978-1285459059 Chapter 3

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Chapter 3

Images of Crime and Criminality

Chapter Objectives

After reading Chapter 3, students should be able to:

1. comprehend the common media portraits of criminality

2. understand why the media gives special attention to predatory criminality

3. see the link between media portraits of criminality and criminological theories

Chapter Outline

I. Criminals, Crime, and Criminality

a. Portraits of crime and justice are a media staple

i. A mainstay in ancient Greek theater

ii. Western literature continued the interest

b. Parallel with and often entwined within the portraits of crime and justice is the

history of violence as entertainment

i. In western culture, real world violence as entertainment examples:

1. Roman gladiator contests

2. Executions as public spectacles

3. Violence against and between animals in the form of:

4. Element in many sports and sports fans regularly themselves

become violent

ii. Fictional violence as entertainment examples:

1. Fairy tales and folk stories

2. Stage plays filled with violent images were common and over time

migrated the violence from unseen, off-stage acts to on-stage

enactments

3. Early films

a. Example: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

4. Subsequent gangster and horror films cemented the acceptance of

visual violence as acceptable mass entertainment content

5. Entertainment violence is part of modern:

a. music lyrics

b. music videos

c. electronic games

iii. The overall history of violence in entertainment media displays a steady

trend to include more violent acts in more graphic portrayals

1. Modern media technologies enable violence portraits to be looped

so that violence seems to be everywhere

a. There may be less violence in comparison to past historic

periods, (as suggested by falling crime rates) but a

pervasive media makes it seem like there is more violence

i. This perception of rampaging violence is important

for how society gets socially constructed

iv. Crime has become one of the nation’s principal social concerns due to:

v. By the second half of the nineteenth century the dominant image of the

criminal in popular culture had shifted from a romantic, heroic portrait to

conservative, negative images

c. Criminals

i. Central theme of:

1. Police stories

2. Detective stories

3. Heist stories

4. Gangster stories

ii. Popular secondary plot elements in:

1. Love stories

2. Westerns

3. Comedies

4. Dramas

iii. Pre-television era criminals

1. Characteristics:

a. enjoyed full lives

b. decisive

c. intelligent

d. attractive

e. active decision makers

2. Early media portraits of criminals allowed audiences to identify

with the criminals

a. Allowed audiences to savor the danger and sin of crime yet

still see it ultimately punished

iv. Post-television criminals

1. Television programming at first constructed images of crime and

justice similar to ones found in film and radio but in much greater

quantity

2. Heroes and villains became more one-dimensional

v. Contemporary criminal portraits have almost no correspondence with

official statistics of persons arrested for crimes

1. Backwards law: the tendency of the media to portray crime and

justice opposite that of crime-and-justice reality

a. True in:

i. Crimes

ii. Criminals

iii. Crime fighters

iv. Attorneys

v. Correctional officers

vi. Inmates

vii. The investigation of crimes and making of arrests

viii. The processing and disposition of cases

ix. The experience of incarceration

2. The typical criminal portrayed in the entertainment media is

mature, white, and of high social status

a. Contrasts with the typical arrestee who is young, black, and

poor

b. Common factor: they are both male

3. Female offenders are primarily shown as:

a. Linked to male offenders

b. White

c. Violent

d. Deserving of punishment

e. Driven by greed, revenge, and often love

vi. The image of the criminal that the news media propagate is similar to that

found in the entertainment media

1. Criminals tend to be of two types:

a. Violent predators

b. Professional businessmen and bureaucrats

2. In general, the news media underplay criminals’ youth and their

poverty while overplaying their violence

a. The violent and predatory street criminal is what the public

takes away from the media’s constructed image of

criminality

d. Predatory Criminality: criminals who are animalistic, irrational, and innately

predatory and who commit violent, sensational, and senseless crimes

i. The image of the predator criminal has dominated in the media for more

than a century and is common to all forms of media

ii. Modern mass media have given massive and disproportionate attention to

pursuing innately predatory criminals as the prime crime-and-justice goal

iii. Found throughout this media portrait:

