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Is the mass media to blame for a distorted perceptions of criminal danger?

By Douglas A. Berman

The question in the title of this post is inspired by this interesting new piece published in Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, which is available via SSRN.  The piece is titled "The Ambivalent Consequences of Visibility: Crime and Prisons in the Mass Media," and here is the abstract: This article aims to demonstrate that, despite their potential for cultivating communitarianism and deliberative democracy on a large scale, the mass media contribute decisively to the formation of punitiveness amongst the public by means of selective semiotic aestheticisation. They overstate the problem of crime; put the blame on marginalised cohorts and level heavy criticism against the administration of prisons purportedly for laxity; issue urgent calls for ever-greater reliance on the use of strict imprisonment by the authorities and the adoption of self-policing measures by local communities and private individuals; and either mute or neutralise the attendant hardships prisoners suffer at the hands of the state...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 31, 2010 (boomark / email).