Visual Criminology Research Articles

Reframing convict tattoo collections: the comic as critical methodology

ABSTRACT Taking the specific example of Paco: Les Mains Rouges (2014; 2017) – a two-volumed sepia graphic novel by Fabien Vehlmann and Éric Sagot – this article explores the potential of the comic format to destabilize carceral histories via the trope of the convict tattoo. The creation of convict records (including the surveillance of tattoos) leaves a rich textual and visual archive that is steeped in power inequalities and absent voices, but also creative potential. By articulating the comic as a critical methodology, this article aims to explore the potential for the format to develop narratives that counter authorized archives and challenge dominant representations of incarceration whilst drawing creative inspiration from historical iconographies of punishment. In its consideration of creative interpretation and potential for engaging with new modes of collecting, it has applications for historical research, media, visual criminology and museum and heritage studies.

The struggle to overcome traffic congestion: A study of social interaction and effects on deviant behavior of motorcycle riders

Background: Motorcycle riding as a means of daily transportation in Southeast Asia, especially Jakarta, Indonesia, manifests the struggle to use the road. This struggle - associated with congestion, irregularity, and lack of control - can lead to physical harm or material loss. Studies on deviant behavior related to motorcycle use mainly discuss motorcycle gangs and traffic violations. This paper intends to explicate how the context of this struggle informs the different meanings of the deviant behavior of motorcyclists in daily traffic life. It employs concepts of innovation and ritualism, learning, harm, visuality, and secret deviance to shatter the prevailing understanding of motorcyclist traffic behavior. Methods: This study chooses T.B. Simatupang Street, one of the busiest roads in Jakarta, as a research location. A mixed method is used to examine the context of the struggle, first qualitatively by utilizing visual data collected through (a) direct video recordings on the road and (b) aerial drone video recordings. Both recordings captured images of motorcyclist behavior considered deviant and can cause harm, such as stopping illegally, clamoring while cutting lanes and other vehicles, and slipping between two automobiles. Then quantitatively, it conducts a survey to collect data on motorcyclists' experiences. Included in the survey were questions with images captured from the direct video recording footage to collect responses toward motorcyclist riding behavior. Findings: The survey findings show that responses toward images of motorcyclist behavior - concerning harm - show a lack of understanding of driving safety and traffic rules, and some consider it as just the daily routine of motorcyclists. Conclusion: Therefore, the visuality of motorcyclist traffic violation is learned through innovation (driving recklessly) or ritualism (daily habit) as a struggle that is ironically visibly secretly upheld by fellow motorcyclists. Novelty/Originality of this Study: This study offers a novel perspective by framing motorcyclists' behavior in Jakarta's traffic as a form of adaptive struggle rather than mere deviance or rule-breaking. It uniquely utilizes visual criminology to argue that what is often seen as traffic violations may be better understood as contextual adaptations to urban congestion, thereby challenging prevailing interpretations of motorcyclist behavior.

Police station meaning, closure and (in)visibility

ABSTRACT This article considers the visual symbolism of policing as reflected by the presence or absence of police stations. The focus is England where recent years have witnessed a prolonged period of police station closure. The article draws on interviews with police estate managers and considers their reasons given for closure and consequent impact on visibility. The discussion is influenced by visual criminology and semiotics, as well as the concept of the abstract police developed by Jan Terpstra and colleagues, that police officers are now more abstract from the communities they serve, and from each other. Station closure was explained as being due to austerity, but also the unsuitability of ‘legacy’ buildings, changes in demand, and changes in police models. In these contexts, some closures may seem appropriate with public engagement maintained online. Moreover, poor community relations mean some may prefer not to have a local station. Yet, we argue that the visual presence or absence of a local police station can be read semiotically as a symbol of the police’s investment, or conversely lack of interest, in the community. The significance of these debates is discussed.