1. Repeated claims that crime is largely perpetrated by predatory

individuals who are basically different from the rest of us

2. Criminality stems from individual deficiencies

iv. Minorities are frequently portrayed as the criminal predators in news

reports

1. Racial violence has been an entertainment media theme at least

since Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s

v. Females are less often portrayed as criminals than males

1. When females who commit serious crimes are portrayed they are

painted in similar predatory images with narratives of:

a. aberrant sexuality

b. broken gender based social roles

vi. The emergence of new media forms has opened new avenues for:

1. Real world predators

a. The lurking sexual predator hiding behind the anonymity of

the Internet and social media who preys on children has

become the twenty-first icon of criminality

b. Across the media, criminality is caused by:

i. Greed

ii. Criminals who know right from wrong but choose

to commit crime

iii. Criminals who are different from the law-abiding

2. New means for moral panics to spread about them

a. Media portraits have increasingly shown criminals as more:

i. Animalistic

ii. Irrational

iii. predatory

b. Criminals’ crimes are more:

i. Violent

ii. Senseless

iii. Sensational

vii. The media have successfully raised the violent predator criminal from a

rare offender in the real world to a common, ever-present image

1. The public is led by the media to see violence and predation

between strangers as an expected fact of life

viii. Serial killers

1. The commodification, public embrace, and effects on criminal

justice policy from the media portrait of serial killers demonstrate

the media’s crucial role in the social construction of criminality

a. The social construction of the serial killer as a new type of

criminal began in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s

2. Serial killers are portrayed as animalistic killing machines more

akin to gothic monsters than human offenders

3. Also implied is that these serial killers were everywhere and were

the perpetrators of most violent crime

a. Historian Philip Jenkins reports that in reality serial killers

account for no more than 300 to 400 victims each year, or 2

to 3 percent of all U.S. homicides each year whereas

domestic violence accounts for about one-third of all

murders

b. Media coverage of serial murderers has swamped the

picture of criminality the public receives

i. The result is that serial killers are commonly

perceived as the dominant homicide problem in the

U.S. and as symbols of a society overwhelmed by

rampant, violent, incorrigible predatory criminality

1. Today symbolized by the pedophile predator

who ironically is constructed as rampant

threats lurking in new social media niches

where they find and lure their victims

ix. Predator criminality presents crime as largely caused by individual

deficiencies

1. Predatory criminals are portrayed as springing into existence

unconnected to any larger social, political, or economic forces

a. the predatory killer is divorced from humanity and society

b. mainstream society is free from any causal responsibility

for crime

e. Crime Victims

i. In the news media

1. Crime victims in the news media are often ignored

a. When described, victims tend to be portrayed as:

i. Female

ii. very young or old

iii. a celebrity

b. Criminal violence against females is portrayed differently

from that against males

c. Victimization of minorities is underplayed

d. The ideal crime victim from a news perspective is a child

or pregnant woman

2. A new type of victim

a. Since the 1990s the news’ construction of child murder

victims has shifted from their killers’ stories to emotional

soft-news stories about the impact on victims’ family and

community

b. The families of crime victims are shown as doubly

victimized, once by the offender and again by the justice

system

i. Example: mass shootings

ii. In the entertainment media

1. Victims normally play one of two extreme roles

a. Helpless fodder

b. Wronged heroic avengers

2. Murder victims are marginalized and homicide happens to

characters who mean little to the other characters or to the

audience

a. Audiences are encouraged to react with a “How curious, I

wonder how it was done” reaction

3. Crime victims are predominantly white and male

4. Entertainment trends in female victimization:

a. Fewer female villains

b. More female assistant heroes

c. Many more female victims

i. Young women are overrepresented in relation to

their real-world victimization rates

5. Common entertainment victim narratives include:

a. the “Undeserving Victim”

i. usually one of the first killed to establish the

evilness of the villain and justify their violent death

at the end

b. the “Stupid Victim”

i. often a police officer, who is never smarter than the

criminal or crime-fighting hero and ends up

stumbling into their death

1. Example: the police officer killed while

trying to single-handedly capture the

criminals

c. the “Lazy Victim”

i. one who is killed while doing something wrong or

improperly

1. Example: the security or correctional officer

watching television instead of their

surroundings

6. Victimization rates of persons in the media correlate more with

fear of crime than with the public’s actual victimization risk

a. Victim portraits are demographically mismatched with

official victim statistics on age and gender

b. Greater proportions of both news and entertainment media

victims are portrayed as randomly selected and as having

no prior associations with their assailants

c. Crime victims in the media are often shown as innocent and

as noncontributory to their victimization

7. Victims are of secondary importance in the media

a. They receive focus only when:

