Making Trouble

Cultural Constraints of Crime, Deviance, and Control

Jeff Ferrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780202306186
• eBook ISBN: 9781351507608
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Making Trouble leading scholars in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, women's studies, and social history explore the mediated cultural dynamics that construct images and understanding of crime, deviance, and control. Contributors examine the intertwined practices of the mass media, criminal justice agencies, political power holders, and criminal and deviant subcultures in producing and consuming contested representations of legality and illegality. While the collection provides broad analysis of contemporary topics, it also weaves this analysis around a set of innovative and unifying themes. These include the emergence of ""situated media"" within and between the various subcultures of crime, deviance, and control; the evolution of policing and social control as complex webs of mediated and symbolic meaning; the role of power, identity, and indifference in framing contemporary crime controversies, with special attention paid to the gendered construction of crime, deviance and control; and the importance of historical and cross-cultural dynamics in shaping understandings of crime, deviance, and control.

I
Introduction

1
Materials for Making Trouble

JEFF FERRELL and NEIL WEBSDALE

INTRODUCTION

Making Trouble develops and expands an intellectual endeavor that can be denoted by the shorthand term “cultural criminology”—shorthand for a mode of analysis that embodies sensitivities to image, meaning, and representation in the study of deviance, crime, and control. This notion of “cultural criminology” references both specific perspectives and broader orientations that have emerged in criminology, sociology, and criminal justice over the past few years, and that inform this collection. Most specifically, “cultural criminology” represents a perspective developed by Ferrell (1995c) and Ferrell and Sanders (1995), and likewise employed by Redhead (1995) and others (Kane 1998a), which explores the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life. More broadly, cultural criminology references the increasing analytic attention that many criminologists now give to popular culture constructions, and especially mass media constructions, of crime and crime control. It in turn highlights the emergence of this general area of media and cultural inquiry as a relatively distinct domain within criminology, as evidenced, for example, by the number of recently published collections undertaking explorations of media, culture, and crime (Anderson and Floward 1998; Bailey and Hale 1998; Barak 1994; Ferrell and Sanders 1995; Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne 1995; Potter and Kappeler 1998). Most broadly, the existence of a concept such as “cultural criminology” underscores the steady seepage in recent years of cultural and media analysis into the traditional domains of criminological inquiry, such that criminologists increasingly utilize this style of analysis to explore any number of conventional criminological subjects. As this collection shows, these range across the substantive domain of criminology, from drug use, interpersonal violence, and terrorism to policing, delinquency, and predatory crime.

HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMES

At its most basic, the sort of cultural criminology utilized in Making Trouble attempts to integrate the fields of criminology and cultural studies or, put differently, to import the insights of cultural studies into contemporary criminology. Given this, much contemporary scholarship in cultural criminology takes as its foundation perspectives that emerged out of the British/Birmingham school of cultural studies and the British “new criminology” (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973) of the 1970s. The work of Hebdige (1979, 1988), Hall and Jefferson (1976), Clarke (1976), McRobbie (1980), Willis (1977, 1990), and others has attuned cultural criminologists to the subtle, situated dynamics of deviant and criminal subcultures, and to the importance of symbolism and style in shaping internal and external constructions of subcultural meaning and identity. Similarly, the work of Cohen ([1972] 1980), Cohen and Young (1973), Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts (1978), and others has influenced contemporary understandings of the mass media’s role in constructing the reality of crime and deviance, and in generating new forms of social and legal control.

As a hybrid orientation, though, cultural criminology builds from more than a simple integration of 1970s British cultural studies into contemporary American criminology. Certainly, cultural criminologists continue to draw on the insights of contemporary cultural studies as a developing field, and on current cultural studies explorations of identity, sexuality, and social space (for example, During 1993; Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992). Moreover, with its focus on representation, image, and style, cultural criminology incorporates not only the insights of cultural studies, but the intellectual reorientation afforded by postmodernism. In place of the modernist duality of form and content and the modernist hierarchy, which proposes that form must be stripped away to get at the meaningful core of content, cultural criminology operates from the postmodern proposition that form is content, that style is substance, that meaning thus resides in presentation and re-presentation. From this view, the study of crime necessitates not simply the examination of individual criminals and criminal events, not even the straightforward examination of media “coverage” of criminals and criminal events, but rather a journey into the spectacle and carnival of crime, a walk down an infinite hall of mirrors where images created and consumed by criminals, criminal subcultures, control agents, media institutions, and audiences bounce endlessly one off the other. In this collection and elsewhere, then, cultural criminologists explore the “networks . . . of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface” (Bau- drillard 1985:127) out of which crime and crime control are constructed, the intertextual “media loops” (Manning 1998) through which these constructions circulate, and the discursive interconnections that emerge between media institutions, crime control agents, and criminal subcultures (Kane 1998b). As part of this exploration, they in turn investigate criminal and deviant subcultures as sites of criminalization, criminal activity, and legal control, but also as “subaltern counterpublic[s] . . . where members . . . invent and circulate counterdiscourses [and] expand discursive space” (Fraser 1995:291).

