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145
Chapter 11
New Media, Crime, and Justice in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter Objectives
Chapter 11 provides:
1. a summary of what the reader has learned about crime, justice and the media
2. an overview of the relationship between media and crime and justice
3. two postulates that encapsulate the media crime-and-justice relationship
4. a description and discussion of two alternative scenarios of the future of the
media’s role between the public and the criminal justice system
5. a discussion of the likely impact of new media on crime and justice
Chapter Outline
I. Crime-and-Justice Media Messages
a. By the late nineteenth century, early print-based media contained the same
criminal stereotypes and causal explanations of crime found in today’s
media.
i. Narratives of individually focused crime and retributive justice
have been common story lines for more than a hundred years
b. As a basic rule of thumb, news, entertainment, and infotainment media
take the least common crime or justice event and make it the most
common crime or justice image
i. Crime constitutes a constant, significant portion of the total media
content
ii. criminals are normally constructed as either predatory street
criminals or dishonest businesspeople and professionals
iii. the criminal justice system is shown as ineffective
1. In this media-made reality, traditional criminal justice
system personnel and standard practices suffer, but
alternatives to the criminal justice system fare even worse
c. The media emphasize individual personality traits as the cause of crime
and violent interdiction as its solution
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i. Preference for crimes involving weapons and solutions involving
violence and sophisticated technology
d. Media present criminality as an individual choice and imply that other
social, economic, or structural explanations are irrelevant
e. The “crime fighter” and “war-on-crime” icons suggest to the public that
crime must be fought rather than solve or prevented
f. The solutions to crime suggested by the media involved expansion of the
existing criminal justice system through harsher punishments and more
law enforcement
g. Media portraits further instruct the public to fear others, for the criminal is
not easily recognizable and is often found among the rich, powerful, and
seemingly trustworthy
h. Media images tilt public perceptions toward law enforcement and crime
control policies
i. The dominant crime-and-justice portrait shows people outside of the
criminal justice system and unburdened by due process considerations to
be the most effective crime fighters
i. At the same time, media bolster the existing criminal justice
system as being the best policy course
ii. This media-constructed, ineffective, last resort criminal justice
system sits within a portrait of a stark social ecology filled with
predatory criminals, violent crime fighters, and helpless victims.
j. The media’s influence on criminality, independent of its effect on criminal
justice, has not been adequately explored, and the specter of media-
oriented terrorism is an issue of immediate concern
i. They available evidence suggests that the media do affect crime
rates and motivate terrorists
ii. Aggregate crime rate studies further suggest that the media affect
crime independently of their violent content and more by molding
crime than by triggering it
iii. The media likely have a copycat effect more on property crime
than on violent crime
1. The more heavily the potential copycat criminal relies on
the media for information about the world and the more
predisposed the individual is to commit crime, the more
likely a copycat effect is
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iv. Violence-prone children and individuals who have difficulty
distinguishing fact from fantasy are particularly at risk for aping
media violence
v. When sexual and violent content are yoked, hypermasculine males
are most influenced
vi. People seeking notoriety imitate crimes
k. Media Anticrime Efforts
i. On the other side of the media social construction equation are
media-based anticrime efforts
1. These efforts appear to be an effective means of
disseminating information and influencing attitudes, but
their ability to significantly affect behavior has not been
established
ii. By constructing crime-and-justice reality, the media also subtly but
significantly affect crime-and-justice policies
1. To varying degrees, media influences:
a. the agenda
b. perceptions
c. policies of the consumer
2. These media effects interact with other factors
a. Perceptions of crime and justice
b. Other, broader perceptions of social conditions
iii. The conflicting arguments of the media as a primary cause versus a
negligible cause of crime, aggression, terrorism, and other
unwanted behaviors not only posit differing causal relations
between the media and behavior but imply vastly different public
policies as well (see Figure 11.1)
1. Primary cause models: argue that a significant, direct linear
relationship exists between media content and consumer
behavior
a. In these models, the media, independent of other
factors, directly cause undesired social behaviors
b. If valid, these models indicate that strong
intervention is necessary in the creation, content,
and distribution of media
2. Negligible cause models: concede a statistical association
