Making Crime Television

Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast

Anita Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134114450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material conditions under which those meanings are formulated.

Using ethnographic and interview data, Anita Lam considers how textual representations of crime are assembled by various people (including writers, directors, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (screenwriting software and whiteboards), and texts (newspaper articles and rival crime dramas). The emerging analysis does not project but instead concretely examines what and how television writers and producers know about crime, law and policing. An adequate understanding of the representation of crime, it is maintained, cannot be limited to a content analysis that treats the representation as a final product. Rather, a television representation of crime must be seen as the result of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests, legal requirements, and broadcasting networks. A fascinating investigation into the relationship between television production, crime, and the law, this book is an accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media, and Criminology.

Chapter 1

Setting the stage: a literature review and analysis

In anticipation of the dawn of the twenty-first century, David Garland and Richard Sparks (2000) set out a programmatic research agenda that would re-conceptualize the discipline of criminology. They argue that academic criminology no longer monopolizes contemporary criminological discourse in society. Instead, this discourse can now be found circulating in public policy and popular culture often with little reference to or understanding of academic criminology. While academic criminology has historically focused on how public policy has constituted the issues of crime and crime control, it has generally ignored popular culture’s criminological discourse. However, Garland and Sparks note that if academic criminology is to remain relevant today, it needs to understand the terms in which crime and crime control are being debated and discussed in popular culture. In seeking continued relevance, criminologists have embraced cultural studies in order to examine pop culture (Garland 2006). Pop culture is primarily conceptualized as the contex-tual domain of images, representations and meanings, many of which are mass-mediated. However, this enthusiastic embrace has generally occurred without much critical contemplation of exactly what it means to study culture (Garland 2006), particularly the production of mass-mediated, cultural representations. For the most part, this lack of critical reflection can be read as another instantiation of the observation that criminology has occurred largely in ignorance of recent conceptual debates in cultural studies (Carrabine 2008: 44) and in media studies (Sparks 1992). As a result, criminologists have tended to write as though there exists a singular culture industry (also known as the media) that is similarly responsible for all kinds of cultural product, all of which are presumed to generate negative effects on mass audiences regardless of medium.

To analyze this intellectual tendency, this chapter is organized into three parts. In Part 1, I will give a brief descriptive overview of the different banners under which research on media, culture and crime has proceeded. In Part 2, I will analyze the primary approaches that have been used by both criminologists and sociolegal scholars to study mass-mediated pop cultural representations. Implicitly, these scholars have proceeded under the assumption that culture is an industry that uses an assembly line to mechanically (re)produce homogeneous cultural products for mass consumption.¹ Lastly, in Part 3, I will argue that it is now time to break away from this particular conceptualization of the culture industry, and allow empirical research of the culture industries to anchor scholarly claims of what kinds of representation are produced by these industries and how.

Part 1: literature overview

Although criminology as a discipline can be traced back to the nineteenth century (Foucault 1977), the relationship between crime and culture has received little attention by criminologists until relatively recently (Young 2008). Criminologists interested in crime, media and culture have remarked upon the importance of mass-mediated, cultural representations of crime,² primarily because they constitute a mainstay of cultural consumption. After all, in North America, at least one crime television drama can be viewed in prime time almost any night of the week (Surette 2009). Crime stories are a staple of news media (see Jewkes 2004), and also feature in several movie genres, such as thrillers, police procedurals, and action movies among others. The popularity and prevalence of representations of crime in popular culture is said to be evidence of the public’s growing fascination with crime and criminal justice (Mason 2003). This becomes problematic, especially to criminologists, because most ordinary people have limited direct experience or contact with criminal justice matters and rely on these media representations for their knowledge of such matters. Consequently, public consumption of media representations of crime is thought to affect public perceptions of criminals, victims and the criminal justice system (Mason 2003). As a result, the body of literature on crime, media and pop culture has been dominated by research on the effects of media representations on people’s behaviour, fear of crime and ideological orientation (Carrabine 2008; Ericson 1991; Mason 2003; Reiner 2007). When studying media, criminologists have tended to focus on the (print) news media and the construction of crime news stories (e.g. Cohen and Young 1973; Ericson et al. 1987, 1991; Peelo 2006; Soothill and Walby 1991). However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, criminologists have also increasingly attended to fictional representations of crime in films and on television (e.g. Rafter 2000, 2007; Valverde 2006).

Despite a shared interest in examining the intersection of crime, media and culture, criminologists have undertaken research on media representations of crime in popular culture under different banners: cultural criminology and popular criminology. In conceiving of popular criminology, criminologists have modelled this field of inquiry on popular legal studies and the interrelated study of law and film.

Cultural criminology

Studies of both news and fictional representations of crime have recently been subsumed under the banner of cultural criminology, which became a notable intellectual movement in criminology within the last decade. As Alison Young (2008) notes, however, there are two strands of cultural criminology – namely, what she calls 1) subcultural criminology and 2) criminological aesthetics, each operating from different theoretical departure points.

