ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses cultural criminology and its key proposition that crime control agencies are simply cultural products which can only be understood in terms of the meanings they carry for those involved. Everyday existences, life histories, music, dance and performance are used to discover how and why certain cultural forms become criminalized and others are not. Jack Katz writes about the ‘seductions of crime’ in which disorder is itself a ‘delight’ to be sought and savoured by the offenders themselves in ways which are compellingly seductive. Mike Presdee develops this sense of the interrelationship between pleasure and pain with his notion of ‘crime as carnival’, while this author uses the phrase ‘the schizophrenia of crime’ to refer to the apparently contradictory contemporary duality of attitude to criminal behaviour where there is both widespread public demand for a rigorous intervention against criminality, while law-breaking is widespread to the virtual point of universality. These issues are developed with the new ‘deviant leisure’ perspective which discusses activities that have the potential to result in harm. Proponents discuss the harm potential that exists beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure.