between the media and some negative behaviors, but argue
that the connection is due not to a causal relationship but to
persons predisposed to certain behaviors seeking out
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particular types of media and concurrently behaving in
ways similar to the behavior displayed in the media
a. As the relationship is associative and not causal, if
these models are correct, policies targeted at the
media will have no effect on social behavior and the
media can be safely ignored
iv. Neither the above-mentioned models is felt to accurately describe
the media-social behavior relationship
1. The actual relationship is believed to be bidirectional and
cyclical (see Figure 11.2)
2. In addition to people acting out their predispositions while
seeking out supportive media and to media causing
behavior to be modeled, the media play a role in the
generation of people predisposed to crime
a. Real-world crime sometimes results in the creation
of criminogenic media
b. Providing live models and creating community and
home environments that are more inured to and
tolerant of crime results in more criminally
predisposed individuals in society
3. New media broaden access to this criminogenic media
content
a. Although the direct effect of media content on
social behavior may not be large, its influence
loops, recycles, and accumulates
l. Two Postulates of Media and Crime and Justice
i. Overall, the media are constant, subtle, and unpredictable crime-
and-justice agents – beneficial if carefully used – but they are
neither the magic cure nor the potent demon they are sometimes
case as
1. Media cannot be ignored but should not be seen as
omnipotent
2. Where do we stand in terms of a broad understanding of the
media and the social construction of a crime-and-justice
reality?
3. Two postulates will drive expectations about future media,
crime, and justice interactions
a. Postulate 1: The media more often than not
construct the criminal justice system and its people
negatively and as ineffective. Yet the cumulative
effect is support for more police, more prisons, and
more money for the criminal justice system
i. The media-constructed reality argues that
the criminal justice system does not work
well but remains the best hope against crime
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b. Postulate 2: Media organizations have increasingly
blurred the line between news and entertainment,
and between fact and fiction. In the process, crime
stories have become a mainstay of hybrid
infotainment programs and new media content
i. Led by the electronic visual media, the
media have become more able and willing to
portray events and to expose and distribute
new information previously considered
private
ii. Spurred by competition and digitized for
maximum dissemination, media present
these events and information in formats to
maximize audience participation and
revenues
iii. The result is that content that goes into and
comes out of the media is processed through
an infotainment lens
ii. Together these postulate result in the continuing disparity between
the media-constructed reality of crime and justice and the real
world reality of crime and justice
1. This disparity has developed because the media converge
on a single image of crime and justice
2. Commercial, organizational, and cultural forces drive the
media to construct and perpetuate this predatory crime–
centered image
a. Commercial forces
i. As commercial enterprises that must show a
profit, media businesses are not particularly
sensitive about their content’s social effects
and will copy any successful content ideas
from their competitors
ii. The result is media that are both redundant
and boundary pushing
1. The media are redundant in that a
successful type of content will
rapidly spawn imitations and
spinoffs
2. The media are boundary pushing in
that they are constantly trying to lure
new audiences through provocative,
titillating content
b. Organizational forces
i. Although the media have increased their
capability to discover and deliver
information about the world, they have also
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moved toward greater reliance on
prepackaged information, stereotypes, and
entertainment-style content
ii. As a result, the public received an image of
crime and justice that is not only distorted
but that basically supports only one
anticrime policy
1. Enhanced crime control mechanisms
are advanced at the expense of due
process protections and social
policies that do not rely on the
criminal justice system
c. Cultural forces
i. Long-established cultural forces come into
play in the wide-scale social acceptance of
the media-generated predator criminal icon
ii. As a culture, depictions of predatory
criminal both entertain and comfort us
1. They entertain because they frighten
and provide glimpses of realities we
are not likely to encounter
2. They comfort because they relieve
our conscience of personal
responsibility for crime and violence
by constructing crime as not
connected to social inequities,
racism, or poverty – things society
could be held responsible for and
might address
d. Together, the commercial, organizational, and
cultural forces create a constructed reality that is
resistant to alternative broader constructions of
crime and justice
i. The media resist because they cannot
commercially afford to seriously challenge
the popular construction
e. We resist as consumers because we are more
