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Crime, Media, Culture

Journal Description

Crime, Media, Culture

Crime, Media, Culture is a fully peer reviewed, international journal providing the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars who are working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry. It promotes a broad cross-disciplinary understanding of the relationship between crime, criminal justice, media and culture.

The crime/media/culture nexus speaks to many whose work is embedded in theories of social relations and social change, and therefore maintains high relevance across the full spectrum of social sciences and humanities. Crime, Media, Culture provides a unique and much needed forum for serious debate underpinned by empirically novel and/or theoretically rigorous research.

“Somewhere between criminology and cultural studies in an area of excitement. It is here where the cultural shift is most evident and where a journal like Crime, Media, Culture can provide just the right lens at the right time” Jock Young, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA and University of Canterbury, UK

“Crime, Media, Culture acknowledges what so many scholars have long recognized, namely the critical importance of media and cultural representations in shaping popular stereotypes of crime and justice, and thus of official policies. All the better the journal’s international nature promises a long overdue integration of existing scholarship in North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. I am delighted to be associated with this project” Philip Jenkins, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Access all issues of Crime, Media, Culture on SAGE Journals Online.

This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Journal Feed

  • Book review: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
    by Edward LW Green
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • “I don’t like guns but having one in Winnipeg right now would feel safer”: Crime, liquor theft, and online fantasies of punishment and control
    by Katharina Maier
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In 2018–2019, there was a surge of local news media coverage in Winnipeg, Canada about what news media described as “brazen” liquor store theft. Online discussion and social media platforms provided segments of the public with opportunities to assert claims about the causes and consequences of this putative crime wave as well as potential solutions within and outside the penal system. These online fora allowed internet communities to imagine new methods of crime control and vocalize a range of emotions about crime and punishment. Employing a thematic analysis of reader comments across several online […]
  • ‘It’s tantalising evidence . . . . but you’ve got to look at the wider picture’: Rap music as evidence in joint enterprise cases
    by Tara Young
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article explores the growing trend of using rap lyrics and music videos as evidence in criminal trials and considers the discriminatory implications of such practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 43 police staff (officers and civillian investigators) and lawyers experienced in investigating, prosecuting or defending cases of serious violence, it focuses on instances where ‘joint enterprise’ (or secondary liability in criminal law) has been invoked to charge and prosecute groups of individuals. The findings reveal that despite legal safeguards designed to prevent prejudicial use of such evidence, its application persists in serious youth […]
  • Human control and ‘management’ of nonhuman animals: New research directions for green criminology
    by Anna Di Ronco
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article enriches and invigorates the green criminological scholarship concerned with nonhuman animals by proposing two research directions centred around the critical analysis of human control and ‘management’ of wild animals. While the first of these directions considers the control of animals in the city, the second draws on green cultural criminology to deconstruct and unravel cultural, mediated and political dynamics surrounding nonhuman animal ‘management’. The article concludes by contending that, following these lines of research, green criminologists can contribute to reducing human-animal conflicts in the city and beyond, while also offering new ways […]
  • Review essay
    by Anita Lam
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Legal hostilities: Navigating queerness, emotion, and space in asylum law
    by Senthorun Raj
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Asylum laws, policies, and bureaucracies are structured by spatializing logics of emotion such as compassion, sympathy, fear, anxiety, and hostility. For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people who seek asylum, legal recognition as a refugee is contingent on the extent to which receiving states believe they are deserving of compassion and care. This materializes spatially through racialized legal and administrative cartographies of safety and danger that position LGBTIQ people as being at risk of a “well-founded fear” of persecution. Meanwhile, those LGBTIQ people who seek asylum in a “disorderly” manner or […]
  • Why young adults consume media content about serial killers: Evidence from Russia
    by Ekaterina Gulina