Grounded as it is in the frameworks of cultural studies and postmodernism, cultural criminology is at the same time firmly rooted in sociological perspectives. Perhaps because of its emergence out of sociological criminology, though, cultural criminology has to this point drawn less on the sociology of culture than it has on other sociological orientations more closely aligned, historically, with criminology. Central among these is the interac- tionist tradition in the sociology of deviance and in criminology (for example, Becker 1963). In examining the mediated networks and discursive connections noted above, cultural criminologists also trace the manifold interactions through which criminals, control agents, media producers, and others collectively construct the meaning of crime. In so doing, cultural criminologists attempt to elaborate on the “symbolic” in “symbolic interaction” by highlighting the popular prevalence of mediated crime imagery, the interpersonal negotiation of style within criminal and deviant subcultures, and the emergence of larger symbolic universes within which crime takes on political meaning. These understandings of deviance, crime, and crime control as social and political constructions, and this endeavor to unravel the mediated processes through which these constructions occur, also build on more recent constructionist perspectives in sociology (for example, Best 1995). Yet while cultural criminology certainly draws on constructionist sociology, it also contributes to constructionist orientations. As many of the essays in this collection show, cultural criminological perspectives embody a sensitivity to mediated circuits of meaning other than those of the mass media. Further, they offer a spiraling postmodern sensibility, moving beyond the dualisms of crime event and media coverage, factual truth and distortion, which at times frame constructionist analyses, to a conception of multiple, interwoven constructions of crime, deviance, and control contested within a world of ceaseless intertextuality.

Finally, cultural criminology emerges in many ways out of critical traditions in sociology, criminology, and cultural studies, incorporating as it does a variety of critical perspectives on deviance, crime, and crime control. Utilizing these perspectives, cultural criminologists attempt to unravel the politics of crime as played out through mediated anticrime campaigns; through evocative cultural constructions of deviance, crime, and margin- ality; and through criminalized subcultures and their resistance to legal control. To the extent that it integrates interact ion ist, constructionist, and critical traditions in sociology, cultural criminology thus undertakes to develop what Cohen has called “a structurally and politically informed version of labeling theory” (1988:68), or what Melossi (1985) has described as a “grounded labeling theory”—that is, an analysis that accounts for the complex circuitry of mediated interaction through which the meaning of crime and deviance is constructed, attributed, and enforced. Put more simply, cultural criminology heeds Becker’s classic injunction—that we “look at all the people involved in any episode of alleged deviance . . . all the parties to a situation, and their relationships” (1963:183, 199)—and includes in this collective examination those cultural relationships, those webs of contested meaning and perception, in which all parties are entangled.

In its mix of historical and theoretical foundations, cultural criminology can thus be seen to incorporate both more traditional sociological perspectives and more recently ascendant cultural studies and postmodern approaches. As such, cultural criminology likewise embodies the creative tension in which sociology and cultural studies/postmodernism often exist (for example, Becker and McCall 1990; Denzin 1992), a tension that at its best produces attentiveness to structures of power and nuances of meaning, to fixed symbolic universes and emergent codes of marginality, to the mediated expansion of legal control and the stylized undermining of legal authority—and to the inevitable confounding of these very categories in the everyday practice of deviance, crime, and control.

CONTEMPORARY AREAS OF INQUIRY

Framed by these historical and theoretical orientations, cultural criminological research and analysis, as utilized in Making Trouble and elsewhere, today operates within a number of overlapping areas. The first of these can be characterized by the notion of “crime and deviance as culture.” A second broad area incorporates the variety of ways in which media dynamics construct the reality of deviance, crime, and crime control. A third explores the social politics of “making trouble” and the intellectual politics of cultural criminology. Finally, a fourth emerging area incorporates those substantive and analytic innovations that the essays collected in Making Trouble contribute to the development of cultural criminology.

Crime and Deviance as Culture

To speak of crime and deviance as culture is to acknowledge at a minimum that much of what we label criminal or deviant behavior is at the same time cultural and subcultural behavior, collectively organized around networks of symbol, ritual, and shared meaning. While this general insight is hardly a new one, cultural criminology develops it in a number of directions. Bringing a postmodern sensibility to their understanding of deviant and criminal subcultures, cultural criminologists argue that such subcultures incorporate—indeed, are defined by—elaborate conventions of argot, appearance, aesthetics, and stylized presentation of self, and thus operate as repositories of collective meaning and representation for their members. Taken into a mediated world of dislocated communication and dispersed meaning, this insight further implies that deviant and criminal subcultures may now be exploding into universes of symbolic communication that in many ways transcend time and space. For computer hackers, graffiti writers, drug runners, and others, a mix of widespread spatial dislocation and precise normative organization implies subcultures defined less by face- to-face interaction than by shared, if secondhand, symbolic codes (Celder and Thornton 1997:473-550).