comfortable partaking in a narrower, entertaining,
and guilt-free constructed reality
m. Expanded Public Access to Criminal Justice Procedures
i. Phrases such as “government in the sunshine” and “freedom of
information” reflect responses to a media-driven social trend
toward more open public institutions and enhanced scrutiny of
public officials
1. Two dominant social institutions play critical roles in this
process:
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a. Media
b. Criminal justice system
2. In our hypermedia society, closed institutions and
proceedings and secret information and sources are
automatically viewed with suspicion and challenged
a. Ironically, the criminal justice system and the mass
media are among a handful of social institutions that
resist full, open access and struggle to keep their
realities closed
3. New media has done the following:
a. Revealed previously low-visibility criminal justice
events
b. Presented more graphic news and entertainment
programs
c. Increased the public’s tolerance for surveillance
d. Recorded the judicial steps and interactions between
the police and citizens more often
e. Proliferated media trials
f. Increased the acceptance of media technology and
entertainment formatting in crime and justice
n. Mediated Reality
i. With regard to crime and justice, the critical issue is ultimately the
media’s role in the social construction of reality
1. Evidence is building that the media alter reality by
affecting the ways in which the audience perceives,
interprets, and behaves toward it
2. These effects cycle through the media in loops where
content is extracted from one context or medium, is
reframed, and reused, often resulting in new, ambiguous
media realities
3. Looping effects are observed in both
a. real events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing)
b. created-for-media pseudo-events (e.g., reality
shows)
4. The ultimate effect on crime and justice is unknown
ii. New media are evolving rapidly and the distinctions between
media types are disappearing
1. The availability of video and new media technologies has
expanded the genre of reality programming
a. What effect the common use of new media will
have on the reporting of citizen crime, authority
malfeasance, and other types of crime and justice
events is unclear
2. Pictures invariably increase the newsworthiness of events
and new media thrives on images
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a. Perhaps this means that the public debate will move
from arguments about factual claims to
interpretative ones as there more often will be
images available to establish basic facts
b. If this is the case then fewer will argue about what
crime happened, more will argue about why crime
happens
c. In that way there possibly will be the positive
benefit from moving the criminal justice debate to
discussions about alternate policies and beyond the
current focus on how to best implement a single
policy
iii. The development of interactive media further changes the
relationship between media and users, and has steadily moved the
media experience closer to direct personal experience.
1. It has also changed the way people interact with each other
a. with less direct, face-to-face conversation
b. more face-to-face-like communication via media
technology
2. Individuals are more often physically in one place,
psychologically in another
a. Today people interact less with those physically
near them such as neighbors and more with distant
people via mobile phones, home computers, and
other “being there” technology
iv. The full effects of interactive media will be significant
1. New media will provide new ways of committing old
crimes (such as consumer fraud) and ways to commit new
crimes (such as murdering a virtual person)
2. With increased interaction will come increased demands to
be able to participate
a. If someone is having the experience of “being
there,” it is natural for them to expect to be able to
participate in what they previously only watched
3. Audiences are increasingly encouraged to:
a. contribute to the conversation
b. vote on the verdict
c. determine the next step
d. decide the final outcome
4. Technologies that change the way people carry on personal
relationships
v. An interactive participatory media has led to a hybrid reality in
which a media-generated reality loops and interweaves with
nonmediated reality
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1. Many children today already spend more time in this
media-constructed reality than in their directly experienced
reality
2. Across the United States a web of media-linked technology
and products gives media reality enormous reach and
impact
3. Unfortunately, we cannot have some of the media forces
for social change without having other unwanted forces
a. We cannot use the media for fighting crime and
processing criminal cases or providing media access
to criminal justice proceedings without also
changing the reality of the criminal justice system
4. Mixing and remixing media-constructed and real-world
events harbingers a future where media constructions of
other media constructions will dominate the social
construction of reality process
a. Directly experienced reality will lose its
preeminence to mediated knowledge and experience
b. Crime and justice will be understood and
experienced in a mass media reality mixing bowl
II. The Future of Crime-and-Justice Reality
a. What might the future media crime-and-justice reality look like?
