Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
As the previous chapter outlined, the most significant ‘event’ of the 21st century has the potential to drastically change the political, economic and social coordinates of the world. While some scholarship has been erudite, linking the micro to the macro and speculating on what the future political economy will look like (for example: Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020; Primrose et al, 2020; Saad-Filho, 2020; Scambler, 2020; Sumonja, 2020), other social scientific work is often theoretically and/or empirically absent. Although space constrains how much literature we were able to review, in our critical analysis of some of the work devoted to capturing, understanding and conceptualising how COVID-19 is affecting us and changing society, we suggest they fall into one of the following categories or, in some cases, a combination of studies/commentaries which:
Handwash social harm – endorse central ideological messaging associated with COVID-19 such as the lockdown and downplay the resultant social harm.
Represent empirical curfews – fail to step outside their discipline, romanticise reality and impose deaptive theories like moral panic. These works lack depth in capturing people’s experiential realities during the pandemic and are often empirically limited.
Disinfect reality – do not place reality within its macro political-economic context and provide snapshot efforts to dissect social feeling/experience into measurable variables and graphs.
Reflect an academic lockdown – are not studies but commentaries alluding to the glorification of the author’s hobby or previous publications.
In the final days of 2019, reports emerged from Wuhan in China that a new strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) had been detected. Within weeks it became apparent that asymptomatic human-to-human transmission was possible and that a major pandemic could be about to unfold. According to the World Health Organization (2021), by late April 2021, over 150 million people worldwide had been infected with COVID-19 and over 3.1 million deaths had been attributed to the disease. In the intervening period, day-to-day life changed so dramatically for people around the world that it is hardly controversial to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic represents the most significant event since the Second World War. While the extent and nature of nation states’ responses to the pandemic have varied, most societies have undertaken social distancing measures; adopted the use of face coverings; imposed national lockdowns; and forced businesses to close, which collectively have had a considerable impact upon social life.
Nation states have been required to intervene in their respective economies on a scale that is without precedent in recent history through the offering of loans, tax relief and furlough schemes to cover a proportion of workers’ salaries. At the onset of the pandemic, supply chains failed, in the UK there were accusations of government corruption in the procurement of essential services, while surveillance technologies, such as test and trace apps, have proliferated and expanded. Workers – who were able to do so – have had to shift to online working and with the closure of schools, colleges and university campuses, so have many children and young people, positioning domestic dwellings as the epicentre of work, familial and social life for many.
When we reflect on COVID-19 and the lockdown restrictions enacted around the world, it is inevitable that some people will have experienced a ‘good lockdown’ in the way that some participants in the previous century’s defining moments, the two world wars, spoke of enjoying a ‘good war’. Time to stop and reflect, identify priorities, learn a new skill, spend more time with family, work from home, enjoy Zoom quizzes. They will come out of this crisis financially better off, professionally secure and emotionally centred. For them, the world post-COVID-19 will likely be one of opportunity and advancement. However, the rich empirical data presented in this book show that these experiences speak to privileges not afforded to all. The world into which COVID-19 emerged was one of heightened inequality, increasing polarisation and tension, and a growing post-social arrangement whereby the challenge of social cohesion was fraught with difficulty. The pandemic has exacerbated many of these tensions and created new ones. New social divisions appear, and new fault lines represent challenges that will define the coming era. Social inequalities have grown, both economically and culturally, as some elites have enjoyed unprecedented growth in wealth, the ranks of unemployed in Western economies swell with each business failure and high-street closure. Elsewhere, in poorer developing nations, the pandemic has burdened states lacking adequate healthcare provisions and with considerable numbers of citizens that rely on the informal economy for work.
Of all of the social problems associated with crime and justice, perhaps none occupies space on the registers of visual culture like the problem of drugs. Long a central site and locus of criminological inquiry, drugs and the related issues they give rise to have always been essential characters in the drama of crime and justice, and those dramas largely play themselves out in the field of the visual image. From the menacing image of the crazed marijuana user immortalized in the film Reefer Madness (1936) to contemporary visual productions like popular ‘Faces of Meth’ campaigns, drug trends and associated issues and problems are constructed and communicated, reified, and even fabricated and cut from the whole cloth of the visual. The visual world(s) of drugs is also perhaps the best and most salient available example to illustrate the sort of flexibility and ‘unfixedness’ of images and aesthetics, the way that images and visual cultures have their meanings negotiated by the social processes that constitute the practice of seeing.
This chapter surveys the various ways in which drugs are given life and meaning in the visual registers of crime and culture, what might be learned or uncovered from those meanings, and the various—and, in the case of drugs, considerable—moments in which an explicitly visual criminology has already begun to engage with the specter of drugs. Among the most immediately relevant dimensions of drugs in visual culture, for a visual criminology, are important questions of ethics, representation, framing, power, and meaning, and so those are the questions to which we now turn.
Among the most important moments in the history of photography was the publication, between 1844 and 1846, of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. The collection, which was the first commercially published book to be illustrated with photographs, described Talbot’s development of the process of calotype printing, which allowed for the mechanical and chemical capture of light, producing what were, for much of the collection’s audience, the first photographic images they ever saw (Talbot 1989). The project included a collection of images that, somewhat remarkably, represents much of the spectrum of photographic subjects at play well over 150 years later: still lifes, portraits, architectural studies, and even slice-of-life or vérité images are all represented in Talbot’s work. What I want to draw attention to here, though, is not the content of Talbot’s work—as fascinating as it may be—but rather the title of that work. For Talbot, it seems, the relation between the photographic image and the ‘natural’ world (more on that shortly) was plainly evident, with photography at last delivering the ability to capture ‘nature’ as conceptualized as all that is not human. Capture, of course, also implies mastery or dominance, as made clear by Allan Sekula (1986: 4) when he noted that photography initially promised, in addition to its early juridical deployment discussed previously, ‘an enhanced mastery of nature’. Human visions of ‘nature’, then—and particularly nature’s forms and relations to the human and the social—have long been at the center of the power of images.
