Contesting Criminal Justice Frames

Preliminaries

This book's method is to track the performances of a handful of culturally available frames on street crime in samples of media and popular discourse. This chapter is intended to lay the foundation for what follows by identifying the frames and describing the samples of discourse.

The Contesting Frames

In order to establish a catalogue of culturally available frames on street crime, I examined the speeches and publications of partisans on various "sides" of the issue. There are two advantages to this strategy: First, frame sponsors tend to express their views in an ideologically coherent manner, thus presenting relatively "pure" or unadulterated frames. Second, by first consulting sponsors rather than mass media products, I could create a catalogue that comes close to including all culturally available frames rather than only those that enjoy prominence in the mass media.

My review of the activist and partisan discourse yielded a working catalogue of frames. I then tested the "fit" of this catalogue on the sample of media discourse assembled for the study. My aim at this stage was to make sure that the frame catalogue offered the right balance between precision (it should represent all of the important views and ideas in the crime debate) and economy (it should summarize and simplify the debate). The final, revised catalogue included five basic frames that I labeled Faulty System, Blocked Opportunities, Social Breakdown, Media Violence and Racist System. They are presented in the coding guide (Appendix B) in terms of their constituent elements. In what follows I describe them as ideal types.

Faulty System

The "law and order" perspective described in the introduction is best captured in the frame Faculty System. This frame regards crime as a con-sequence of impunity: People do crimes because they know they can get away with them. The police are handcuffed by liberal judges. The prisons, bursting at their seams, have revolving doors for serious offenders. "The system is riddled with loopholes and technicalities that render punishment neither swift nor certain, says Bush Administration Attorney General William P. Barr (P.A.F., 1993:13). "The Supreme Court of our country has made it almost impossible to convict a criminal," says Alabama governor George Wallace (Gordon, 1990:176). The only way to enhance public safety is to increase the swiftness, certainty and severity of punishment. In the words of President Richard M. Nixon, "The time has come for soft-headed judges and probation officers to show as much concern for the rights of innocent victims of crime as they do for the rights of convicted criminals" (1973:3~5). Loopholes and technicalities that impede the apprehension and imprisonment of offenders must be eliminated. Adequate funding for police, courts and prisons must be made available. In our failure to act, warns political scientist James Q. Wilson, "We thereby trifle with the wicked, make sport of the innocent, and encourage the calculating" (P.A.F., 1993:15).

Faulty System is sponsored by Republican politicians, conservative policy analysts, and most criminal justice professionals. It can be symbolically condensed with the mug-shot of the convicted rapist Willie Horton, or by the image of inmates passing through a revolving door on a prison gate (both symbols courtesy of commercials aired on behalf of George Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign [see Chapter 1]).

The frame Blocked Opportunities depicts crime as a consequence of inequality and discrimination, especially as they manifest themselves in unemployment, poverty, and inadequate educational opportunities. People commit crimes when they discover that the legitimate means for attaining material success are blocked. In the words of President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Unemployment, ignorance, disease, filth, poor housing, congestion, discriminationóall of these things contribute to the great crime wave that is sweeping through our nation" (Beckett, 1994a). The United States is unique among industrialized societies in both the extent of its income inequality and the weakness of its social safety net. Moreover, since the 1960s the deindustrialization of American cities and attendant disappearance of good paying blue-collar jobs has steadily worsened prospects for the urban poor. Growing desperation promotes violence as well as property crime; in the words of criminologist David Bruck, "If you're going to create a sink-or-swim society, you have to expect people to thrash before they go down" (P.A.F., 1993:22). To reduce crime, government must ameliorate the social conditions that cause it. In the words of former Minneapolis Police Chief Anthony Bouza ''Only the government can provide an educational plan that serves the poor, a welfare system that attends to the needs of the excluded and jobs programs that offer hope to all our citizens.... The War on Poverty must be refought. The dilemma of racism must be attacked" (Bouza, 1993:20).

Blocked Opportunities is sponsored by liberal and Left policy analysts and by some liberal Democrat politicians. It can be symbolically condensed through references to the dead-end jobs reserved for inner-city youth, such as "flipping burgers at McDonalds."