i. There are two possible scenarios for the future:
1. The crime and justice spectacle
2. Surveillance
3. Spectacles are continuously generated in images of crimes
and crime victims, investigations of crimes, searches for
wanted fugitives, media trials, and final punishments.
i
New
media venues and technologies enhance the plausibility of
both of the following scenarios developing.
b. Spectacles
i. In the spectacle scenario, a free-wheeling infotainment media
dominates the culture in a technologically resplendent journalism
driven by an intrusive voyeurism
1. Spectacles are continuously generated in
a. crimes and crime victims
b. investigations of crimes
c. searches for wanted fugitives
d. media trials
e. final punishments
2. In this world, the media push the boundaries of taste and
decency without constraints
3. In such an environment, a host of programs are possible
a. Live executions would be natural and would
include:
i. ‘Last words’
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ii. Following the last meals and hours of life
iii. Behind the scene interviews with
1. The executioner
2. Other participants
3. Family members
iv. The execution itself
b. Programs could include
i. “Death Row Talk Show”
ii. “The Halfway House”
iii. “Hostage”
iv. “Rape Victim”
v. “Drug Dealer”
vi. “Pedophile”
4. Aggressive, proactive news will take off with news
agencies staging their own sting operations aimed at
offenders, politicians, police officers, and citizens
5. Journalists will ride along with police or offenders
6. Policy changes will be fast tracked an enacted without
public debate due to massive media attention
7. For the general public, expectations of privacy will be all
but eliminated
a. Conversations, files, and information obtained by
any means can be used by the media as courts
advance the position that media possession of
information in whatever form and however obtained
is usable under the First Amendment
b. Prior arrests, personal activities, past marriages,
romances, illnesses, and indiscretions great and
small all become open to media scrutiny and public
review
c. Self-Surveillance
i. In the second scenario of surveillance, the commercial media
operates under heavy restrictions, and their ability to cover,
comment on, and portray crime-and-justice issues and cases is
tightly restrained
1. At the same time, media technology is applied to its full
capabilities in crime control efforts
2. No digital data would be considered private or require
search warrants to access
3. Combined, these two trends create a society where the
watchdog function of the media is disabled while the
surveillance and control capabilities of the media and
media technology are maximized
ii. Regarding the elimination of the media’s constitutionally
mandated government watchdog function, criminal cases would be
processed absent media coverage, and verdicts would be
155
announced only after trials are concluded and any sentences
imposed
1. Filming and coverage of police operations, courtroom
proceedings, and correctional facilities would not be
allowed
iii. Concerning the commercial media, all televisions will be equipped
with sensors that identify viewers so that all “inappropriate”
content can be automatically blocked
1. Other recording devices would be blocked from making
copies of all but approved, prepaid materials
2. All print, visual, and audio entertainment media must be
processed, reviewed, and approved by the new Federal
Bureau of Media before marketing
3. Media liability is assumed by the courts for any copying by
consumers of stunts, crimes, and other injury-causing
behaviors contained in the media
iv. Media-based anticrime efforts utilizing mass media and media
technologies would proliferate
1. Information about wanted suspects is continually run
2. All print, visual, and audio media products are required to
carry crime prevention public service announcements,
reenactments of unsolved crimes, and Most Wanted
fugitive descriptions as 25 percent of their advertising
allotment and to give these message prominent times and
placement to promote increased citizen surveillance
3. All streets and public spaces in communities and the
transportation links between them are under the continuous
gaze of a national camera surveillance system
4. Commercial and corporate camera security systems are tied
into the overarching government camera matrix
5. Each of the millions of separate cameras analyzes its video
output, automatically recognizing and flagging behaviors
such as crimes
6. Face recognition programs notify authorities when people
are deemed “out of place”
7. Alibis and adherence to probation conditions are frequently
checked using the video data
8. Web and communication tracking software programs are
accessible by government agencies and private corporations
