Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: • Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities. • The cultural politics of victims rights. • Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora. • Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age. Claire Valier is Lecturer in Law at the University of London and a graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Her other works include Theories of Crime and Punishment (2001). International Library of Sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim Editor: John Urry Lancaster University Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture Claire Valier First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2004 Claire Valier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98738-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–415–28175–X (Print Edition) Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: punishment, culture and communication 1 1 Murder will out 13 2 Punishment, print culture and the nation 37 3 Travelling cultures 55 4 Irony and the state of unitedness 73 5 The internet, new collectivities and crime 91 6 Punishment and the powers of horror 111 7 The shadow of the death penalty 125 Conclusion: addressing the contemporary 145 Notes 153 Bibliography 159 Index 173 Acknowledgements This book arises from discussions with colleagues, students and friends, as much as from the reading of texts. I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of individuals who have read and commented upon my work, and opened up spaces in which to speak and write. In particular these have included Ronnie Lippens, John Urry, Derek McGhee, Elena Loizidou, Les Moran, David Garland, Alison Young, Tony Jefferson, Richard Sparks, Beverley Brown, Geoff Pearson, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison, Robert Reiner, Richard Jones and Simon Hallsworth. My work has benefited immeasurably from the hospitality of a number of insti- tutions. I would particularly like to thank some people in Cambridge for providing an exceptionally convivial milieu for scholarship. Queens’ College, Cambridge, was home for many years. I would like to express my gratitude to the President and Fellows for the award of my Munro Scholarships, which provided great rooms and tuck, as well as the company of kindly colleagues like Stewart Sage, Jackie Scott, Peter Spufford, John Eatwell, Stuart Bridge, and Brendan Bradshaw. The Institute of Criminology was the locus of my doctoral research and my first ventures in lecturing. I would like to thank all there, and in particular Loraine Gelsthorpe and Anthony Bottoms, who have offered considerable support and inspiration over the years. The Radzinowicz Library and Helen Krarup continue to provide a welcoming place of study, for which I am truly grateful. A number of institutions have generously awarded me scholarships, research grants, and bursaries. I would like to thank the committees and administrators of the following bodies: the University of Cambridge, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the British Society of Criminology, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Law Society. Earlier versions of chapters 1, 3 and 6 were published in the British Journal of Criminology and Theoretical Criminology. I would like to thank the publishers of these journals, their editors and reviewers. My friends and family have been a constant source of pleasure and support over the years. I would like to thank and to salute: Teddy McCollom, Kat Astley, Harriet Neuberger, David Hugh-Jones, Alexander Wedderburn, Lavinia Mitton, Orlando Sayer, Elizabeth Kendal, Bryony Worthington, Louise Watson, Gabrielle Hinsliff, Rupert Thompson, Clare Hayward, Guillaume Metayer, and Kit McCormick. The greatest thanks are due to my family, and to Annabel. Introduction Punishment, culture and communication He stands, staring down the curve of closed doors, while a fear he knows to be irrational begins to nibble at his belly. A few months ago a fourteen-year-old girl was thrown from a train by some yob who hadn’t got anywhere when he tried to chat her up. Miranda’s thirteen. This is all rubbish, he knows that. But then, like everybody else, he lives in the shadow of monstrosities. Peter Sutcliffe’s bearded face, the number plate of a house in Cromwell Street, three figures smudged on a video surveillance screen, an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come. (Barker 1998: 3) The crime control and penal practices of today unfold in the shadow of mon- strosities. On the television, computer or cinema screen, staring out from the cover of the newspaper, and from shelf upon shelf of true crime books and magazines, there they are, the face of the Yorkshire Ripper, the ‘House of Horrors’ where at least nine young women were killed, the CCTV footage of James Bulger’s abduction from a busy shopping mall. These shadowy and macabre images menace a man late to collect his daughter from a railway station. Fearful for her safety, he imagines the horrors of injury and murder evoked by certain remembered images. Images connected with notorious crimes, it seems, become inseparable from the attributed meanings of crime and punishment, and central to their symbolic power. Pictures like these include the faces of murdered children like Megan Kanka, Polly Klaas and Sarah Payne, smiling out from family album snapshots. They live on in memorial legislation, with over fifty US laws in recent years named for children who were victims of violence. Other images bring into the home within minutes, or in real time, the scenes of grave bodily trauma, mental anguish and devastation from the distant site of a terrorist attack. These big news crimes become image events. Above and beyond their documentary worth as evidence, the CCTV footage and amateur video that, we are told, increasingly reconstitutes public space as a technologized scanscape, strikes us with a deep resonance. One might mention here the tape of the Rodney King beating, the live footage of OJ fleeing in his Bronco, pursued by both police and television helicopters, or the videoed 2 Punishment, culture and communication ‘execution’ of Daniel Pearl. Hours of footage from inside the courtroom can now be watched, confronting viewers with scenes like those of Louise Woodward crying when her murder verdict was read. Then there are the mug- shots, the plaintive faces of the ‘Bulger killers’, terrified young boys subjected to the ultimate in vengeful fury. Who can forget the face of Myra Hindley, dubbed by the tabloids, ‘the icon of evil’? Images connected with some crimes are circulated globally. As I write this text, the snapshot of Holly and Jessica wearing matching Manchester United shirts, taken hours before their abduction, is shown on televisions and published in the newspapers. The Sun’s headline reads ‘WORLD WEEPS WITH SOHAM.’ The article tells readers that thousands across the globe have been leaving messages of shock and grief on the town’s website. The Mirror’s headline reads, ‘WORLD WIDETEARS ’, and reports that within days 16,500 people from all over the world had posted messages on an internet book of condolence set up by the County Council. There is, the article informs, no country untouched by the Soham tragedy (Sun, 19 August 2002, Daily Mirror, 21 August 2002). Both newspapers demand the return of the death penalty. Each of the images described above, in its own way, dramatizes a connection between penal practices and mediated visibility. Furthermore, these striking and repeatedly displayed images demonstrate the importance of studying the relations between punishment, culture and communication. It is the object of this book to tease out some connections between the teletechnologies, those technologies of the afar, and the passions of punishment. The need to undertake work of this kind is rendered all the more pressing given the major trans- formations in communication technologies that have transpired over the last two centuries. It is time to look into the changing textual, rhetorical and pictorial practices through which penal practices draw the imaginative engagement of multiple viewing and reading publics. We now inhabit societies called ‘pictophagic’ and ‘iconocentric’. This calls for scrutiny of what Peter Goodrich (2001) terms ‘law in the videosphere’, addressing the increasing prominence of visual media within crimino-legal practices. We need to survey the images, the at times global televisual and cyberspatial enactments within which punishment is carried out. In addition to charting the visual culture with which penality is tied up, this book addresses the impact of changes to the modes of information.