Subcultural criminology

While subcultural criminology was more or less inaugurated by the publication of Jeff Ferrell and Clinton Sanders’ Cultural Criminology (1995), it was not introduced to the wider community of criminologists until 2004 through the publication of a special issue of the journal Theoretical Criminology (see also Ferrell, Hayward, Morrison, and Presdee 2004). In presenting this new criminological perspective, Keith Hayward and Jock Young (2004: 259) described it in the following terms:

[Cultural criminology] is the placing of crime and its control in the context of culture; that is, viewing both crime and the agencies of control as cultural products – as creative constructs. As such, they must be read in terms of the meanings they carry. Furthermore, cultural criminology seeks to highlight the interaction between these two elements … Its focus is always upon the continuous generation of meaning around interaction; rules created, rules broken, a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, moral innovation and transgression.

In its manifesto form, subcultural criminology seeks to differentiate itself from what Hayward and Young (2004) call ‘conventional’ or ‘administrative’ criminology, which is a criminological perspective dominated by the instrumental and rational narratives of rational choice theory and positivism. In distinguishing itself, subcultural criminology’s ‘terms of engagement’ are precisely binary opposites to those of ‘conventional’ criminology. ‘Conventional’ criminology privileges the use of quantitative methodologies; subcultural criminology uses qualitative methodologies, such as ethnography and qualitative content analyses. While ‘conventional’ criminology theorizes human subjects as rational beings, subcultural criminologists emphasize their ‘irrationality’ by focusing on their emotions. In particular, subcultural criminologists follow Jack Katz’s (1988) insight that the act of (criminal) transgression is pleasurable, by focusing on the joys of transgression and the ‘delight of deviance’ (e.g. Presdee 2000). In contrast to ‘conventional’ criminology’s focus on the community of victims and their fear of crime, subcultural criminologists tend to focus on subcultural participants (e.g. joy riders, gang members, young people at raves, graffiti artists, etc.). Their interest in media representations is related to the extent to which those representations make an impact on the style and aesthetic of subcultural participants, subjects who are theorized as consumers of mass mediated crime images.

In their understanding of media, subcultural criminologists primarily draw upon scholarly work done in the 1970s (Young 2008) – specifically, Stuart Hall et al.’s (1978) Policing the Crisis and Stanley Cohen’s (1972) early work on moral panics. Thus, subcultural criminologists endorse Hall et al.’s (1978) insight that the mass media play a highly significant role in both the labelling and communication of deviant subcultural identity, by fuelling moral panics. Hall et al. (1978) examined the moral panic surrounding mugging in Britain during the early 1970s. They connected the moral panic about mugging to the larger panic about the steadily rising rate of violent crime throughout the 1960s. Both of these panics, however, were about things other than crime per se (Hall et al. 1978: vii): as a condensation symbol for race, youth, and crime, mugging was a sign that the British way of life was falling apart, social order was disintegrating, and that society was in crisis. Mugging was used as an opportunity by the British state to construct an authoritarian consensus and to mobilize a law-and-order ideology. Similarly, in Cohen’s (1972) analysis of the British mass media’s construction of confrontations between the Mods and the Rockers in the 1960s, he demonstrated how the media demonized ‘deviants’ to reinforce society’s boundaries of normality and order. While both are seminal works, it should be noted that both Hall et al.’s (1978) and Cohen’s (1972) analyses are based on news representations rather than other kinds of fictional representation. The question remains to what extent insights derived from analyses of news representations can be applied without modification to understanding how fictional representations are produced, distributed and consumed.

Criminological aesthetics

Criminological aesthetics is a semiotic, textually oriented approach to analyzing the construction of crime as an image (Biber 2007; Hutchings 2001; Valier 2004), paying close attention to framing and editing devices as well as the linguistic tricks and turns through which crime becomes a topic (Young 1996: 16). This perspective begins with the observation that crime’s images are structured according to a binary logic of representation: ‘Oppositional terms (man/woman, white/black, rational/irrational, mind/body, and so on) are constructed in a system of value which makes one visible and the other invisible’ (Young 1996: 1). The important point of analytic focus is not on the image’s production, but on its interpretation by a spectator. According to Alison Young (2008: 24), criminological aesthetics pays attention to ‘the matrix of intersections between spectator, the image and the context of reception.’ For Young, these three terms are knit together through her definition of imagination: as the process by which people make images of crime, imagination evokes the drive of spectatorship, which turns on processes of identification with, in and as law and against crime and disorder. By and large, spectator identification is explored through the way a text constructs implied readers or viewers, and does not generally entail empirical research on the reception and identification of actual readers or viewers.

Popular criminology and popular legal studies

In the first comprehensive study of the genre of crime films done by a criminologist, Nicole Rafter (2000: 7) examines the content of such Hollywood films not for their accuracy, but for the ideological messages embedded in their narratives and imagery. More importantly, she begins to think through the implications of popular criminology. Crime films offer popular criminological explanations about who is a criminal, what is a crime, and what are the causes of criminal behaviour. They also tend to reflect the criminological theories in vogue at the moment they are produced (Rafter 2000: 48). For example, when criminological theories in the 1930s highlighted inner-city conditions and immigration as the causes of crime, films focused on ethnic mobsters’ struggles for control in urban settings. When Freudian explanations of crime became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, films began to present morally twisted characters in need of psychoanalytic diagnoses. However, crime films also continue to recycle discredited criminological theories. While academic criminologists move on to new theories of crime and criminal behaviour, crime films do not necessarily follow suit. Instead, they continue to represent the same kinds of popular criminological explanation irrespective of scientific credibility. While this tends to frustrate academic criminologists, it does not follow that they should ignore popular criminology.