d. Obviously, neither future scenario, spectacle or surveillance, is attractive
i. But, both are composed of elements and capabilities already
available
ii. The point is that it is vital that we understand how the media and
crime and justice interact, and we plan for the type of media crime-
and-justice relationship we desire
III. Mediated Criminal Justice
156
a. “If actors define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”
i. What it is like to live in a society; how its citizens feel about their
government, authorities, and neighbors; and the daily social
expectations of people are all strongly influenced by what people
see, hear, read, and share about crime and justice
ii. The social construction of crime and justice loops back to
influence the entire social reality of a nation
b. Exactly how and to what extent the media cause long-term changes in
social behavior remains unknown, but it is clear that they play an
important, but not autonomous role
i. The following are all important factor in crime levels, and all are
subject to enhancement by the media:
1. Ethnic violence
2. Racial strife
3. Oppressive living conditions
4. Violent cultural history
5. Economic disparities
6. Family destruction
7. Interpersonal violence
ii. As with individuals, the media alone cannot criminalize a
country—but once a country criminalizes its media through an
emphasis on predatory and unrealistic portraits, a slow spiral of
increased crime and tolerance for crime begins
iii. For modern societies, the media:
1. set the expectations and moral boundaries for crime
2. guide the public policies
3. steer the social construction of crime-and-justice reality
a. In the 21st century, new media have come to play
the lead role in this process
c. Today media content distribution is a diffused decentralized experience
i. When combined with interactivity, decentralization leads to
powerful social effects
ii. Due to the increasingly active role of audiences as co-producers of
content, the traditionally separate domains of “media” (where
content and information are made) and “society” (where content
and information are consumed) are no longer separated
iii. The traditional research question of what are media effects on
society is less relevant than the study of how a “mediated society”
functions
d. New media has expanded access to crime and justice content while
enhancing the entertainment value of criminal justice events and legacy
media’s role as the primary crime and justice gatekeeper is being rapidly
supplanted
i. New media play roles in all aspects of crime and justice today:
1. criminalization
2. crime planning
157
3. committing crimes
4. identifying suspects and victims
5. pursuing and capturing suspects
6. locating evidence
7. communicating with the public
ii. Court proceedings will generate a media trial in the “evil
stranger” frame.
iii. Contemporary crimes are extracted from one context, reused,
reframed, and employed to create new, fully mediated realities of
crime
e. In addition a technological race between data swamping from the
enormous amount of digital information produced daily by new media and
the mining of this data for useful insights is occurring
i. The contest between being overwhelmed by the mass of raw
information versus the ability to make sense of this information
will determine whether criminal justice remains an infotainment
sideshow or becomes a considered policy driven entity
f. Currently new media crime content cycles out to the media-sphere through
society to return in alternate media forms and vehicles
i. Such Looping of content is observed in both massively mediated
real events (such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings), and in
the continuous created for media pseudo-events (think anything
Kardashian) common in infotainment media
g. The social effects of surveillance are difficult to predict
i. A social effect of immense concern involves new media based
surveillance and loss of privacy
1. A decline in privacy is intertwined with an increase in
surveillance so as the capability for surveillance has
increased the negative impact on privacy has become a
criminal justice issue
2. The impact of everyday surveillance and digital
information that is instantly and widely available will be on
law enforcement and on society is yet to be determined for
the new media world that has:
a. high social visibility
b. high levels of surveillance
c. low levels of regulation
ii. The marketing of camera surveillance systems to the public has
emphasized their benefits and their benign effects on those not
engaged in crime
1. “If you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to
fear”
2. Belief in the protective watch of “Big Father” has replaced
the fear of “Big Brother” in the 21st century where the
many watch the few and the hidden watch the many.
