Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

Theoretical Criminology, May 2014: Volume 18, Issue 2

Introduction to special issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment
Nicole Rafter

Seeing things: Violence, voyeurism and the camera
Eamonn Carrabine

In increasingly mediatized cultures it is essential that criminologists develop more sophisticated understandings of the power of images and this article offers such an approach. It begins by setting out some of the relationships between photography and criminology as they have evolved over time to enable a richer understanding of how the modern criminal subject is constructed and how archival practices have a significant bearing on how meanings are organized. The second section develops these arguments by focusing on the controversies generated by four images that are among the most astonishing documents to have survived Auschwitz, providing visual evidence of the ‘crime of crimes’. In the final section the distinctive problems posed whenever images of horrific events are re-presented in artistic contexts are confronted in an effort to build a more critically engaged visual criminology.

From object to encounter: Aesthetic politics and visual criminology
Alison Young

Recent criminological research has engaged with images of crime such that there increasingly appears to exist a need for a specifically visual criminology. Within visual criminology, however, images are frequently constructed as objects of analysis rather than as constitutive elements of the discursive field. This article draws upon the specific context of the social, cultural and legal responses to uncommissioned words and images in public space—street art and graffiti writing. Focusing on one instance of unauthorized image making, I argue for the dynamic role of the image in the constitution of crime in contemporary society and culture, thanks to the affective dimension of the encounter between spectator and image. The complex range of responses to street art and graffiti highlights ways in which visual criminology must ensure that it eschews an object-centred approach to the image, and conceptualize it instead by means of an aesthetic politics of the encounter.

Visual criminology and carceral studies: Counter-images in the carceral age
Michelle Brown

Mass incarceration maps onto global neoliberal carceral formations that, in turn, look very much like a visual iconography of social suffering. Camp or prison-like conditions define the daily life of many of the world’s inhabitants caught in contexts of detention, incarceration, forced migration, and population displacement. Often depicted as abject subjects, actors in carceral contexts and the people who organize with them seek to find strategies of representation that humanize and politicize their existence. This essay attempts to gain a sense of the visual struggles at the heart of these carceral scenes by way of an analysis of the use of images and new media by current and former prisoners, community members, artists, and scholars to counter mass incarceration in the United States. Such scenes are significant sites for examining how a visual criminology might reveal and participate in the contestations and interventions that increasingly challenge the project of mass incarceration.

(Un)seeing like a prison: Counter-visual ethnography of the carceral state
Judah Schept

While prisons proliferate in the rural landscape and sites of penal tourism expand, the carceral state structures the available visual and analytic vantages through which to perceive this growing visibility. Using examples from fieldwork in Kentucky, including Appalachian prison communities and a site of penal tourism, this article proposes ‘counter-visual’ ethnography to better perceive the ideological work that the carceral state performs in the spatial and cultural landscape. A counter-visual ethnography retrains our eyes to see that which is not ‘there’ but which structures the contemporary empirical realities we observe, record, and analyze: the ghosts of racialized regimes past, the sediment of dirty industry that seeps into and imbues the present, and the trans-historical and trans-local circulation of carceral logics and epistemologies. In addition, this article suggests the important role images play in shaping alternative vantages from which to better perceive the carceral state with historical, spatial, and political acuity.

‘No one wins. One side just loses more slowly’: The Wire and drug policy
Stephen Wakeman

This article presents a cultural analysis of HBO’s drama series, The Wire. It is argued here that, as a cultural text, The Wire forms a site of both containment and resistance, of hegemony and change with recourse to the regulation of illicit drug markets. In this sense The Wire constitutes an important cultural paradigm of drug policy debates, one that has significant heuristic implications regarding both the present consequences and future directions of illicit drug policy. Ultimately, it is demonstrated below that through its representations of the tensions and antagonisms characteristic of drug control systems, The Wire reveals larger predicaments of governance faced by neoliberal democracies today.