.  £18.99 / US $29.95. ISBN: 1-84392-013-1.

Reviewed by David Fraser, School of Law, University of Nottingham. Email: David.Fraser@nottingham.ac.uk

The process of commissioning papers, encouraging contributors to meet deadlines, and editing the final versions of collected essays is surpassed in difficulty only by the task imposed upon the reviewer. The reviewer must attempt to be aware both of the editor’s vision and of the various authors’ contributions while at the same time avoiding a mere serial summary of the chapters. The task is rendered even more difficult when one is faced with a collection such as the one under review. Paul Mason has brought together a disparate number of themes under the broad heading of the subtitle of this work “media representations of crime and justice.” More accurately, one might argue that the adjective “criminal” might have also been included in the subtitle since almost without exception the essays here deal with representations of criminal justice. Indeed, even the idea of the “criminal”—of criminal justice, of criminality and of criminalization—is broadly construed in the various essays which make up this fascinating collection.

The editor in his own introduction argues that the notion of “criminal visions” carries with it a two-fold purpose (pp.1-9). First, the title is meant to suggest and underline the visual element of media representations of crime, criminals and criminality. We are consumers and producers of images and meanings which construct, replicate and deconstruct crime in modern society. Second, a theme identified by Mason is the idea that the work is visionary—i.e. that it perhaps sets out the future for scholarly examinations of the broad themes developed by each of the authors and their representations of a field of sociological, criminological and legal study.

The focus identified by the editor and adopted by most of the contributors, thus, is broadly postmodern. Meanings are constructed, deconstructed, circulated, consumed, transformed as images are produced and reproduced. Media presentations of crime play a vital role in the social construction of our understandings of crime and criminals. From tabloid newspaper coverage, to reality TV shows, to lawyers in film, to closed circuit TV images and beyond, fact and fiction, reality and the imaginary, work in complex matrices to create and re-create our understanding and knowledge of crime. Indeed, fact and fiction, reality and myth become problematic and problematized categories as they play off each other in complex ways. Each contribution to the collection in some way creates a text raising issues about the points of contact between “fact” and “fiction,” and indeed about the epistemological and, to a lesser [*514] extent, the ideological bases of the categories themselves.

Julian Petley offers an intriguing examination of the ways in which “real” legal regimes interact with fictionalized visions of criminality and violence in his study of British film classification and censorship practice (pp.33-50).  Deborah Jermyn examines the British Broadcasting Corporation’s popular program Crimewatch (pp.175-190). She offers a careful study of the ways in which such programs like America’s Most Wanted, that seek public assistance in apprehending criminals, are grounded in deliberate visual reproductions of domestic bliss and tragedy, the victim and the victim’s family, and opposing images of criminals taken from mug shots, photofits, computerized reproductions and grainy CCTV footage. Here fact and fiction, real life images and constructions of innocence and guilt, through the array of photographic and televisual reproductions selected and managed in the name of law enforcement and a search for the real criminals, are deployed in ways which create their desired results. Similarly, Martin James offers an intriguing review of how the media select particular crimes and victims and set them up as what he calls “signal crimes”—i.e., seemingly ordinary crimes which are made to carry a whole host of broader meanings about the loss of social innocence, about moral panics concerning ever present criminality among us, about the breakdown of law and order, and so on. In many cases, of course, chance, holes in the program schedule, and the need to fill space and time in a 24-hour news cycle with round-the-clock coverage may serve as mundane explanations for what James might see as a complex criminological phenomenon. (pp.51-69). Policing and media portrayals thereof feature in Rob C. Moody’s contribution to the collection (pp.214-237). Yet many of these contributions ignore two key elements in the process of media-driven criminalization—the quotidian sociology of media professions and the complex social contexts in which we, the public, consume and interpret these images.

One of the major strengths of the book, and the one which does fulfill the editor’s wish that it offer a vision for the future of critical criminological and media studies scholarship, is its focus on the media of the United Kingdom. More precisely, most of the chapters deal with English media reports and phenomena related to law enforcement and crime in that country. This is, for many of us perhaps, a breath of fresh air in a field which has been dominated by scholarship by and for Americans. It serves as a useful introduction to the complex, theoretically sophisticated work which is happening elsewhere. At the same time, this collection might also serve to begin an engagement with the idea that media representations of crime in the age of satellite TV and instantaneous coverage of events carry complex messages, which are at the same time homogenizing and potentially liberating in their impacts in different national and international contexts.

