NCJ Number
139032
Date Published
1992
Length
261 pages
Annotation
To challenge many popular notions about crime, criminals, and crime control, each chapter of this book questions the most basic assumptions of crime and justice and traces the development of a crime problem from its creation to society's integration of a myth into popular thinking and eventually social policy.
Abstract
Individual chapters focus on several popular criminal justice issues: child abduction, child sexual abuse, the serial killer, organized crime, white collar crime, police work, the drug war, the transmission of HIV, and crime control and capital punishment. As a rule, crime myths are created in nonscientific forums by the telling of crime- related fictions or sensational stories. These crime fictions frequently take on new meanings as they are retold and at some point become accepted truth for many people. The fiction in the crime myth comes both from fabrication of events and distortion of events into social and political problems. An attempt is made to illustrate the range of social processes by which popular thought about a crime issue of concern transforms the original concern into a crime problem that takes on the characteristics of myth. 5 tables and 512 references