Framing Crime

Cultural Criminology and the Image

Keith Hayward, the late Mike Presdee

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134046867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In a world in which media images of crime and deviance proliferate, where every facet of offending is reflected in a 'vast hall of mirrors', Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image makes sense of the increasingly blurred line between the real and the virtual.

Images of crime and crime control have become almost as 'real' as crime and criminal justice itself. The meaning of both crime and crime control now resides, not solely in the essential – and essentially false – factuality of crime rates or arrest records, but also in the contested processes of symbolic display, cultural interpretation, and representational negotiation.

It is essential, then, that criminologists are closely attuned to the various ways in which crime is imagined, constructed and framed within modern society.

Framing Crime responds to this demand with a collection of papers aimed at helping the reader to understand the ways in which the contemporary 'story of crime' is constructed and promulgated through the image. It also provides the relevant analytical and research tools to unearth the hidden social and ideological concerns that frequently underpin images of crime, violence and transgression.

Framing Crime will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of criminology, crime and the media, and sociology.

Chapter 1
Opening the lens

Cultural criminology and the image

Keith Hayward

Do you want to acquire power through the image? Then you will perish by the return of the image.

(Jean Baudrillard, 2005)

Five years ago now, in the edited collection Cultural Criminology Unleashed (Ferrell et al., 2004), we commented that the true meaning of crime and crime control was to be found not in the essential (and essentially false) factuality of crime rates, but in the contested processes of symbolic display, cultural interpretation, and representational negotiation. Images of crime, we claimed, were becoming ‘as “real” as crime and criminal justice itself ’, with mediated anticrime campaigns, visually constructed crime waves, and media fabrications of counter-cultural imagery all circulating in ‘an endless spiral of meaning, a Möbius strip of culture and everyday life’ (ibid: 3–4). At that time, our intention was to be controversial; the goal being to play with the parameters of the discipline and challenge the staid conventions of orthodox criminology. However, surveying the world five years on, such proclamations appear less irreverent flights of futurological fancy and more commonsense observation. While the everyday experience of life in contemporary Western society may or may not be suffused with crime, it is most certainly suffused with images and increasingly images of crime.

However, it is not just a case of image proliferation – contemporary society’s keen sense of the visual demands that images also be both mutable and malleable. Here the ‘logic of speed’ (Virilio, 1986, 1991) meets liquidity of form, as images bleed from one medium to the next. Uploaded and downloaded, copied and crossposted, Flickr-ed, Facebook-ed and PhotoShop-ped, the image today is as much about porosity and manipulation as it is about fixity and representation. This, of course, poses a question: what does the term ‘image’ actually mean under contemporary conditions?

The word ‘image’ is utilized and etymologically defined in a number of ways. However, from a pictorial perspective, image traditionally refers to a representation of the external form of an object. This remains the case, of course, but for the purposes of this collection, we have deliberately sought to expand and enhance the term. Just as cell phone photos migrate from street to screen and ‘user-generated-content’ websites set video clips loose from their origins, traditional conceptual understandings of the term image are also set in motion. One such example is the increasing interchangeability of the terms ‘image’ and ‘visual’. If the former relates to representation, then the latter (traditionally at least) relates to ‘seeing’. However, consider our mass-mediated society, what Appadurai (1996: 35) calls the late modern ‘Mediascape’ (that bundle of media that manufactures information and disseminates images via an ever expanding array of digital technologies). Here, much of what we ‘see’ is actually mediated by the image. On the internet, for example, the photograph and the icon function as navigational devices, allowing us to ‘see’ virtual worlds and traverse the endless pathways of cyberspace. Likewise, while TV, film, and video all incorporate sound and broadcast technology, they are by definition primarily photographic experiences. Hence the increasing use of terms such as ‘visual culture’¹ or ‘imaged form’ as ways of explaining and understanding a world in which the collective conscious is now shaped and manipulated by the digital image-making machinery of the Mediascape.

