Images of Crime, Criminals and Justice in American Media

A sample of crime films, television programs, news programs, and a song were reviewed for this content analysis. Notes are included at the conclusion of this report. Several general themes emerged from these texts. First, the images of career criminals portrayed in the mass media continue to include Italian Mafia types, minority ghetto gangs, and the occasional white collar criminal who may commit a crime of passion. Deprivation and structural functionalist theories as discussed below along with social learning theories may explain the persistence of these images and the social realities they tend to mirror.

A series of CSI Las Vegas television programs presented criminals as falling into these categories but tended to focus instead on the positive characteristics of crime fighters. This included forensic scientists as well as police officers. While these individuals were shown as having character flaws (e.g., excessive egos, involvement with crime figures, gambling addiction), their dedication to their jobs was emphasized. In contrast, criminals were depicted as less intelligent, more violent, and the product of flawed backgrounds.

Bob Dylan's "The Hurricane" was a song that made the case that Rueben "Hurricane" Carter, a black New Jersey boxer, was wrongfully accused of murder by racist police officers. Whether or not Carter was innocent may be less significant than the fact that Dylan's song painted a portrait of police officers convin

ome involved in crime through imitation or modeling of criminal conduct. Secondly, Akers "contended that definitions and imitations are most instrumental in determining initial forays into crime (Akers and Sellers 49). The continued involvement in crime results in differential social reinforcement and the theory has been subjected to extensive empirical testing mostly in studies where measures of social learning are used to account for self-reported delinquency. Akers and Sellers (49) state that overall, "the research is supportive of the perspective, including studies in which social learning theory was tested against competing explanations of crime such as social bond theory." Walter C. Reckless' Containment Theory has influenced Control Theory by recognizing the individualization of the self and arguing that a variety of factors might push a person toward crime and that other factors might pull one toward misbehavior (Lilly, Cullen, and Ball 89). Reckless recognized that the leading sociological theories seemed to have effectively analyzed many of the central pushes and pulls operating on individuals but suggested that containment theory could explain why in spite of the various criminogenic pushes and pulls, whatever t