Bill McClanahan (2023) Visual Criminology. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press

Kajsa Lundberg reviews Visual Criminology by Bill McClanahan

“Missing the Community for the Dots”: Newspaper Crime Maps, Territorial Stigma and Visual Criminology

By drawing on research on territorial stigmatization, critical cartography, and visual criminology, this article develops a critical literacy of crime maps to scrutinize their ability to function as adequate representations of crime. Focusing on online newspaper crime maps of homicides published by one of Chicago’s major newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, this article argues that crime maps assign a criminogenic character to urban spaces by spatially inscribing homicides onto community maps. In particular, this article devotes attention to the power of crime visualizations through cartography, developing strategies to educate readers about how to critically think about and read crime maps’ visualizations of the spatiality of crime. This article is intended as both a critique of crime maps’ spatio-visual practices as well as an attempt to develop a critical literacy of crime maps.

Visible policing: uniforms and the (re)construction of police occupational identity

ABSTRACT This article contributes to contemporary criminological debates on police visibility by exploring the relationship between police uniforms, artefacts and occupational identity. The article is influenced by visual criminology and semiotics and draws on elicitation interviews with officers and staff from four English police services. Participants were asked to bring with them an object or image that they identified as being an important expression of their occupational identity, which was then discussed. Most often objects or images were associated with their uniform. Findings are presented in relation to the visual symbolism, iconography and performativity of uniforms and related material artefacts. Participants drew upon visual representations in making sense of positive and negative aspects of their role and in defending their occupational identity in the light of perceived external challenges, such as reductions in police numbers and threats of violence and danger. It is argued that the communicative properties of this material culture play an important symbolic role in the self-legitimation and professional identity of police work.

New Criminological Perspectives: The Observational Method

AbstractThis contribution will present the observational method, whose main goal is the in-depth analysis of the criminal situation concerning both the dynamics that are triggered within the relationship – therefore interpreting them through the eyes of the individuals involved – and the dynamics faced by those who observe the relationship from the outside and then have to represent or judge it. The method is the result of the encounter between two approaches, narrative criminology and visual criminology, from which it borrows the concepts of narrative and image. Narrative, in this case, means the stories produced by individuals, who describe the events through their point of observation, and the arguments produced by criminologists and operators based on the perspective they adopted in observing the story; therefore, the narrative plays a central role. The observational method defines the relationship metaphorically as if it were a room within which the protagonists act and perceive themselves according to where they are placed and what they see subjectively. Those who observe the room from the outside will describe it as if it were a photograph. Here the concept of image borrowed from visual criminology returns. Starting with the first activities that are carried out talking about criminal acts (fact-crimes) and then the inspection activities (technical–judicial and psycho-criminological), we will highlight the role of the criminologist and the narrative approach that distinguishes his or her work.

Visual criminology and lives lived in public space

In January 2017, several homeless people gathered outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, Australia. The gathering gained significant media attention and led to an immediate political response, with the city council proposing changes to ban rough sleeping in the city. Drawing on insights from visual criminology and moral geography, I scrutinise how visual regimes and aesthetic judgements helped motivate this punitive response. To do so, I combine ten in-depth interviews with homelessness service providers and a critical discourse analysis of how Melbourne’s two daily newspapers reported on the camp. I identify how the newspapers represent homeless people as violating the idealised aesthetics of the city, a violation which comes to discursively justify their criminalisation. Moreover, the way a person looks and their belongings, if stored in public space, direct their reception and whether or not they become subjected to police interventions. Finally, representations of homelessness matter and alternative representations of homeless people could shift the emphasis away from criminalisation, in favour of policy responses to homelessness attuned to structures of social and economic inequalities.

