ABSTRACT
Moral panic theorists and researchers from a variety of disciplines have been paying a debt of gratitude to Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall et al. for forty years. It was their innovative analyses of the volatile reactions of moral entrepreneurs, the media, and control culture to norm-violators that not only launched the concept of moral panic, but also made folk devils essential to it. In Cohen’s (1972) oft-cited work, of course, the folk devils were the mods and the rockers, factions of two emerging and edgy youth subcultures in Great Britain. It was their altercation in the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea over the rainy Easter weekend of 1964 that set off a hostile, excessive, and repressive social reaction that Cohen went on to analyze as a moral panic. Hall et al. (1978) laid out the complex process by which the media translated the warning of police and politicians about street crime into a public idiom that gave a discursive reality to the vague fears of the public. They examined the discursive loop by which the public’s frightened reactions to media reportage were then fed back to the police and politicians as indicators not just of public opinion, but also of public support for augmenting the control culture by increasing arrest rates for muggers, passing new laws, and raising maximum terms for prison sentences.