This blurring of representation and seeing, of image and visual, is never more apparent than when we consider how crime is imaged in contemporary society. While mug shots, surveillance photographs, and newspaper pictures of notorious criminals have long featured as part of the ‘spectacle’ of crime and punishment in modern society (see Carney, this volume). Today, as criminals videotape their crimes and post them on YouTube, as security agents scrutinize the imagemaking of criminals on millions of surveillance monitors around the world, as insurrectionist groups upload video compilations (filmed from several angles) of ‘successful’ suicide bomb attacks and roadside IED (Improvized Explosive Device) detonations, as images of brutality and victimization pop up on office computer screens and children’s mobile phones, as ‘reality TV’ shows take the viewer ever deeper inside the world of the beat cop and the prison setting, there can be no other option but the development of a thoroughgoing visual criminology.

For some, such a ‘visual criminology’ is already with us. After all, phrases like ‘images of ’ and ‘media constructions of’ are now common and commonly accepted prefixes to conventional criminological categories such as policing and prison studies. However, as I have stated elsewhere, ‘[t]his disciplinary drift into the realm of the image hardly constitutes an adequate visual criminology… Simply importing images into a discipline defined by words and numbers is in fact likely to retard the development of a visual criminology, since it will leave in place the ugly notion that written or numeric analysis can somehow penetrate

1 I use the term ‘visual culture’ here in its general sense and not as it relates to the distinct subfield of social and cultural study that draws together cultural studies, art history, philosophy, and critical theory (see e.g. Mirzoeff, 1999; Dikovitskaya, 2006 for introductions to the academic discipline of visual culture).

the obfuscation, conquer the opaqueness, of the image’ (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008: 184–6). Instead of simply studying ‘images’ we need a new methodological orientation towards the visual that is capable of encompassing meaning, affect, situation, symbolic power and efficiency, and spectacle in the same ‘frame’. This new approach must seek to fuse precise visual attentiveness with politically charged analysis, to be as attuned to representation and style as it is to the way visual culture impacts on individual and collective behaviour. As David Freedburg (1989, xxii) makes clear in his book The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (itself a work that urges art historians to take their analyses beyond traditional understandings of the ‘image’): ‘We must consider not only beholders’ symptoms and behaviours, but also the effectiveness, efficacy, and vitality of images themselves; not only what beholders do, but also what images appear to do; not only what people do as a result of their relationship with imaged form, but also what they expect imaged form to achieve, and why they have such expectations at all’.

In keeping with such a philosophy, this book aims to help cultural criminologists go beyond simple analyses of the static image/picture and develop the theoretical and methodological tools needed to understand the dynamic force and power of visual culture. Such a task is now urgent. Contemporary visual representations of crime, transgression, and punishment take us far beyond the realm of the criminal justice system or law and order politics; even beyond established understandings of the media’s role as ‘a storehouse of illicit excitement’, a ready resource for the voyeuristic consumption of violence and tragedy. Today, our world might best be described as a highly mediated ‘crime fest’, where the visual representation of crime and punishment plays out in reality TV theatres of the absurd and mediated spectacles of punitiveness. To paraphrase a famous quote by Gianni Vattimo and Wolfgang Welsch, over the last few years, the (visual) media has changed from simply conveying information or telling entertaining stories about crime, to actually shaping and producing its reality (Vattimo and Welsch, 1998: 7).