i. they transform into crime fighters in the

entertainment media

ii. they have a preexisting newsworthiness

1. are already famous or a vulnerable

8. In the media-constructed world the important relationship is

between the crime fighter and the criminal

a. Unlike the real world of crime, where pre-established

relationships between victims and criminals are the most

significant factor in the generation of most violence

b. This holds true even in police reality programming where

the interactions between the police and suspects dominate

the shows

9. Most victims in the media exist only to be victimized

a. Once that function is fulfilled, if still alive, they are shunted

aside to allow the central contest between the heroic crime

fighter and the evil criminal

f. Crimes

i. In the entertainment media

1. Crimes that are most likely to be found are those that are least

likely to occur in real life

2. Property crime is underrepresented, and violent crime is

overrepresented

a. Murder, robbery, kidnapping, and aggravated assault make

up 90 percent of all prime time television crimes, with

murder accounting for nearly one-fourth

b. In contrast, murders account for only one-sixth of 1 percent

of the FBI Crime Index

c. At the other extreme, thefts account for nearly two-thirds of

the FBI Crime Index, but only 6 percent of television crime

3. Entertainment media content greatly overemphasizes individual

acts of violence, even during periods when new content is less

violent

a. Due to the multimedia web and the constant recycling of

content

ii. In the news media

1. The news media take the rare crime event and turn it into the

common crime image

a. Violent crime’s relative infrequency in the real world

heightens its newsworthiness and leads to its frequent

appearance in crime news

i. crime news focuses on violent personal street crime

such as murder, rape, and assault

ii. more common offenses like burglary and theft are

often ignored

b. According to one study, murder and robbery account for

approximately 45 percent of newspaper crime news and 80

percent of television crime news

2. The focus is on entertaining crimes with dramatic recitations of

details about individual offenders and crime scenes

a. Neither the content nor the total amount of crime news

reflects changes in the crime rate

b. Focuses heavily on the details of specific individual crime

c. Only a minuscule percentage of stories deal with the

motivations of the criminal or the circumstances of victims

iii. Overall, crime is cast in the media within constructions where large

differences exist between what the public is likely to experience in reality

and what they are likely to gather from the media

g. White Collar Crime

i. An area of crime that has large social impact but small media attention is

white collar crime

1. Ignored because:

a. not visual

b. it is difficult to generate and maintain moral panics about

white-collar crimes and criminals

2. Media portraits are:

a. rare

b. framed in celebrity-focused stories

c. formatted as infotainment

d. differentiated from “real crime”

3. In the news media

a. Extensive coverage of specific white collar crimes will

occur provided there is some newsworthy link such as:

i. a significant fine

ii. prosecution

iii. company liquidation

4. Historic symbolic white collar crimes include:

a. Ponzi schemes

b. the Teapot Dome scandal

c. the Enron case

d. the Martha Stewart case (see Box 3.1)

e. Bernie Madoff (see Box 3.1)

f. The 2008 banking industry collapse

5. Coverage has:

a. Continued to shift attention onto specific individuals

b. Remained sparse and haphazard into this century

6. A cycle of massive accounting scandals and economic crisis

resulted in a recent increase in coverage and a parade of

dramatized arrests of white-collar executives

a. It remains to be seen whether the increase simply reflects a

sensational corporate crimes during a period of economic

turmoil to be followed by a return to the low levels of

media attention

ii. Why has media attention to white collar crime been historically low?