158
iii. So it is that the voyeuristic public follows the lives of celebrities
through social media while an enormous amount of aggregated
visual and digital information posted by the surveilled is culled by
government and business
h. The first observable change in the new media society is the shift in focus
on the part of criminal justice from the past to the future
i. Traditionally, the criminal justice system focused on reacting to
past events where crime first occurred and the criminal justice
system reacted by investigating, arresting, prosecuting, and
punishing
ii. New media has not only shortened the time frame between a crime
and the distribution of news of the crime, but has helped to reverse
the point in time considered appropriate for intervention
1. In the new media world, the criminal justice system is
increasingly involved in proactive pre-crime activities
exemplified by:
a. surveillance
b. crime prevention aimed at victim target hardening
c. anti-crime programs aimed at recognizing and
reducing risk
d. pre-emptive reverse stings and interventions
2. No longer is a response to crime enough, criminal justice
professionals and government policy-makers are today held
to a ‘no-crime’ standard
a. When a serious crime occurs the outcry is no longer
just “what should we do next?” but includes the
question “Why was this allowed to happen and who
is at fault?”
i. The single most significant social effect of media crime-and-justice
content is not is direct generation of crime or other behavioral effects but
its effect on criminal justice policies
i. The fear and loathing we feel toward criminals is tied to our
media-generated image of criminality
ii. We see numerous portraits day after day
iii. The media portray criminals as typically animalistic, vicious
predators
1. The public debate is flooded with dire warnings and
sensational crime stories imbedded in a burlesque media,
which is predominantly characterized by the demands of
the marketplace
2. This image translates into a more criminal society by
influencing the way we react to all crime in America
iv. We imprison at a much greater rate and make reentry into law-
abiding society, even for our nonviolent offenders, more difficult
than other advanced but less crime-focused, less fear-driven
nations
159
1. The predator criminal image results in policies being based
on our worst-case criminals with a constant ratcheting up of
punishments for all offenders
IV. What You Have Learned
a. As the reader of this book, you have learned
i. To appreciate the role that the media plays in contemporary crime
and justice, especially policy
ii. About the history and evolution of the media from print to visual to
digital and interactive-based outlets and how this evolution shapes
the information that the public receives about crime and criminal
justice
iii. That in the contemporary mediated world of crime and justice,
images, speed, and flexible access are key
iv. That infotainment media values steer the selection, formatting, and
delivery of crime-and-justice media content
v. That audiences pick from a vast store of media outlets and control
what content they expose themselves to and when they consume it
vi. That social constructionism as a perspective to the various
interactions between the media and crime and justice can be used
to 1. Dissect competing social construction efforts
2. Recognize claims makers
3. Recognize strategies to promote crime and justice
construction
vii. About symbolic crimes, frames, narratives, and ownership in social
construction and can see the process play out as you use media
b. Specifically regarding crime and justice, you have learned that
i. The most common media portrait of criminality is that of a violent
predator criminal who hunts innocent victims
ii. The most common explanation of crime found in the media relies
on individual characteristics – particularly defective personality
traits such as greed or innate evilness
iii. The media has the capacity to influence criminal behavior in some
people but that there is no evidence of widespread criminalizing
effect
iv. The media more likely provides criminal models and techniques to
individual already engaged in criminal behavior or already decided
to commit an offense
v. The media works on copycat crime as a rudder more than a trigger
vi. The media’s role in terrorism is evolving in reaction to the Internet
and other new media and that media-oriented terrorism is expected
to increase
c. Concerning crime fighters, you know that
i. Armed civilians and elite rogue law enforcement officers are
portrayed in the media as the most successful crime fighters
160
ii. Forensics and criminalistics have merged with infotainment to
produce a “crime fighting scientist” hero that currently reigns in
popularity
iii. The judicial system is shown in a backwards manner with rare
events like trials and homicide cases dominating and common
