Gray Cavender

CSI and moral authority: The police and science

Since it first aired in 2000, CSI has consistently been among the top-rated television programs in the United States. In this article, we analyze CSI’s debut season and also include observations about the program today as well as its two spin-offs: CSI: NY and CSI: Miami. We are interested in the cultural meanings conveyed in this very popular forensic crime drama, especially in terms of the moral authority of the police and of science. We consider how CSI uses the conventions of the crime genre to assert the police as a moral authority. We also demonstrate how CSI portrays a sense of forensic realism, and, in so doing, asserts the veracity of science. We conclude with a discussion of what these meanings suggest about the legitimacy of policing and of science.

Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs

In eleven original studies by social scientists, this is the first volume to focus on television reality crime programming as a genre. Contributors address such questions as: why do these programs exist; what larger cultural meaning do they have; what effect do they have on audiences; and what do they indicate about crime and justice in the late twentieth century? Adaptable at both undergraduate and graduate levels, Entertaining Crime will contribute to discussions of crime and the media, as well as crime in relation to other issues, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and fear of crime.

Media and Crime Policy A Reconsideration of David Garland’s The Culture of Control

In this article, I use the tenets of media studies scholarship to reformulate David Garland’s account of the shifts in sanctioning policy that began in the 1970s. I address the media’s prominent role in shaping public mentalities and sensibilities that were incompatible with penal welfarism and supportive of more punitive policies. In particular, I analyze media coverage of the policy debate and also dramatic depictions of crime. I argue that the media were more influential in shaping public attitudes toward sanctioning policy than Garland suggests.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN REALITY CRIME TV

This article focuses on the social construction of femininity in a reality television program, Americas Most Wanted. The program blurs fact and fiction in reenactments of actual crimes. The analysis focuses on its depiction of women crime victims. A prior study argues that the program empowers women to speak about their victimization. Other research suggests that such programs make women fearful. The authors compare episodes from the 1988-1989 and the 1995-1996 seasons. Although women spoke about their victimization, men spoke more often and presented master narratives about the crimes. In both seasons, the program imagery emphasized feminine vulnerability to violence from strange, devious, and brutal men and masculine technical expertise and authority as womens protection from such violence.

Trial by fire: Media constructions of corporate deviance

Some scholars blame the low salience of corporate deviance on a lack of media coverage. Others claim that negative coverage might shame corporations into compliance with regulations. We examine how the news frame used to report corporate deviance affects issues of salience and regulation. We create a conceptual model of crime news frames and use it to analyze newspaper coverage of two instances of alleged corporate deviance: claims about the safety of GM trucks and an NBC Dateline program about the trucks. The coverage was shaped by the standard crime news frame, with its features of attribution and individualization of responsibility, maintenance of moral boundaries, and resolution. The reliance on this frame reinforced dominant ideological definitions of corporate deviance that perpetuate its low salience and limit the use of the media as a mechanism for inducing corporate compliance.

Strange Interlude: An Analysis of Juvenile Parole Revocation Decision Making

This paper presents an analysis of the gestait of decision making in 114 revocation hearings held by a juvenile parole board in a western state. The gestait perspective emphasizes the social production of decisions.Revocation decisions were found to be made “backstage” in prehearing conferences which occurred during the interlude between official hearings. In these conferences, decision makers, acting as a team, typed juveniles and agreed on a script to be performed during formal hearings. These decisions, and accounts for them, were embedded in an organizational context of occupational roles, tasks, and resources that maintained individualized justice as the working ideology of juvenile justice.

Enron’s perp walk: Status degradation ceremonies as narrative

The collapse of Enron and revelations about the widespread financial wrongdoing of other corporations prompted congressional hearings in 2002. The hearings culminated in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, legislation that regulates the accounting industry and imposes prison sentences on executives who lie on their corporations’ financial statements. There was extensive media coverage of Enron and the other high-profile corporations and of the congressional hearings into their wrongdoing. In this paper, we analyze the media representations of these matters. We focus on media coverage of the political language that was offered during the hearings, on the media’s own characterizations of these events, and on how the coverage represented corporate wrongdoing and its control. Our analysis is in three parts. First, we track the ‘bad apples’ language that shifted blame from the corporations onto individuals. Second, we consider the angry denunciations from Congress that resemble status degradation ceremonies. Third, we analyze the hearings as representations of the scandal story using a critical dramaturgy. We argue that the hearings became a spectacle that deflected critique from the economy and shored up the legitimacy of the government and the economy. The usage of critical dramaturgy helps us to make sense of criminological research about the public’s sensibilities of corporate crime.

The Baffling Case of the Smoking Gun: The Social Ecology of Political Accounts in the Iran-Contra Affair

Drawing on media coverage and the Tower Commission Report, this paper analyzes the social construction of political accounts in the United States Iran-Contra scandal. The scandal illuminates the dynamics of accounting within a political, organizational context. The analysis demonstrates how information management, a complex division of labor, and boundary control cloud governmental responsibility for the initiatives. Moreover, coverage of political accounts within established news frames highlights questions of individual responsibility and motivation. The political accounts are based on and reinforce underlying assumptions about the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements. Together, these dimensions form a social ecology of political accounts.

Scared Straight: Ideology and the media

One of the more widely publicized presentations about crime is “Scared Straight,” a documentary about a program in which juveniles visit inmates in a New Jersey penitentiary. It is the contention of this article that this film and the accompanying media coverage of it convey an ideology message concerning crime and criminals. Crime is presented as a matter of individual choice that has little relationship to any social variables. Criminals are portrayed in a one-dimensional manner as evil, vicious, and barely human. The documentary is a success because these images of crime and criminals conform to existing stereotypes. Based on these distorted images, the film and media coverage “market” a simplistic solution to crime that is compatible with their presentation of the crime problem.

A critique of sanctioning reform

Over the past decade in the U.S. and, more recently, in England, there has been extensive criticism of existing penal policy. There has been a movement in both countries to abandon the rehabilitative ideal in favor of the justice model. In this paper we analyze the debate over sanctioning that has emerged in the two countries and suggest some caveats about the implications of the justice model as a basis of penal policy. Additionally, we offer some observations about the general context of sanctioning reform.