Social Breakdown

The frame Social Breakdown depicts crime as a consequence of family and community disintegration. Witness the skyrocketing rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births. Witness the indifference of urbanites to the crime that plagues their communities. Family breakdown in the context of urban indifference has loosened the moral and social bonds that in better times discouraged crime. As President Clinton explained in his 1994 State of the Union message, "In America's toughest neighborhoods, meanest streets, and poorest rural areas, we have seen a stunning breakdown of community, family and workóthe heart and soul of civilized society. This has created a vast vacuum into which violence, drugs and gangs have moved." The remedy for the problem can be found in collective efforts to reconstitute family and community through moral exhortation, neighborhood associations, crime watches and community policing. "Every parent, every teacher, every person who has the chance to influence children must force a change in the lives of our kids," urged the President in his weekly radio address. "We have to show them we love them, and we have to teach them discipline and responsibility.î The frame can be symbolically condensed through laments over the decline of "family values" and by the figure of Kitty Genovese, the New York woman who was stabbed to death while her neighbors looked passively on (see Chapter 4).

Social Breakdown is typically expressed in a neutral, ostensibly non-ideological fashion, but the frame also has conservative and liberal versions. The conservative versions attributes family and community breakdown to "permissiveness," the protest movements of the 1960s and 70s (e.g., civil rights, feminism) and government-sponsored antipoverty initiatives (e.g., "welfare"). As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, "Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self discipline and industry are waning. . . [F]amilies are more and more matrifocal and atomized; crime and disorder are sharply on the rise.... It is a stirring, if generally unrecognized, demonstration of the power of the welfare machine" (Beckett, 1994a). The liberal versions, in contrast, attribute family and community breakdown to unemployment, racial discrimination, deindustrialization and capital flight.

Media Violence

The frame Media Violence depicts crime as a consequence of violence on television, in the movies and in popular music. Violence in the mass media undermines respect for life. By the time the average child reaches age 18, notes Dr. Thomas Elmendorf in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Communication, "he will have witnessed . . . some 18,000 murders and countless highly detailed incidents of robbery, arson, bombings, shooting, beatings, forgery, smuggling and torture." As a result, "Television has become a school of violence and a college for crime" (1976:764). To reduce violence in the society we must first reduce it in the mass media.

Media Violence can be symbolically condensed through reference to violent television programs (e.g., Miami Vice) or musicians whose lyrics are said to promote violence (e.g., "Guns 'N' Roses," "2 Live Crew"). The frame is sponsored by citizen lobby organizations (e.g., the Massachusetts based group Action for Children's Television), and, periodically, by members of Congress and the Department of Justice.

Racist System

The fifth frame, Racist System, derives its essence from a depiction of the criminal justice system rather than an attribution of responsibility for crime. The frame depicts the courts and police as racist agents of oppression. In the words of Johnson Administration Undersecretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, "We have in these United States lived under a dual system of justice, one for the white, one for the black" (1968:616). Police resources are dedicated to the protection of low crime white neighborhoods rather than high crime minority ghettos. Black offenders are more likely to be arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison than whites who commit comparable offenses. And the death penalty is administered in a racist fashion. In some versions of this frame, the putative purpose of the criminal justice system is to suppress a potentially rebellious underclass.

Racist System is sponsored by civil rights and civil liberties activists and by Left intellectuals. It can be condensed by reference to Rodney King or other well-known targets of racially motivated police violence.

Rebuttals

Each of these five frames has a number of standard rebuttals. Faulty System, for example, is frequently negated with the claim that imprisonment "hardens" offenders; Blocked Opportunities with the claim that most poor people are straight as an arrow; Social Breakdown with the claim that rhetoric about the "nuclear family" is in fact thinly veiled hostility for feminism; and so on. The coding guide (Appendix B) specifies some of the frames' most common negations. Table 2.1 illustrates the frames' key components.

