CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

I am a member of the Sociology Department and Director of the Justice Studies program. I therefore teach mostly criminology and criminal justice courses, but I have also taught courses in race relations and in popular culture. My interest at the present time is not to design a brand new course but rather to add a “cultural studies” perspective to three courses I already teach. They are: (1) Criminology; (2) The Sociology of Organized Crime; and (3) The Sociology of Corrections.

Cultural criminology, as it is known, explores the common ground between cultural and criminal practices in contemporary social life—that is, between collective behavior organized around imagery, style, and symbolic meaning, and that categorized as criminal by legal and political authorities. These intersections of culture and crime have defined the evolution of public controversies past and present and increasingly shape the experience and perception of everyday life. Thus groups and events thought of as cultural are routinely criminalized by moral entrepreneurs, legal and political authorities, and others. And the criminalization campaigns launched against them operate not only by constructing legal statutes and enforcement procedures but by deploying mediated symbols and mobilizing powerful cultural references.

Besides culture as crime, there is also crime as culture—or subculture. Although this is not a new idea, a contemporary “cultural studies” approach adds some significant details. For a criminal subculture is both an association of like-minded people and a network of symbols, meaning, and knowledge organized around the shared aesthetic of the subculture’s members. This aesthetic is the notion of style, which can be “read” in two ways: (1) as defining the meaning of crime and deviance for subcultural participants, agents of social control, consumers of mediated crime images, and others; and (2) as constituting the essential materials out of which criminal projects and identities are constructed and displayed. Moreover, symbolism and style shape the social and legal contexts in which these subcultures are embedded. For both subcultures – and styles – emerge from ethnic, class, age, and gender inequalities, and by turns reproduce and resist them. Criminality and criminalization are therefore cultural practices and must be acknowledged as such.

This is the perspective I will “infuse” into the above-mentioned courses. In Criminology, an introductory course, it will be used to “bracket” the field, looking at theories and their historical emergence as cultural practices themselves, and taking time also to consider newspaper articles, television, and films, as producers of the images which function to define crime. (And, by the same token, I will consider the role of music—especially rap—in elaborating a counter-discourse on the meaning, and aesthetics, of crime.) In the Organized Crime course, however, I will concentrate specifically on the motion picture industry, and look at the way Hollywood has been “screening” gangsters since the 1930’s, creating both a parallel narrative and an emotional subtext. And, lastly, in the Corrections course, I will use a “cultural studies” approach to consider three distinctive narratives: (i) how penology, and the penal system, construct their objects; (ii) how these constructions are mediated and reproduced in films, on television, and by the press; and (iii) how both prison and street subcultures absorb, reflect, and mimic these constructions.

References:

Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough For You?: Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond (Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997)

Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: From Griffith to the Godfather and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton &

Co., 1980)

Jeff Ferrell, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (New York: Garland, 1993)

Jeff Ferrell and Clinton R. Sanders, eds., Cultural Criminology (Boston: Northeastern University Press,

1995)

Jeff Ferrell and Neil Websdale, eds., Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and

Control (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999)

Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance Through Rituals (London: Hutchinson, 1976)

Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978)

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979)

Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books,

1988)

Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1997)

Coramae Richey Mann and Marjorie S. Zatz, eds., Images of Color, Images of Crime (Los Angeles, Ca.:

Roxbury Publishing Co., 1998)

Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch Of

Evil (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

William Eric Perkins, ed., Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996)

David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1996).

William Sanders, Gangbangs and Drive-bys: Grounded Culture and Juvenile Gang Violence (Hawthorne,

NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994)

The Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture