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34
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
35
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
36
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
37
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
38
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
39
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
40
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
41
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
42
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:
43
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
44
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
45
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
46
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:
47
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
