Images of crime and criminals: How media creations drive public opinion and policy

Media representations of crime and criminals dehumanize and marginalize criminals and create an atmosphere that allows or even fosters the criminal justice system to treat convicted criminals with extreme measures. This is particularly true for members of minority groups historically based on race and/or ethnicity. Public opinion on crime is formed from a variety of sources besides personal experience; fear of crime is driven by media treatments of crime rather than by statistics. Newspapers, magazines, television, the true crime press and political rhetoric all contribute to the discourse on crime. This study of the treatment of actual (not fictional) crime in these sources reveals common elements in the presentation of crime that include a focus on random, violent crime; the importance of victim and offender attributes (race, gender, other physical characteristics) in determining criminality; use of metaphoric language equating criminality with non-human status; an overwhelming reliance on the police as a source of information and perspective; and a simplistic view of causes based solely on individual traits rather than structural elements. The range of potential solutions to the problem of crime in America depends upon these dominant images of crime and criminal created for the public. These solutions are contained within a narrow realm of possibilities by the limitations placed upon the creation of the criminal Other by dominant American texts. The polticization of crime has narrowed how crime is defined, our ideas on the causes of crime, and the arena of acceptable solutions. Current solutions to the problem of street crime are limited primarily to building more prisons, increasing sentence lengths and the use of capital punishment. Black American men are disproportionately imprisoned, and the greatest increase has been due to drug offenses rather than violent crime. The results of this study demonstrate the power of the media and politicians in actively creating a crime reality and point to the need for a more responsible discussion on the problem of crime in order to give the American public a more realistic view of the actual harms that exist and a better understanding of the elements involved in this discourse.