ABSTRACT
Across the social sciences, there has been a resurgence of interest in visual methods, which has been accompanied by a rise in scholarship on visual culture that has now established itself as an exciting and expanding intellectual field. In criminology, while there is a rich tradition of research on ‘crime and the media’, specific attention to the visual, or indeed on the role and place of the image in crime, in crime control and in criminal justice has long been lacking. This omission is particularly surprising given just how deep-seated the cultural fascination with the iconography of crime and punishment is in the popular imagination. Of course, there have been some significant interventions in recent years, including Katherine Biber’s (2007) Captive Images, Judith Resnick and Dennis Curtis’ (2011) Representing Justice, Jonathan Finn’s (2009) Capturing the Criminal Image and Alison Young’s (2005) Judging the Image, which have each made ambitious attempts to understand the power of representation and bring new ways of thinking to bear in the discipline. Today images are everywhere, and they have a profound impact on our sense of ourselves as ‘modern’ (Jervis 1998). Indeed, the term ‘ocularcentralism’ was coined to describe a world saturated by visual experiences and the privileging of vision in Western philosophy and social theory (Jay 1993).
