Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of public narratives of crime and criminal justice and its importance in influencing criminal justice and penal policy as well as expressions of public opinion. In order to understand the power of public narratives of crime and criminal justice, it is important to better conceptualise the term and make public narratives empirically accessible. Thus, the author develops a conceptual map of different levels of discourse and the different voices competing for attention in the public domain in order to proceed to developing the concept of public narratives into one that can be measured empirically across time and space. This provides a more dynamic understanding of how crime, criminal justice, and punishment are constructed in specific social contexts and environments.
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Notes
- 1.
Most powerfully represented in the Minnesota sentencing grid in the USA; https://mn.gov/sentencing-guidelines/guidelines/, last accessed 7 February 2020.
- 2.
James Bulger was two, when he was abducted and murdered by two 10-year-old boys in Liverpool in 1993. James’ abduction was captured on CCTV and the subsequent trial of the two 10-year-old boys was the subject of intense media coverage.
- 3.
Stormzy is a London-based grime—a form of electronic dance music—artist and rapper who was the first Black British solo act at the main Glastonbury stage. Glastonbury is a world-famous festival of performing arts taking place annually in Somerset, England, established in 1970 and one of the main British music festivals.
- 4.
Kim Kardashian West is a reality TV star with 150 million Instagram followers and 62 million Twitter followers.
- 5.
- 6.
Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racially motivated attack in London in 1993, at the age of 18. The investigation of his death was mishandled and subject to a public inquiry which led to the Metropolitan Police to be labelled as institutionally racist (Macpherson Report 1999).
- 7.
Hillsborough Stadium was the scene of Britain’s worst sporting disaster when 96 people died in a stadium crush in 1989. Media coverage blamed football fans and South Yorkshire Police shifted blame to football fans. Numerous enquiries followed and criminal and civil proceedings are still ongoing—a senior police officer, match commander at Hillsborough on the day of the crush, was acquitted of gross negligence manslaughter in December 2019.
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Feilzer, M.Y. (2020). Public Narratives of Crime and Criminal Justice: Connecting ‘Small’ and ‘Big’ Stories to Make Public Narratives Visible. In: Althoff, M., Dollinger, B., Schmidt, H. (eds) Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47236-8_4
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