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

Police organisations across much of the Western world have eagerly embraced body-worn video camera technology, seen as a way to enhance public trust in police, provide transparency in policing activity, reduce conflict between police and citizens and provide a police perspective of incidents and events. Indeed, the cameras have become an everyday piece of police ‘kit’. Despite the growing ubiquity of the body-worn video camera, understandings of the nature and value of the audiovisual footage produced by police remain inchoate. Given body-worn video camera’s promise of veracity, this article is interested in the aesthetics of the camera images and the socio-cultural construction of the cameras as tellers of truth. We treat body-worn video cameras as image-making devices linked to techniques and technologies of power, which construct and frame police encounters in specific ways, and we suggest that the aesthetics and point-of-view nature of the image contribute greatly to the truth-value that the images acquire. This article begins by providing an historical context for the use of cameras and images in policing. We then introduce our framework of visual criminology and present theories of point-of-view as a construct in the diverse areas of gaming, pornography and the visual arts, as well as in television and cinema. The article deploys the cinematic use of point-of-view to unpack the affective impact and aesthetic of the police body-worn video camera footage. We suggest that viewers of the footage are placed in the position of the corporeally absent police officer whose experience has been recorded by a viewfinderless device. This generates a vacillating interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, given that the alleged faithful recording of the event by the body-worn video camera presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event.

Crimes of the Senses: Yarn Bombing and Aesthetic Criminology

Abstract Yarn bombing involves the display of knitted or crocheted items in public space, often without permission. This article draws on interviews with yarn bombers in the North West of England and considers who the yarn bombers are, their motivations and experiences and their views on the legal status of yarn bombing. Although the visual is important for yarn bombing—and it is therefore of interest to visual criminology—this article also looks further to consider other sensory experience. In this way, it contributes to an emerging aesthetic criminology concerned with broader sensory, affective and emotive experience. Drawing on Thrift’s work on urban affect or mood, as well as Anderson and Young on affective atmospheres, yarn bombing is regarded as a crime of the senses affecting both the look and the feel of the city. The scope for further development of an aesthetic criminology is suggested, including specific methodologies that embrace the full range of sensory experiences associated with crime, disorder or social harm.

Visual criminology and the social image/s of crime

Visual criminology and the social image/s of crime

Visually exploring social perceptions of environmental harm in global urban contexts

Building on the visual criminological endeavour, the article describes an ongoing pilot study exploring the potential usefulness of a visual and sensory methodology for investigating the social perception of environmental crime and harm. Given the scarcity of tools with which to approach these dynamic and elusive phenomena, I focus first on the methodological and theoretical positioning that sees the encounter between green, cultural, visual and narrative criminologies. I will do this by considering in detail two techniques to collect qualitative data: interviews-with-visual-materials (also known as photo elicitation) and itinerant soliloquies – a peculiar sociological form of mobile methodology. In doing so, I invite sociologists who work in visual criminology to reconsider the constitutive relationship between our ways of seeing and our ways of sensing and perceiving the environment we live in. Finally, the article reflects on the importance for criminologists and sociologists of deepening and strengthening an organic solidarity among the visual, sensorial and narrative dimensions of environmental crime and harm, as well as looking at the social, cultural and political relevance of human–environment relationships.

The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory

This article considers the manner in which visual criminology has flourished in the current moment, while exploring its foundational relations and points of distinction as a form of critical criminology. In particular, we devote attention to the relationship of images to control, power and resistance at a time defined by the spectacular proliferation of media. We also discuss new and recent directions in visual criminology that enlarge our understandings of both critical and visual work, including forensic architecture and sensory criminology.

The spectacle of Discipline and Punish: The tableau, the diagram and the calligram

This article returns to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in order to consider its continued relevance for thinking about the representation of incarceration today beyond categories of ‘spectacle’ and ‘surveillance’. In order to rethink the text in relation to contemporary scholarship on visual criminology, it will explore the visual elements of Discipline and Punish in more detail via the concepts of the ‘tableau’ and the ‘diagram’ found in Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault. These concepts will be supplemented by the notion of the ‘calligram’, drawing on Foucault’s 1968 essay ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ in order to explore what is at stake in current representations of incarceration via a specific engagement with offender art. Evoking Jacques Rancière’s notion of curiosity as a critique of the ‘intolerable image’, the article will suggest ways in which the relationship between the academic scholar qua ‘penal spectator’ and the ‘represented’ incarcerated subject can be reconfigured to produce a more critical, empathetic and socially responsible engagement with such representations.