1. Low public interest

2. Crimes involve indirect harm to victims

3. Crimes provide few striking visual images

4. Crimes are highly complex and boring

5. Crimes involve long time scales

6. Require knowledgeable journalists

iii. Stories are often killed in the news selection filtering process because they

are not “news” in the traditional sense

1. Typically are punished by civil penalties, placing them outside of

the criminal justice system and outside of traditional crime news

that originates in police reports

2. News media organizations fear litigation and withdrawal of

advertising from the negative portrayal of powerful economic

entities

iv. Counterbalancing these coverage-reducing factors:

1. Recent increases in investigative reporting as a journalism practice

2. The availability of Internet sources for information

3. The efforts of various advocacy groups to serve as spokes-persons

v. Similar to other crime, when covered white collar crime is more often

treated in infotainment renditions:

1. Corporate celebrities in trouble

2. Normal people turning to fraud

3. High visibility fraud such as identity theft

4. Long term concealment of and failure of government entities to

discover fraudulent enterprises

vi. News media construction of white-collar crime:

1. predatory individuals

2. the failure to detect and punish them

3. failure to protect the public

4. The adjudication of individual crimes and the punishment of

individual offenders (receive the bulk of media attention)

vii. Dissimilarity to other crime constructions:

1. corporate offenders are rarely cast as pathological

2. white collar crime is sanitized and ‘decriminalized’ as technical

law violations rather than as real crimes

a. When arrested white collar criminals often attempt to

socially reconstruct their crime as noncriminal activity

viii. White-collar crimes that are reported are likely to be cast as caused by

criminal individuals—a bad apple explanation—rather than as common

corporate practices

1. The harm of such events and the criminogenic nature of certain

industries are downplayed

ix. Representations in the entertainment media

a. Examples:

i. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

ii. Films

b. Story lines:

i. businessmen are often portrayed as criminals

1. more often street criminals dressed up as

executives than businesspeople engaged in

criminal business practices

ii. they are shown usually committing crimes of

violence:

x. The social reality of white collar crime may be undergoing a social

reconstruction similar to that of drunk driving in the 1990s

1. There is evidence that the general public began to see white collar

crime more seriously in the early 2000s and there has been more

attention to white collar criminality of late

2. A counter force though is the decline in reporting resources

available to news agencies as new media has sapped their audience

size

3. If maintained, a positive side of this shift is that media coverage

has been described as more of a deterrent to white-collar crime

than formal sanctions

a. Public shaming in the media can be effective

h. The portrait of criminals and crimes in the media does display a number of

evolutionary trends

i. Criminals have become more evil

ii. Heroes have become more violent

iii. Victims have become more innocent

iv. Violence has become more graphic

v. Crimes have become more irrational

vi. The popular criminology found in the media does not pretend to be

empirically accurate or theoretically valid but its audience far exceeds

that of academic criminology

i. Criminological Theories and the Media

i. Criminological theories can be grouped along a number of dimensions,

one being where a theory locates the primary cause of crime

1. Crime theories fall into five groups:

a. Rational choice theories

i. Crime is seen simply as a rational, free-will

decision that individuals will make when the gains

from committing a crime outweigh the likely

punishment from committing a crime

ii. To control crime, these theories argue that society

must deter crime by ensuring that punishments:

1. outweigh the rewards of crime

2. are known beforehand

3. are certain to be implemented

4. are quickly administered

b. Biological theories

i. Place the cause of crime in the innate genetic or

constitutional nature of criminals (natural born

killers)

1. primitive theories looked for specific

physical traits (or Lombrosian-based

atavisms) as signs of criminality

2. recent theories look to genetic traits or

biological trauma

ii. Criminal justice policies associated with biological

theories of crime focus on medical interventions

and control of procreation

c. Psychological theories

i. Explain criminality as the result of mental

deficiencies or criminal personalities

1. People commit crime because their

“personality” is ill formed

2. In the media these theories come in “twisted

psyche” and “sexual deviant” portraits best

shown in Alfred Hitchcock films like

Psycho

ii. Associated policies are based around counseling

and therapy

d. Sociological theories

i. Look at social groups as the loci of the basic causes

of crime

1. Criminals are criminals because of the

people they associate with, or share a

neighborhood or culture with

a. Criminal environments

b. Normal people are forced or steered

into crime by their social

circumstances

ii. Sociological theories that receive the most media

play:

1. Strain

2. Blocked opportunity

3. Culture conflict

iii. The means of fixing the individual criminals

generated by the bad environments:

1. Better fit and adjust the criminals to law

abiding society

2. Change criminals’ socialization

3. Secondarily changing their social

environment (conservative approach)

e. Political theories

i. Emphasize the political and economic structure of a

society as the root cause of crime

ii. Central to these theories:

