ABSTRACT
The crime control and penal practices of today unfold in the shadow of monstrosities. On the television, computer or cinema screen, staring out from the cover of the newspaper, and from shelf upon shelf of true crime books and magazines, there they are, the face of the Yorkshire Ripper, the ‘House of Horrors’ where at least nine young women were killed, the CCTV footage of James Bulger’s abduction from a busy shopping mall. These shadowy and macabre images menace a man late to collect his daughter from a railway station. Fearful for her safety, he imagines the horrors of injury and murder evoked by certain remembered images. Images connected with notorious crimes, it seems, become inseparable from the attributed meanings of crime and punishment, and central to their symbolic power. Pictures like these include the faces of murdered children like Megan Kanka, Polly Klaas and Sarah Payne, smiling out from family album snapshots. They live on in memorial legislation, with over fifty US laws in recent years named for children who were victims of violence. Other images bring into the home within minutes, or in real time, the scenes of grave bodily trauma, mental anguish and devastation from the distant site of a terrorist attack. These big news crimes become image events.
