Crime and Culture in America

Crime and Culture in America PDF Author: Parviz Saney
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Saney cogently argues that in the absence of adequate support within social and legal norms, a heavy burden is placed upon the criminal justice system, a burden that it cannot carry. Criminal law and the courts fail to provide for either swiftness or certainty of punishment; police have failed to overcome the basic American distrust of authority to gain the comparable support enjoyed by police in other countries; and the penal system operates under contradictory goals, isolated from public view or support. The final chapter presents a succinct set of proposals for changing the justice system to one that would be humane and more just. Choice This thought-provoking study of the crime problem in America provides an in-depth look at the sociological forces that are dominant in today's society and examines the possible influence of certain contemporary values and perceptions on criminal activity, the quality of justice in the American courts, and the attitude of the general public. The author discusses the various factors that can affect or encourage criminal behavior and relates these directly to the way people feel and respond to the incidence of crime and its punishment, and to a growing lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Crime in America is first presented in a factual context, followed by a discussion of its cultural influences, and finally with a consideration of its criminal law aspects.

Crime and Culture in America

Crime and Culture in America PDF Author: Parviz Saney
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Saney cogently argues that in the absence of adequate support within social and legal norms, a heavy burden is placed upon the criminal justice system, a burden that it cannot carry. Criminal law and the courts fail to provide for either swiftness or certainty of punishment; police have failed to overcome the basic American distrust of authority to gain the comparable support enjoyed by police in other countries; and the penal system operates under contradictory goals, isolated from public view or support. The final chapter presents a succinct set of proposals for changing the justice system to one that would be humane and more just. Choice This thought-provoking study of the crime problem in America provides an in-depth look at the sociological forces that are dominant in today's society and examines the possible influence of certain contemporary values and perceptions on criminal activity, the quality of justice in the American courts, and the attitude of the general public. The author discusses the various factors that can affect or encourage criminal behavior and relates these directly to the way people feel and respond to the incidence of crime and its punishment, and to a growing lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Crime in America is first presented in a factual context, followed by a discussion of its cultural influences, and finally with a consideration of its criminal law aspects.

The Culture of Crime

The Culture of Crime PDF Author: Boaz Ganor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138535015
Category : Crime and the press
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation "story" than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them. The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity¿from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press. The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.

Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture PDF Author: Lindsay Steenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136177361
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book identifies, traces, and interrogates contemporary American culture's fascination with forensic science. It looks to the many different sites, genres, and media where the forensic has become a cultural commonplace. It turns firstly to the most visible spaces where forensic science has captured the collective imagination: crime films and television programs. In contemporary screen culture, crime is increasingly framed as an area of scientific inquiry and, even more frequently, as an area of concern for female experts. One of the central concerns of this book is the gendered nature of expert scientific knowledge, as embodied by the ubiquitous character of the female investigator. Steenberg argues that our fascination with the forensic depends on our equal fascination with (and suspicion of) women's bodies—with the bodies of the women investigating and with the bodies of the mostly female victims under investigation.

Crime and the American Dream

Crime and the American Dream PDF Author: Steven F. Messner
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781133528647
Category : Anomy
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
How has America's over-emphasis on the pursuit of materialistic gain contributed to the it's high rate of violent crime? CRIME AND THE AMERICAN DREAM, 5E, International Edition is an easy-to-understand book that attempts to answer that question using seminal criminological theory.

The Crime Without a Name

The Crime Without a Name PDF Author: Barrett Holmes Pitner
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640095594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In this incisive blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry, journalist and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner seeks a new way to talk about racism in America An NPR Best Book of the Year Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term "genocide"), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America PDF Author: Barry Latzer
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039305
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such levels that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday behaviors and even lifestyles. The risk of being mugged was a concern when Americans chose places to live and schools for their children, selected commuter routes to work, and planned their leisure activities. In some locales, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the market. In the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is the first book to comprehensively examine this important phenomenon over the entire postwar era. It combines a social history of the United States with the insights of criminology and examines the relationship between rising and falling crime and such historical developments as the postwar economic boom, suburbanization and the rise of the middle class, baby booms and busts, war and antiwar protest, the urbanization of minorities, and more.

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture PDF Author: Dimitris Akrivos
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030049124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book explores the links between crime, deviance and popular culture in our highly-mediatised era, offering an insight into the cultural processes through which particular practices acquire a criminal or deviant status, and come to be seen as social problems. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the edited collection brings together international scholars across various areas of specialisation to provide an up-to-date analysis of some important and topical issues in 21st-century popular culture. The chapters look at different aspects of popular culture, including fictional detective narratives and the true crime genre, popular media constructions of sexual deviance and Islamophobia, sports, graffiti and outlaw biker subcultures. The authors examine a wide range of relevant case studies through a number of crime and deviance-related theories. Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture will be of importance to scholars and students across several disciplines, including criminology, sociology of deviance, social anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, television studies and linguistics.

Crime and Culture

Crime and Culture PDF Author: René Lévy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351947621
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

Governing Through Crime

Governing Through Crime PDF Author: Jonathan Simon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195181085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.

Crime, Culture and the Media

Crime, Culture and the Media PDF Author: Eamonn Carrabine
Publisher: Polity
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Why are newspapers and television programmes filled with stories about crime and criminals? Is their portrayal of crime accurate? How do the media transform our attitudes to crime? Is fear of crime, for example, really created by the media? The relationships between crime and the media have long been the subject of intense debate. From the earliest days of the printing press to the explosion of cyberspace chat rooms, there have been persistent concerns about the harmful criminogenic effects of the media. At the same time, the media are fascinated with crime – on the news, in films and on television there are countless stories about crime, both real and imagined. In this innovative and accessible new book, Eamonn Carrabine carefully untangles these debates, and grapples with the powerful dynamics of fear and desire that underlie our obsession with crime. Chapter-by-chapter the book introduces the different ways in which relationships between crime and the media have been understood, including classic debates about the media’s effects, news production, and moral panics, as well as more cutting-edge studies of the representation of crime in the contemporary media. Combining empirical research findings with the latest theoretical developments, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduates and graduate students across the social sciences, especially those taking courses in criminology and media studies.