There is one more matter to clarify concerning my catalogue of frames. In contemporary discourse, crime is often attributed to drugs an guns. I made an early decision that drugs and guns are part of the crime problemóthings that demand explanation and not explanations in themselves. If in the account that follows "drugs" and "guns" are conspicuously absent as a "causes" of crime, it is for this reason.

Media Discourse

The sample of media discourse created for this study is comprised of 58 op ed columns on the topic of street crime. The op eds appeared in six metropolitan newspapers during a twelve month period between 1990 and 1991. The newspapers include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. Items were initially included in the sample if they addressed the topic of street crime and appeared opposite the editorial page or in the expanded commentary section of the Sunday paper. The sample was subsequently winnowed to include only items that displayed at least one of the crime frames either for the purpose of advocacy or rebuttal. Of the handful of op eds excluded at this stage of data compilation, most were pieces that merely described the seriousness of the crime problem without offering either an analysis of its sources or recommendation for its cure.

The sample is representative of one type of media discourse: that of public policy commentary by political, journalistic and academic elites. In contrast to entertainment programming (e.g., police dramas) op eds tend to be explicit in their ideological messages. In contrast to straight news reporting, op eds, when taken as a whole, tend to be ideologically diverse. Beckett (1995) attributes this diversity to the relative autonomy of op ed writers from official (governmental and law enforcement) sources. Gans (1979) points out that newspaper editors feel compelled by a professional "balance norm" to publish roughly equal numbers of expressly conservative and liberal columns. While distinct in these respect from other types of media discourse, op eds feature the key tropes and metaphors that punctuate the public debate on crime. They are also significant for their effects on public policy; politicians read op eds to get a sense of where the political winds are blowing and thereby to arrive at conclusions about what to say and do.

Popular Discourse

The shortcomings of survey research for gathering data on public opinion are widely recognized: Surveys tend to produce findings that reflect the concepts and categories of their authors rather than their subjects (Reinharz, 1984); they treat opinions as stable when in fact opinions vary with context (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Bennett, 1980); and they foster an image of people as isolated individuals rather than members of particular cultures and subcultures (Blumer, 1948). At the root of the problem is that survey research rests on a faulty depiction of the research subject: It assumes that each person carries about in her head a fixed and relatively simple structure of attitudes. But in the real world, human consciousness is bound up with social context and language, both rife with shades of symbolic meaning. What people think and say depends in part on who is asking, who is listening, how the question is posed, and a host of related details. Surveys, in spite of the best efforts of skilled researchers, cannot adequately deal with this complexity.

Michael Billig's (1987, 1991) depiction of the research subject is perhaps the alternative most compatible with the constructionist approach to public opinion. He contends that thinking is nothing more than a dialogue or an argument occurring in a single self. Hence public conversation and private thinking can be treated analytically as part and parcel of the same process. The best way to analyze both is to regard people as orators and to examine the rhetorical components of their arguments. Prominent among the latter are "common-places" - the contrary themes, maxims, folk wisdom, values, and so forth, that together comprise a culture's common sense. But how can we sample the work of everyday orators?

Table 2 . Crime Frames
	Diagnosis	Prognosis	Condensing Symbols
Faulty System	Crime stems from criminal justice leniency and inefficiency	The criminal justice system needs to "get tough."	Willie Horton "Handcuffed police" "Revolving door justice"
Blocked Opportunities	Crime stems from poverty and inequality	The government must address the "root causes" of crime by creating jobs and reducing poverty.	"Flipping Burgers" at McDonalds
Social Breakdown	Crime stems from family and community breakdown.	Citizens should band together to recreate traditional communities.	"Take back the streets" Kitty Genovese "Family values"
Media Violence	Crime stems from violence in the mass media	The government should regulate violent imagery in the media.	"Life imitates art" 2 Live Crew Guns n Roses
Racist System	The criminal justice system operates in a racist fashion.	African Americans should band together to demand justice	Rodney King Crown Heights Charles Stuart

Used with permission from:
Sasson, Theodore. Crime Talk: How Citizens Contruct a Social Problem. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter) Copyright 1995 Walter de Gruyter Inc., New York.