This is exactly the point at which cultural criminology enters the frame. Over the last decade or so, cultural criminology has emerged as a distinct theoretical, methodological, and interventionist approach that situates crime, criminality, and control squarely in the context of cultural dynamics (see e.g. Ferrell and Sanders, 1995; Presdee, 2000; Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008). From this view, crime and the agencies and institutions of crime control operate as cultural enterprises – that is, as richly symbolic endeavours created out of ongoing human interaction and power relations. As such, they must be read in terms of the contested meanings they carry; they must be interrogated as key social sites in which rules are created and broken, and where moral entrepreneurship, political innovation, and experiential resistance intersect. In undertaking this interrogation, cultural criminology often focuses theoretically on situated meaning and constructed social identity, and methodologically on forms of ethnography predicated on the Weberian tradition of ‘verstehende sociologie’ (see Ferrell, 1997). However, while early cultural criminological research emanating from the United States focused predominantly on rich, indexical cultural accounts of marginal deviant groups (e.g. Ferrell, 1993/1996; Hamm, 1995: see also Ferrell and Hamm, 1998), more recently, it has expanded its focus to include space, place, and cultural geography; the ongoing transformations and fluctuations associated with hypercapitalism; the vicissitudes of power, resistance, and state control; concepts of risk and embodied practice, and a whole host of other areas. The strength of the ‘cultural approach’, then, is the way it seeks to tackle the subject of crime and criminalization from a variety of new perspectives and academic disciplines. In effect, as I have stated elsewhere, its ‘remit is to keep “turning the kaleidoscope” on the way we think about crime, and importantly, the legal and societal responses to rule-breaking’ (Hayward and Young, 2007: 103). In all of this, cultural criminology attempts to reorient criminology to contemporary social and cultural changes, and so to imagine a ‘post’ or ‘late modern’ theory of crime and control. In this regard, cultural criminology conceptualizes many transgressive behaviours as attempts to resolve internal conflicts that are themselves spawned by the contradictions and peculiarities of contemporary life; put in different terms, ‘cultural criminology seeks to fuse a phenomenology of contemporary transgression with a sociological analysis of late modern culture’ (Hayward, 2004: 9).

Concepts such as situated meaning, symbolic richness, or cultural flow are, of course, meaningless unless they incorporate a thoroughgoing consideration and appreciation of the visual. Thankfully, cultural criminologists have had a longstanding interest in both symbolic interaction and the way meaning and power are negotiated and displayed through the efflorescences of mass-produced imagery. Similarly, from a methodological perspective, cultural criminology embraces visual analysis, with readings and counter readings of images and imaginative media/textual case studies and deconstructions featuring from the outset (see Ferrell, 1999: 406–8 and the international journal Crime, Media, Culture). How could it really be any other way? In our contemporary world of media festival and digital spectacle, the ‘story’ of crime and crime control is now promulgated as much through the image as through the word. Hence, cultural criminologists use the visual evidence of crime as a critical and pedagogic vehicle to illuminate the power of images in shaping popular understandings and social constructions of crime, deviance, and punishment.

From cell phone photographs and video footage shot in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan and then posted online, to the grainy CCTV footage that drives the slurry of primetime ‘cops and robbers’ compilation shows (Fishman and Cavender, 1998; Rapaport, 2007), from unreal ‘reality TV’ moments that shape moral values and social norms, to stylized representations of crime and power in comic books (Nyberg, 1998; Williams, 1998) and even criminology textbook covers (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008: 101–2), ours is a world in which ‘the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street; [where] there is no clearly linear sequence, but rather a shifting interplay between the real and the virtual, the factual and the fictional. Late modern society is saturated with collective meaning and suffused with symbolic uncertainty as media messages and cultural traces swirl, circulate and vacillate’ (ibid: 123).

Needless to say, such concerns are seen by some as a frippery, a marginal concern well beyond the scope and remit of mainstream (state-sanctioned) criminology. Nevertheless, as cultural criminologists have said many times before, dismissing this focus on visual imagery as a decorative or ‘aesthetic’ criminology is to mistake method for meaning. In a world where power is increasingly exercised through mediated representation and symbolic production, battles over image, style, and cultural representation emerge as essential moments in the contested negotiation of late modern reality.

However, if cultural criminology is keen to break free of the constraints of orthodox criminology, it is equally keen to escape th...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Opening the lens
• Chapter 2 Crime, punishment and the force of photographic spectacle
• Chapter 3 The decisive moment
• Chapter 4 Hindley’s ghost
• Chapter 5 Screening crime
• Chapter 6 The scene of the crime
• Chapter 7 Imagining the ‘war on terror’
• Chapter 8 Framing the crimes of colonialism
• Chapter 9 ‘Drive it like you stole it’
• Chapter 10 Staging an execution
• Chapter 11 Fighting with images
• Chapter 12 A reflected gaze of humanity
• Index