NCJ Number
161436
Date Published
1996
Length
238 pages
Annotation
This book examines the crimino-legal complex (criminology, criminal law, criminal justice, the media, everyday experience) in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory.
Abstract
The author explores the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality; exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices; and analyzes the effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community, and everyday life. Among the events and issues which the author presents are: (1) criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; (2) the pleasures of reading detective fiction; (3) ambiguities of victimization and social justice in the city; (4) sacrificial structures in the law's response to conjugal homicide; (5) policing the ethnicity of the illegal immigrant; (6) the governmental strategies of campaigns against single mothers; and (7) the fatalism of the spectacle of HIV/AIDS in criminal justice policy. Footnotes, figures, references, index