ABSTRACT
One of the key ways of understanding how people think about crime and justice is by investigating how they talk about it. This excerpt from Theodore Sasson’s Crime Talk: How Citizens Construct a Social Problem describes one method of establishing what crime means to people through considering how they articulate and express their views about it in open conversation. The frame Social Breakdown depicts crime as a consequence of family and community disintegration. Witness the skyrocketing rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births. Witness the indifference of urbanites to the crime that plagues their communities. Family breakdown in the context of urban indifference has loosened the moral and social bonds that in better times discouraged crime. The frame Media Violence depicts crime as a consequence of violence on television, in the movies and in popular music. Violence in the mass media undermines respect for life.
