1.5 Framing Crime

A key social institution that constructs our idea of what is crime today is the media (Surette, 2011) (see 3 Media and Crime). The media is effective in amplifying particular threats, sometimes to the point of generating moral panics and constructing representations of groups (e.g., youth, the working class, and racialised communities) as posing a threat to public well-being. As the media is largely privately owned, crimes of the upper classes (e.g., insider trading, fraud, and environmental crimes) are often filtered out. The media also plays a role in establishing a distance between “us” and “them” through a process of Othering, in which criminals are depicted as fundamentally different from the rest of the population and therefore deserving, if not requiring, incarceration.