On the afternoon of 25 May 2020, police in Minneapolis, Minnesota approached George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man, following a tip that Floyd had attempted to pass a counterfeit $20 note to a store clerk. During the interaction, a white cop, Derek Chauvin, detained George Floyd on the pavement with his knees on Floyd’s neck and back as a physically passive Floyd struggled to breath. For nearly nine minutes, Chauvin—with the assistance of three other cops—remained on top of George Floyd, ultimately killing him. The murder was captured, like so many are now, by the mobile phone cameras of bystanders, and by the next day the footage had circulated internationally. Almost immediately, global protests against police violence began, focusing largely on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman murdered in her home by police, two weeks prior to Floyd, in my own hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. At the time of this writing, almost six months later, those protests continue in every major American city and around the world, and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are the tragic symbols, their names hoarsely shouted and spray painted, their faces appearing on placards and signs and shirts and murals.
The image of Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a dying George Floyd, it seems to me, is the essential criminological image of the contemporary moment. I do not reproduce it here, not because it is too shocking—American police murdering an unarmed Black man should not, by now, come as a shock to anyone—but because it is too familiar.
This book began with the killing of George Floyd by cops in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the spring of 2020. It is fitting, then, that it ends more or less there, too. Instead, however, of the immediate particular circumstances of George Floyd’s murder—the knee in his back, the violent disinterest of Derek Chauvin and his coworker accomplices on the scene, or the pleas of bystanders, with their mobile phone cameras rolling, to the police to stop, to allow George Floyd to breathe—I end on what came next, as the world was confronted yet again with the painfully familiar image of the police violence of racial capitalism: a Black man killed by the state.
As this book has argued, described, and demonstrated, over the previous seven chapters, there is ample opportunity to find some criminological and sociological truth in the image, and in the ways in which we produce and employ and understand it. Images constitute and condition the social worlds of crime, harm, and justice, and we live our lives more or less immersed in their spectacle. But when George Floyd died the world did not just ‘see it happen’: George Floyd’s killing, like those before it, is not simply seen in the footage of his murder, it is felt. It is not only images of a police murder that are produced when the cameras roll, it is the sounds of a murder. It is George Floyd’s dying plea for his mother, or 26-year-old Daniel Shaver begging in a hotel corridor for clear instruction seconds before being hit five times with shots from Mesa, Arizona cop Phillip Brailsford’s AR-15 rifle, on which Brailsford had carefully inscribed ‘you’re fucked’ in an ornate script.
If prisons are routinely occluded as described in the previous chapter, then police is a power that suffers the opposite condition: the visibility of police is markedly high, with police images occupying a fantastic amount of space across visual culture, a condition that has led police to be described as ‘by far the most visible of all criminal justice institutions’ (Chermak and Weiss 2005: 502). The relation between police and the visual, though, reaches far beyond the binary condition of visibility or invisibility; police power is elementally connected to the visual image, and the moments of interaction between police power and the image are incalculably vast, both historically and in contemporary contexts. In this chapter, I understand police power as largely imagined, expressed, materialized, reified, and resisted through processes that are, at least in part, theatrical, melodramatic, dramatological and, above all, visual.
This is what Jean and John Comaroff (2004) describe as the ‘theatrics of policing’,1 and it is largely the visual artefacts of those theatrics that I mine in this chapter for insights into the relation between police and the image. Even a fleeting glance, however, at the contemporary visual landscape will quickly overwhelm the attuned viewer with images of and from police; our visual worlds are, it seems, crawling with cops, their fingerprints smudging and distorting nearly every image. This chapter, then, describes only the broad contours of that relation. From ‘Wanted!’ posters and early efforts at biological criminology to the growing corpus of video images of police killings, this chapter describes the development of criminological analysis of the police–image relation and endeavors to uncover some of the myriad ways in which the image and the police always implicate one another.
Like many of the other issues and sites taken up in this book—and, more generally, taken up by criminology—the ways and moments in which we imagine the prison are intensely configured by the ways and moments in which we see the prison; how we understand the concept of the prison is conditioned by how, where, when, and what we see when we look for or at the prison as a material space, as a building and as a location. The inverse, though, is also of course true: what we look at and for when we look for the prison in the vast landscapes of visual culture is conditioned by what we imagine the prison to be. Caleb Smith (2013: 167) cuts to the heart of this relation, noting that ‘the penal state is operative in sites where we might not be accustomed to look for it’. It is necessary for a visual criminological exploration of punishment to think expansively about when and where we might render regimes of punishment visible, or to otherwise use images in order to wrestle meaning from punishment.
It is obviously essential, then, when thinking about the visual dimensions of punishment, that we not limit our analysis to prisons. Like police, described later in Chapter 7, the full form of punishment is first obscured by thinking solely of the prison. In the example of police, the problem arises from the limitations imposed by ‘the’, whereas in the case of punishment the limitation is imposed by ‘prison’. It is important, then, to remain mindful of the vast apparatuses of punishment that extend beyond and outside of the confines of the prison.
In challenging social science’s established orthodoxies, this first in a series of books is a call for its disciplines to embrace new theoretical paradigms and research methods to better understand the reality of life in a post-COVID world.
By offering a detailed insight into the harmful effects of neoliberalism before the pandemic, as well as the intervallic period the world is currently living through, the authors show how it is more important than ever for social science to evolve and take a leading role in contextualising the biggest crisis of the 21st century.
This is a critical blueprint for ongoing debates about the COVID-19 pandemic and alternative modes of research.