Rafter (2007: 415) defines popular criminology as a category composed of discourses about crime found in film, on the Internet, on television, in newspapers, novels, rap music, and myth. Popular criminology, Rafter argues, covers much more territory than academic criminology in terms of raising ethical and philosophical issues. More importantly, it has greater social significance because it is more accessible and has a bigger audience than academic criminology. By presenting itself as scientific through the undramatic and dispassionate presentation of facts, theories and conclusions, academic criminology avoids the accessibility provided by popular criminology, effectively burying itself in ‘the catacombs of conferences, journals and books’ and the use of ‘obfuscatory language and footnotes’ (Rawlings 1998: 1–2). Despite the tension that exists between academic criminology and popular criminology, Rafter claims that they should be considered complementary discourses and ways of knowing about crime that exist under the larger umbrella category of criminology.

Because Rafter’s conceptualization of popular criminology has been informed and inspired by popular legal studies, it would be worthwhile to consider the research questions that have stimulated the sociolegal study of popular culture. Popular legal studies (e.g. Chase 1986; Friedman 1988–9; Macaulay 1988–9) began in the form of discussions about how to study law and film. Film was taken as an example, and sometimes an exemplar, of a highly influential pop cultural product that sociolegal scholars should study because of their impact on ordinary people’s perceptions of law. For example, as the first scholar to propose the study of law and film, Anthony Chase (1986) also proposed the creation of a systematic legal theory of American popular culture. He argued that pop cultural formats (e.g. fiction and non-fiction television, film, pop music and advertising) provide a fertile ground for a ‘primitive accumulation’ of mass culture’s images of law and lawyers. An analysis of prime time, fictional television representations of law could be considered raw material for the popular social imagination, and offered a revealing look at American attitudes towards law and lawyers.

In general, there are three underlying assumptions that anchor the body of work done under the framework of popular legal studies. First, popular legal studies consider popular culture itself as a medium with a distinct format (Sherwin 2000). For example, William MacNeil (2007) examines various pop cultural texts without attention to their medium specificity. He considers fictional television series, novels, and film as exemplary instances of ‘people’s law’ or lex populi, all of which serve to deliver jurisprudence from the rarified domain of legal professors to the public domain of the masses. The specific medium of various pop cultural products does not matter to these sociolegal researchers because they are more interested in the messages being transmitted by particular informational sources.

Second, from the beginning, popular legal studies was conceived as closely connected to considerations of ordinary people’s perceptions of law. It sought to read pop cultural texts as evidence of people’s attitudes towards law and justice. For example, Stephen Gillers (1988–9: 1622) argues that the popular television drama LA Law (1986–1994), broadcast to millions of viewers, ‘may be seen as the single most important influence on the popular conception of lawyers’ work and ethics. Accordingly, it may be criticized when it comes to distort what it pretends to describe.’ Thus, Gillers provides a justification for corrective criticism: Because pop cultural texts are conceptualized as having such an immense effect on people’s perceptions of law, sociolegal scholars need to highlight the gaps between (representations of) law in pop culture and (sociolegal representations of) law in action. The scholarly focus on the gap is in keeping with the tradition of sociolegal research, which has tended to focus on the gap between law on the books and the law in action (Sarat 1985; Sarat and Silbey 1988). Read within this tradition, popular legal studies merely highlight yet another gap to study. Like popular legal studies, popular criminology, as formulated by Rafter (2007: 415), also seeks to analyze the process through which popular criminology affects ordinary people’s beliefs and perceptions about crime. In particular, academic criminologists should pay attention to how information about crime from popular criminological sources is organized in people’s minds as frames and then as schemata.

Lastly, popular legal scholars are concerned with the effects of pop cultural texts on both ordinary people and on legal practitioners. The focus on ordinary people is often related to a concern that they will one day serve as jurors, and that their jury duty will be impacted by their consumption of pop cultural products. Certainly, this concern fuelled research on the CSI effect. There has been additional concern that the consumption of pop cultural products also shapes legal practices. In Law Goes Pop (2000: 17), Richard Sherwin asks what effect pop cultural forms, like advertising, Hollywood films, and television dramas, have on legal practice. He argues that as visual media, film and television have significantly altered the storytelling strategies used in the courtroom by trial lawyers, by highlighting the efficacy of visual persuasion. Because images are easily accessible (i.e. no training is required to understand them) and credible through the myth of ‘seeing is believing,’ they are especially persuasive to juries. Unlike MacNeil (2007), Sherwin (2000) sees the popularization of law in negative terms: when law goes pop, the ideals of law and justice are tarnished, by the mixing of fact with fic...