Imagining Crime

Front Cover
SAGE, Dec 18, 1995 - Social Science - 240 pages
This book offers an original and challenging reading of the crimino-legal complex' - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and everyday experiences - in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory.

Through an exploration of the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality, Alison Young exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices. She analyzes the far-reaching effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community and everyday life.

Imagining Crime examines a number of key events and issues which have signalled shifts in the representation of crime. These include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the pleasures of reading detective fiction; ambiguities of victimization and social justice in the city; sacrificial structures in the law's response to conjugal homicide; policing the ethnicity of the illegal' immigrant; defensive responses to the limits of representation in the Bulger affair; the governmental strategies of campaigns against single mothers; and the fatalism of the spectacle of HIV/AIDS in criminal justice policy.

 

Contents

The Bulger Case and the Trauma of the Visible
111
On the Single Mother and
146
HIVAIDS as Spectacle in Criminal Justice
175
The Imagination of Crime
207
Index
227
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