Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control

by Jeff Ferrell

In Making Trouble leading scholars in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, women's studies, and social history explore the mediated cultural dynamics that construct images and understanding of crime, deviance, and control. Contributors examine the intertwined practices of the mass media, criminal justice agencies, political power holders, and criminal and deviant subcultures in producing and consuming contested representations of legality and illegality. While the collection provides broad analysis of contemporary topics, it also weaves this analysis around a set of innovative and unifying themes. These include the emergence of "situated media" within and between the various subcultures of crime, deviance, and control; the evolution of policing and social control as complex webs of mediated and symbolic meaning; the role of power, identity, and indifference in framing contemporary crime controversies, with special attention paid to the gendered construction of crime, deviance and control; and the importance of historical and cross-cultural dynamics in shaping understandings of crime, deviance, and control.

390 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Jeff Ferrell is Professor of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. His books include Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and The Politics of Criminology. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Reviews

[Loraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A facinating collection of papers examining the social constructions of deviance and control, namely, the complex microcircuits of knowledge (and thus, power) in the form of media. Deviance, like race and gender, is a social construction, and the ontology of deviance shifts according to current ideological trends or bent to serve its ends. Highly political in context, changes in common conceptions of crime and deviance, as framed by & disseminated by the media, reflect and promote the interests of dominant hegemonic powers. This is particularly interesting in the detailed examination of how "pro-life" violence in the 1980-90's had long resisted the official designation of "terrorism", and the underlying political and legislative implications.

[Roberto Caracas · Rating 5 out of 5]

good