12. Cultural Criminology
12.1 Introduction
Dr. Steven Kohm
🎯 Learning Objectives
- Define cultural criminology as a critical perspective.
- Identify cultural criminology’s key theoretical influences.
- Discuss the four key features of cultural criminology.
- Discuss the connection between boredom, pleasure and crime.
- Describe the key methods used in cultural criminology research.
- Describe the concepts employed by cultural criminology to address the dynamic interplay between crime, control and media representation.
- Identify the critiques of cultural criminology.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something [Black and] Blue
This chapter introduces students to cultural criminology, a perspective that reworks and breathes new life into the study of crime and crime control by adapting older methods and theories to present contexts. Culture is a foundational concept of the perspective, and cultural criminology views culture as dynamic—always shifting and evolving. Cultural criminology examines the way culture both reflects and affects crime and crime control, while also examining how certain cultural practices are criminalised. Cultural criminology was influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology; the new deviance theory of the 1960s, including subcultural and labeling theories; as well as interactionist theories from Britain, most notably moral panic theory. Cultural criminology shifts the focus of criminology away from background factors such as age, social class, and racialised identity; it emphasises instead the immediate “existential ‘foreground’ of crime” (Hayward, 2016, p. 299), or the immediate pleasures and experiences of those who break the law. Cultural criminology is a critical perspective that examines social and economic shifts in contemporary times—an era referred to by social theorists as late modernity (Giddens, 1984, 1990). Cultural criminologists argue that capitalism is transformed in important ways in late modernity, resulting in the commodification of lifestyles and the image, while treating crime and punishment as objects to be consumed pleasurably as popular entertainment in film, TV, music and video games (Young, 2007). In summary, cultural criminology is a rapidly evolving subfield that includes many approaches, but at its core is a three-part “framework concerned with meaning, power, and existential accounts of crime, punishment and control” (Hayward, 2016, p. 300).
A critical criminological theory that emphasises the immediate pleasures and experiences of those who break the law, with a particular focus on the era of late modernity.
A general term used to describe all aspects of a society related to individual and collective identity and meaning. Culture can be expressed in the material items of a particular society, such as clothing and other consumer goods, as well as in the ideas and beliefs that circulate and shape the way individuals and groups understand themselves and the surrounding world. Culture can more narrowly refer to aspects of creative output such as art, music and literature, and is often divided into high culture and low culture. While high culture is found in art galleries, museums and opera houses, low culture, or popular culture, can be found all around us and is the stuff of TV, popular music and graffiti art. Cultural criminologists view culture as arising from broader economic and social relations, and thus tending to reflect dominant ideas related to crime and crime control.
The time period beginning in the late twentieth century and extending to today. Social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman argue that the defining features of the modern era were transformed in significant ways in the late twentieth century. Capitalism, communications, and conceptions of the self were markedly altered in this period. However, these theorists dispute the notion that there has been a complete break from modernity heralding a new post-modern era. Instead, they see the present time period as being characterised by an intensification of modernity. Cultural criminology does not completely disavow the ideas and insights of postmodernism, but generally prefers the term late modernity to denote the present era marked by widespread interactive digital communications, commodification of crime and violence, rapid global flows of capital, goods and people, and an intensification of feelings of insecurity and anxiety (e.g., Young, 2007).