Photographing prisoners: The unworthy, unpleasant and unchanging criminal body

The use of photography in representing the criminal body has long been a focus of interest in the social sciences, especially so when exploring the historical evolution of criminal identification practices. By contributing to the emerging field of visual criminology, this article explores current practices around photography of prisoners in the everyday contexts of the prison space. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with prisoners, prison guards and probation officers in three Portuguese prisons, we analyse how different social actors construct the criminal body. This construction is explored through the meanings attributed to prisoners’ photographic portraits used for their identification. In particular, we discuss how their photographic documentation acts as a classification device and a visual representation of the criminal. We argue that this representation, by portraying elements of unworthiness, unpleasantness and immutability, plays a significant role in the parole board’s decisions and produce an embodied sense of identity and perpetuation of stigma.

Raw, roast or half-baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate

Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid considerable attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman animals has often and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of national identity. It is from the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad backcloth of this article is woven. Its focus is the neglected coupling of patriotism and carnism, instantiated here by its deployment in William Hogarth’s painting Calais Gate (1749). A pro-animal reading is offered of the English artist’s exhortation that it is in the nature of ‘true-born Britons’ to consume a daily dish of roast beef served with lashings of francophobia and anti-popery. The article suggests that alert contemporary viewers of Calais Gate would nevertheless have noticed that Hogarth’s painterly triumphalism ironically rekindles the repressed memory of English military defeat and territorial loss. Because the political and religious borders between England and France were so easily defaced and refaced, the accompanying air of uncertainty over national identity would also have infiltrated the perceived authenticity of English roast beef. The article draws on animal rights theory, on nonspeciesist green criminology and on green visual criminology in order to oppose the historical dominance of human interests over those of other animal species in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.

Sex Work, Sensory Urbanism and Visual Criminology: Exploring the Role of the Senses in Shaping Residential Perceptions of Brothels in Blackpool

AbstractUrban studies and criminology have much to offer each other, but the links between the two have so far been underexplored. This article is an illustration of how aspects of both can, and should, be brought into conversation: namely the literatures on sensory urbanism (in urban studies) and visual criminology. The benefits of doing so are evidenced by a case study exploring the ways in which the senses shape residents’ perceptions of brothels in Blackpool. Three key findings emerge from the case study. First, the residents interviewed tended to focus on the visual aspects of brothels rather than other sensory aspects. Nevertheless, touch and smell (and their interaction with the visual) also played small but important roles in shaping residential perceptions. Second, residential perceptions of sex work and brothels are linked to, and encompass, a plurality of emotional responses. Third, while the residents could see or hear little of what was happening inside the brothels, they often sought out sensory clues from outside, typically drawn from the architectural features of the brothels. Such insights, we argue, are made possible by, and highlight the possibilities of, the bringing together of urban studies and criminology.

Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology. Edited by Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017, 578pp., £165.00 hb)

Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology. Edited by Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017, 578pp., £165.00 hb)

The digital witness: The role of digital evidence in criminal justice responses to sexual violence

While the low conviction rate for cases of sexual violence is often justified by the so-called ‘he-said-she-said’ nature of these cases, the increasing presence of digital evidence has begun to challenge this justification. This digital evidence can provide new opportunities for intervening in and prosecuting sexual violence. However, it may also be used against complainants or deemed still insufficient for proving guilt. Thus, while digital evidence may be challenging typical criminal justice responses to sexual violence, it may equally be utilised to buttress entrenched stereotypes and criminal justice practices that lead to complainant dissatisfaction and serve to support low conviction rates. I draw on critical feminist legal theory, feminist engagements with digital technology and sexual violence, and visual criminology to theorise the burgeoning role of the digital witness in sexual violence cases.

Visual criminology and Lombroso: In memory of Nicole Rafter (1939–2016)

Nicole Rafter (1939–2016) formed her vast and diverse oeuvre long before the rise of visual criminology. Nevertheless, Rafter was a pioneer in this new, expanding field. Rafter’s scholarly interest in ‘the visual’ and biological theories of crime appeared in her early scholarship. Eventually, Rafter focused on the visual and Cesare Lombroso’s (1835–1909) criminal anthropology. She discovered that Lombroso was not simply the founding figure of what is today called criminology, but of visual criminology.