American scholars will probably be intrigued by the contribution from Daniel Stepniak (pp.254-277), detailing and critiquing the legal regime under which television cameras are banned from British courtrooms. Michael McCahill has also produced a fascinating contribution to the broader literature in his chapter on how two [*515] forms of media construction of crime, CCTV images and reports in the media about CCTV coverage and crime, come together in what might be the apotheosis of media visions of criminality. “Fact” and mediated “fact” create a new, different and unreal reality of visions of criminality and crime (pp.192-213).

All readers will want to examine the two specifically non-English contributions to the volume, both of which deal with radically different, yet interconnected, questions of media representations of crime in Northern Ireland. Chris Greer (pp.90-115) details the ways in which the peculiarities of the press market, including the political orientation of a particular newspaper in a small jurisdiction like the six counties, can determine the production of differing approaches to the reporting of sex crimes there. Mark Hayes offers a careful examination of the ways in which the British press criminalized the Republican movement and deliberately distorted political discourse into the tabloid symbolism of murderous, terrorist madmen. In light of post-9/11 media representations of “the war on terror” where “crime” has been replaced by “war” as the dominant signifier, such an historical review must be of interest and concern to many readers (pp.133-155).

More purely fictionalized accounts of crime, criminals and the criminal justice system are also analyzed for the ways in which they shape, produce and reflect socially constructed categories. George S. Larke examines the familiar theme of popular entertainment’s obsession with and mythologizing of the Mafia (pp.116-132). Serial killers and our apparent obsession with fetishized multiple killings features in Jim Conrich’s unsettling account (pp.156-171).  Paul Mason offers us a study of the equally familiar prison movie genre (pp.278-297).

Jonathan Roper produces an absorbing analysis of the heist movie genre, with a focus on director Michael Mann (pp.73-89). Two of the leading UK scholars on law and popular culture, Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn, give us their reading of the ideological function of the ways in which lawyers are represented in movies (pp.238-253). For Roper, Mann’s films portray and deploy ambiguous moral and social messages about the criminals who are their central characters. Cops and robbers, in other words, cannot but co-exist. They are two sides of the same dubious and complex social codes that surround law-violating behavior, and it is often difficult to decide who is who. For Greenfield and Osborn, on the other hand, film lawyers, whatever their personal foibles and flaws, always seem to win in the end. But their victory transcends the personal, for when they win, justice triumphs. Thus, these two contributions to the book take different approaches to fictionalized accounts of crime and the criminal justice system and make two different points.  For Roper, law, crime, criminals all remain open categories with moral and ethical doubt the only certainties; while Greenfield and Osborn find there is no doubt in the message conveyed by the films they study—i.e., justice, or one particular Hollywood, Americanized vision of justice, will triumph.

This apparent conflict in readings of mediated visions of crime and criminal justice is at once the strength and [*516] weakness of the volume under review. If we avoid strictly determinist views of the role of media in constructing our images of crime and then of shaping our “reality” of crime, and instead adopt the editor’s and contributors’ more complex visions of social practices, of resistance to and acceptance of dominant messages, then we must accept a multiplicity of possible meanings. Criminals can be good and bad, particular visions of justice will be replicated in Hollywood films, while at the same time we might come to admire Hollywood’s construction of Mafiosi family values. True crime television will construct criminals and juxtapose images of innocent victims, and at the same time we, as citizens, differentiate between and among crimes and criminals. We can admire some types of criminal behavior and condemn others. We can be led by tabloid headlines into moral panics, but not every time, although a major contribution from Robert Reiner, Sonia Livingstone and Jessica Allen (pp.13-32) does offer ample empirical and sociological evidence about the ways in which newspaper coverage of crime can determine the politics of law and order.

In other words, at some level we are all postmodernists now. Crime is complex; media images work in the world in complicated, inter-connected and fascinating ways. We can be at once compelled by serial killers and revolted by their actions. We can celebrate, as we do at Nottingham, the triumph of the criminal Robin Hood over the evil embodiment of law and order, the Sheriff, and we are proud of this victory by a thief. This is, I believe, the point at which this collection disappoints, but only slightly. The complex, multi-layered readings of media representations, of truth and fiction each deconstructed, which are at the heart of many of the contributions to the volume, could perhaps have benefited from more detailed analysis of the viewer/citizen and her/his role in the criminalization process broadly understood in our modern democracy. Most of the authors recognize that we are not merely Adornoesque passive receivers of media manipulations, but they stop there. Perhaps this is a future vision for engaged scholars, to examine our understandings and practices as citizens concerned with law, order and democracy in a mass media world. The present volume has turned on the TV; it is for us to choose the channel.

*****************************************************

Copyright 2004 by the author, David Fraser.