The Real Politik of Crime and Punishment

• In Event: Crime, Politics and Insecurity

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that political attention to crime and actual crime are largely unrelated. I challenge this conventional wisdom by highlighting the positive relationship between homicide rates, and public and political attention to crime (The Myth of Mob Rule: Violent Crime and Democratic Politics). In this paper, I pursue a deeper understanding of this relationship by exploring rates of lethal violence, media coverage of crime, and public concern about crime in ten American cities between 1965 and 2005, paying particular attention to the race of victims and offenders portrayed in the media, the voices that rise to prominence during the violent crime wave, and the relationship between actual risk and levels of fear about crime amongst different populations. I find that rising lethal violence is an important material condition that is reflected in media coverage of serious crime and in public concern about it, independent of the race of victims and offenders. However, the racialized nature of serious violent crime in the United States, coupled with long-standing racist narratives about black offenders and white victims plays an important role in how violent crime is framed as a problem and in the policy agenda-setting that results from its growing salience.

Author

• Lisa L. Miller, Rutgers University