events like plea bargains and property cases rare
iv. Trials selected for massive coverage parallel entertainment media
story lines and sinful rich, power-abusing, or evil predatory
defendants
v. There is historical tension between the courts and the media, as
well as the ongoing attempts to balance due process protections
and media access to the courts
d. Concerning the portrait of the criminal justice system, you
i. Perceive how corrections is constructed in a manner that focuses in
negative events and images
ii. Recognize the media “smug hack” icon that paints corrections as a
set of failed institutions staffed by defective personnel
iii. Know that the media image of these institutions has them filled
with violent dangerous individuals who prey on heroic victimized
inmates
e. Most importantly, you understand that the media’s greatest impact on
crime and justice is in the area of public policy
i. You know that
1. Use of the media in anticrime efforts has been increasing in
both public service “ads’ aimed at reducing crime and in
enhanced surveillance based on improved media
technology
2. The effect of these efforts on crime and society is yet to be
determined but that public support ensures their increased
use
3. Media content lends support to punitive over preventive or
rehabilitative criminal justice policies but that the exact
relationship between media and criminal justice policy is
convoluted, shifting, and not fully understood
f. You have gained an understanding of your new role as a participant in the
social construction of crime and justice each time you post, tweet, like,
friend, or blog about a crime, criminal, or victim
g. In addition to these lessons, the most important message running through
this book is that social construction is inescapable and that the media are
powerful engines in the reality-construction process
i. Although not the sole or even the most powerful cause of crime,
the media are tightly tied into the other crime-generating engines
and their influence is recycled, enhanced, and compounded
1. New media have emerged as a particularly important social
construction engine
161
ii. The result has been a national character and crime-and-justice
reality that is:
1. Individualistic
2. Materialistic
3. often violent
iii. American’s popular media sets the stage for how we understand
crime and the media construct the images that have become the
taken-for-granted stories about crime and justice
1. But it is a social construction with a paradox: with new and
old media providing a 24/7 window, there is now so much
attention on crime that the end result has not been an
advance in understanding, but an obfuscation of reality
a. An obscuring flood of media information about crime
and justice flows in unabated looping circles
b. Hysteria reigns and a sensible, rational discussion of
how crime might be dealt with seems impossible
i. even as we see more images and more
messages, and spend more money trying to deal
with the problem
h. Is there hope? A little
i. One observer suggests that online bloggers might serve as a check
and balance mechanism on both the news media tendency to focus
on rare violent crimes and to present unsubstantiated facts and
interpretations about events and on the tendency of legislators to
push through emotionally driven but ill-conceived laws
1. Social media bloggers, by virtue of being outside the
mainstream news media and political domains, but with the
capability to directly reach the general public, can provide
oversight to limit the thoughtless emotion of crime news
and the myopic policymaking of politicians
2. It has been observed that blogs and Twitter already provide
real-time, in-depth analysis of events and offer more
detailed information than conventional media
3. Online blogs have also provided outsider claims-makers
with greater opportunity to have a voice in the social
construction competition
i. From this collective base of knowledge, you can proceed to observe and
interact with crime-and-justice media from an informed position,
recognizing when your personal social construction of reality is being
influenced
j. You are now prepared to move from an unconscious consumer of
mediated crime-and-justice knowledge to an interactive author of your
own socially constructed crime-and-justice reality
Chapter Key Terms
162
None
Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites
The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before
recommending them to your students.
Anticrime Campaigns
http://www.criminaljusticeschools.com/blog/15-worst-anti-crime-public-service-
announcements
Surveillance
http://www.surveillancecommissioners.gov.uk/index.html
http://epic.org/privacy/surveillance/
http://www.eff.org/issues/privacy
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_playlists&search_query=sur
veillance+methods&uni=1
http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/97/05/
