ABSTRACT
A glance at the television schedules for tonight, or the film listings for your local cinema, or the headlines in today’s national or local newspapers, will quickly indicate both the vast and seemingly insatiable interest the general population has in crime and criminals, and the key role the media play in portraying and describing all aspects of criminal behaviour. Some of this crime will be fictional, others, ‘real life’, and our appetite for reading and watching about both appears to be enormous – popular television programmes such as soap operas invariably include criminality in their story lines; television documentaries, news programmes and our newspapers highlight and discuss crime and criminal justice issues on a daily basis. And the knowledge and understanding the public have about crime and criminals is largely based onwhat they have seen or heard through the various media forms. More generally, it is impossible for us to know through direct experience everything about our society. In a study looking at crime news in the USA, Dorfman (2001) found that over three quarters (76%) of the public said they formed their opinions about crime from what they see or read in the news, more than three times the number of those who said they got their primary information on crime from personal experience (22%).