Understandably, then, much research in this area of cultural criminology has focused on the dispersed dynamics of subcultural style. Following from Hebdige’s (1979) classic exploration of “subculture: the meaning of style,” cultural criminologists have investigated style as shaping both the internal characteristics of deviant and criminal subcultures and external constructions of them. Miller (1995), for example, has documented the many ways in which gang symbolism and style exist as the medium of meaning for both street gang members and the probation officers who attempt to control them. Reading gang styles as emblematic of gang immersion and gang defiance, enforcing court orders prohibiting gang clothing, confiscating gang paraphernalia, and displaying their confiscated collections on their own office walls, the probation officers in Miller’s study construct the meanings of gang style as surely as do the gang members themselves. Likewise, Ferrell (1995a, 1996) has shown how contemporary hip hop graffiti exists essentially as a “crime of style” for graffiti writers, who operate and evaluate one another within complex stylistic and symbolic conventions, but also as a crime of style for media institutions and legal and political authorities, who perceive graffiti as violating the “aesthetics of authority” essential to their ongoing power and control. More broadly, Ferrell has explored style as “that most delicate but resilient of connecting tissues between cultural and criminal practices” (1995b:169), and examined the ways in which subcultural style shapes not only aesthetic communities, but official and unofficial reactions to subcultural identity. Finally, Lyng and Bracey (1995) have documented the multiply ironic process by which the style of the outlaw biker subculture came first to signify class-based cultural resistance, next to elicit the sorts of media reactions and legal controls that in fact amplified and confirmed its meaning, and finally to be appropriated and commodified in such a way as to void its political potential. Significantly, these and other studies (for example, Cosgrove 1984) demonstrate that the importance of illicit style resides not simply within the dynamics of deviant or criminal subcultures, nor in media and political constructions of its meaning, but in the contested interplay of the two.

In Making Trouble this exploration of subculture, style, and mediated response continues. In her chapter, “Punky in the Middle,” for example, Lauraine Leblanc documents the complex and often contradictory processes by which politicians, the police, and the media constructed the meaning of the 1996 punk uprisings in Montreal, partially in response to the “spectacular forms of subcultural deviance,” “stylistic innovation,” and “sartorial terrorism” that the punks put on display. Similarly, Karim Murji’s chapter, “Wild Life: Constructions and Representations of Yardies,” explores the ways in which the cultural and media construction of the Jamaican “yardie” criminal in Great Britain draws on and reproduces stylized, stereotypical images of ethnicity and ethnic subcultures. Alternatively, Jeff Ferrell’s chapter, “Freight Train Graffiti: Subculture, Media, Dislocation,” documents the U.S. hip hop graffiti underground’s use of shared symbolic and stylistic codes in constructing its own media of long-distance communication.

Media Constructions of Deviance, Crime, and Control

Cultural criminology incorporates a wealth of research on mediated characterizations of deviance, crime, and crime control, ranging across historical and contemporary texts and investigating images generated in newspaper reporting, popular film, television news and entertainment programming, popular music, comic books, and the cyberspaces of the Internet. To this diverse body of scholarship Making Trouble contributes research on a variety of contemporary media forms—television news and entertainment, newspaper reporting, popular film, alternative media—and provides important historical perspective as well. Jon’a Meyer’s chapter, “The Elders Were Our Textbooks,” investigates an often overlooked medium: the telling of traditional stories as a means of constructing understandings of deviance, crime, and control. In their chapter “The Historical Roots of Tabloid TV Crime,” Paul Kooistra and John Mahoney likewise document the often unnoticed historical antecedents of contemporary tabloid television and “reality-based” crime programming. Gray Cavender, in his chapter “Detecting Masculinity,” in turn explores significant historical changes in ideologies of crime and masculinity, as circulated through past and present popular films.

Further, as Neil Websdale’s chapter in this collection, “Police Homicide Files as Situated Media Substrates,” suggests, cultural criminologists explore the complex institutional and informational interconnections between the criminal justice system and the mass media. Researchers like Chermak (1995, 1997, 1998) and Sanders and Lyon (1995) have documented not only the mass media’s heavy reliance on criminal justice sources for imagery and information on crime, but more importantly, the reciprocal relationship that undergirds this reliance. Working within organizational imperatives of efficiency and routinization, media institutions regularly rely on data selectively provided by policing and court agencies. In so doing, they highlight for the public those issues chosen by criminal justice institutions and framed by criminal justice imperatives, and the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Constructions of History and Myth
• Part III Constructions of Gender and Crime
• Part IV Constructions of Subculture and Crime
• Part V Constructions of Policing and Control
• Part VI Constructions of Crime and Terrorism
• Part VII Conclusions and Prospects
• Biographical Sketches of the Contributors
• Index