1. The distribution of political power

2. Unequal access to influence and material

goods

3. Racism, oppression, sexism, and elitism

iii. These explanations are more likely to argue for:

1. Social changes

2. Restructuring society relationships

3. Revamping the criminal justice system

2. The media tend to reflect the criminological theories popular at the

time

a. a sociological perspective (1930s): urban ethnic inner city

was the basic cause of criminality

b. psychological perspective (1940s/1950s): deviant

personalities were the root case

c. political perspective(1960s/1970s): labeling and critical

criminology were brought to the fore

d. a mix of theoretical perspectives (1980s): films indicted

drugs and family violence

j. Criminality in Today’s Media

i. Psychotic super-male criminals

1. Most popular construction of criminality

2. Sometimes given super-villain traits to create seemingly

indestructible murderous super criminals popular in slasher and

serial killer films

3. Generally possess:

a. an evil, cunning intelligence

b. superior strength

c. superior endurance

d. superior stealth

4. Crime is an act of:

a. twisted, lustful revenge

b. a random act of irrational violence

5. Historical trend has been to:

a. present psychotic criminals as more and more violent and

bloodthirsty

b. to show their crimes more and more graphically

i. Since the 1980s, violence has been shown in

graphic hyperviolent close-ups

6. The psychotic criminal clearly supports the individually focused

biological and psychological theories

a. Crime is:

i. Innate

ii. an act of nature gone bad

iii. not society’s fault

ii. Business and professional criminal narrative

1. Less popular narratives due to:

a. Their complexity

b. Society having a share of the blame for crime

2. Characterized as:

a. shrewd

b. ruthless

c. often violent

d. a ladies’ man

3. The core message is that crime is simply another form of work or

business, essentially similar to other careers but often more

exciting and rewarding if, perhaps, more violent

4. These media portraits of criminality tend to be more complex and

multi-theoretical, spreading the responsibility for crime over both

the criminal and society

a. individually based psychological theories of criminal

personality

b. psychopathic explanations

c. the classical school of crime

d. elements of political and economic causes

iii. Victim and heroic criminal narrative

1. Least common portrait

2. Alternative perspective supporting:

a. Sociological explanations

b. Political explanations

3. This “Robin Hood” criminality narrative supports a number of

theories including:

a. Strain

b. Blocked opportunity

c. Labeling

d. Critical criminology theories

k. The media have attributed a wide range of factors as plausible causes of

criminality and provide some support for every criminological theory

i. However, the dominant and loudest messages in terms of their frequency

and popular appeal point to individually based theories of crime and away

from social ones

ii. While criminological theories come into and go out of fashion with

criminologists, the criminological ideas imbedded in the media do not

1. Criminologists drop discredited theories, but the media recycle

them

a. even primitive theories of crime such as demonic

possession continue to be presented as credible

explanations of crime in the media

iii. Theories that focus on individual characteristics combine with

psychological theories to form the most popular portrayals

1. Psychological explanations, often combined with political or

biological elements, are the most popular

iv. The single most common portrait of a criminal features:

1. an upper-middle-class person gone berserk with greed

2. greed, revenge, and mental illness as the basic motivations for

criminality in the vast majority of crimes shown in the media

3. the psychotic criminals frequently holding positions of political or

economic power

v. The repeated message is that:

1. crime is perpetrated by individuals who are different in

substantially basic ways from the law-abiding

2. criminality stems from individual problems

3. when not inborn, criminal conduct is more often than not freely

chosen behavior

l. The dominant media construction of criminals, crimes, and criminality is

simultaneously both unsettling and conservative

i. It is unsettling in its emphasis on violent predatory criminality, which is

portrayed as random and largely unavoidable

ii. It is conservative in that the explanations of criminality emphasize

individual traits as causes and minimize social and structural ones

Chapter Key Terms

backwards law [59] psychological theories [68]

predatory criminality [60] sociological theories [69]

white-collar crime [64] political theories [69]

popular criminology [68] psychotic super-male criminals [70]

rational choice theories [68] business and professional criminals [70]

biological theories [68] victims and heroic criminals [71]

Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites

The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before

recommending them to your students.

Media Violence

http://www.magicdragon.com/EmeraldCity/Nonfiction/socphil.html

http://www.cln.org/themes/media_violence.html