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article explores Russian young adults’s motives for consuming media content related to serial killers. Based on a sociological perspective of consumption, the research integrates concepts such as consumerism and “new hedonism” postulated by Campbell with Giddens’s structuration theory and Goffman’s stigma theory. We argue that consumerists’ motivations and images of serial killers are products of modernity. A total of 26 semi-structured online interviews were conducted with young adults aged 18–35 years from 14 cities in Russia. We then performed a thematic qualitative analysis using the AtlasTI software. Our findings show that consumers of […]
  • ‘I’ve seen people on the train, like really weird people’ hauntological reflections on the fear of crime
    by Alex Simpson
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. By exploring the hauntological dimensions of fear of crime, this article proposes that this phenomenon exists as an ontological absence that manifests through the spectacle of crime’s imaginary, shaping thoughts, emotions, and movements. In so doing, we highlight fear of crime’s alignment with Fisher’s concept of the eerie – a presence that at once indicates an absence and an object that points to nothing beyond itself. Building on this foundation, we incorporate Simmel’s rendering of the Stranger and Casey’s theorization of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places to argue that fear of crime is not solely […]
  • Review essay: Attica is a paradigm
    by Judah Schept
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Humor, resistance, and the power of images: The case for studying prison cartoons
    by Arden Richards-Karamarkovich
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune, an American prison newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s, we highlight how incarcerated artists used satirical humor to convey the harms of imprisonment and express their agency in the face of penal oppression. […]
  • Book review: Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood
    by Tony Jefferson
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Book review: Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination
    by Jordana Silverstein
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Cultural criminology, counter-extremism and the contemporary far right
    by Tony Karas
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This article draws together existing criminological work as well as developments from sociology, political science and media studies to argue that cultural criminology can offer a useful corrective to current ‘counter-extremist’ thinking about the contemporary far right. The first part of the article introduces the contemporary far right, describes how it differs from previous instances, and explains that this resurgent far-right movement has to date primarily been analysed through the lens of ‘counter-extremism’. The second part of the article problematises the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’. The article argues that these concepts are […]
  • Problematising anabolic-androgenic steroids in Australian media: Violence, crime and disordered masculinity
    by Katinka van de Ven
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. As anabolic-androgenic steroid use has become more mainstream, so has media reporting on steroid-related problems and harms. The media is a particularly important site in shaping the social meanings of alcohol and other drug use, yet no research to date has focused on media representations of steroids and their effects. Informed by Bacchi’s post-structural method of problematisation analysis, we examine how the Australian news media problematises steroids and significant political effects produced by dominant problematisations. Australian news articles from 37 sources were electronically collected via the Factiva database during 2022, with 151 articles included […]
  • Book Review: Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown
    by Tom Rice
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Doing good, doing wrong, doing time and doing harm: Criminalising the marginal in charity shops
    by Alida Payson
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. This paper builds upon theories of carceral spatiality and criminalisation to explore the extension of the carceral state into everyday spaces. In particular, here we consider the UK charity shop, which not only covertly relies on carceral labour from people ‘doing time’, but also abets the carceral state by criminalising everyday lives on the social and economic margins, thereby doing harm. Moreover, this criminalisation means charity shops become part of a broader system of governing in which social issues are treated as criminal problems with carceral solutions. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork in charity […]
  • Civil War: A film review
    by Avi Brisman
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • School Copaganda in the US South: Tinsel, twinkle, and police-youth programming
    by Hannah Carson Baggett
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print. Told in schools across the US for decades, Officer Friendly is a story about policing. Through the literal reading of books like Miss Frances’ 1953 Your Friend the Policeman, visits from McGruff the Crime Dog, and even the ever-expanding TikTok world of dancing SROs, the story remains the same: police keep us safe from the bad guys. In this paper, we draw on data from school and police social media accounts in a community in Alabama to expose the bad faith underpinnings of this story, and how it functions through ‘friendly’ police-youth programming in […]
  • Book review: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences
    by Victoria Inzana
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • Book review: A Philosophical History of Police Power
    by Quinn Lester
    Crime, Media, Culture, Ahead of Print.