Vol. 6 No. 5 (May, 1996) pp. 90-92
CRIME TALK: HOW CITIZENS CONSTRUCT A SOCIAL PROBLEM by Theodore
Sasson. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995. xiii + 197 pp. Cloth
$38.95. Paper $18.95.
Reviewed by Sally Engle Merry, Wellesley College
How do ordinary people talk about the crime problem in the
contemporary United States? What kinds of stories do they tell
one another about why crime happens and what can be done about
it? This book uses group interviews and a content analysis of the
mass media to construct the dominant stories told about crime
through the method of frame analysis. This approach examines the
framework within which particular accounts are told. It could
also be described as narrative analysis: the author has examined
a wide variety of verbal accounts and newspaper stories to
uncover the dominant narratives told about crime. He then locates
the tellers of these narratives in the social categories of race
and class. The result is an interesting description of dominant
stories about crime now afloat in the country and some sense of
the areas in which blacks and the whites, as he terms his
categories, agree and disagree.
Sasson begins by locating his methodology in opposition to survey
research. As he points out, surveys, while frequently used to
examine attitudes toward crime, are unable to measure the
situational and contextual nature of these ideas. The ideas can
be better understood as parts of a conversation in which
expectations about audience, context, and history affect the way
statements are framed and understood. This is an important point
and is a useful critique of the kinds of information available
from survey research as well as a valuable context for
appreciating the insights derived from Sasson's alternative
methodology.
Sasson begins by reading the op-ed pages of national newspapers
during the early 1990s. On this basis, he defines five dominant
frames for crime stories. He describes them along with their
intellectual histories, and it is clear that most have long
pedigrees, many of which include the social sciences. Some, he
notes, go back to the 18th century, such as the work of Beccaria.
Thus, these are not new stories but old and well-used ones. It
would be interesting to examine further than the book does the
origins of these stories in social science and the reasons for
their durability as well as their tendency to seem freshly
invented in every generation.
The first frame, Faulty System, sees crime as a result of the
inadequacies of the criminal justice system. People commit crimes
because they know they can get away with it: liberal judges,
overcrowded prisons, and legal technicalities undermine the
ability of the criminal justice system to deliver swift,
consistent penalties. The second frame, Blocked Opportunities,
sees crime as a consequence of inequality and discrimination,
unemployment, poverty, and unequal educational opportunities. The
failing social safety net and the desperation of the urban poor
account for crime. The third frame, Social Breakdown, envisions
crime as the product of family and community breakdown, high
divorce rates, urban indifference, and the absence of the
discipline and responsibility of work. As Sasson notes, the
origins of this perspective are in the Chicago School of urban
sociology in the early twentieth century.
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The fourth frame, Media Violence, attributes crime to the
pervasive violence of TV, film, and popular music. The fifth
frame, Racist System, argues that the courts and police are
racist agents of oppression, that police protection is
disproportionately devoted to white neighborhoods, and that the
criminal justice system disproportionately convicts and imprisons
people of color. In the op-ed columns, he found the Faulty System
frame most frequently cited, with the Social Breakdown and
Blocked Opportunities frame close behind and the Media Violence
and Racist System frames mentioned least often.
Having delineated these five frames on the basis of examining
public commentary in the newspapers, Sasson moves to the
community, conducting interviews in small groups of neighbors
designed to assess to what extent people use one or another of
these frames to talk about crime. He carried out discussions in
twenty groups in Boston, fairly evenly divided between white and
black participants. In total, there were 110 participants. Here,
he found that some frames were divided into sub-categories and
some were not. There are liberal and conservative versions of
several of them. Each frame has a series of standard rebuttals
which also become part of the conversation.
In the group discussions, the most common perceptions fall into
the frame he calls Social Breakdown. This view attributes crime
to moral decline, poor parenting, and community disintegration.
It typically focuses on the failure of individuals to carry out
their responsibilities rather than on the failure of social
structure. Faulty System was also commonly discussed. Relatively
few proposed the Blocked Opportunities theory. Among
African-American groups, Racist System was common and readily
discussed, although talk focused on the racism of the criminal
justice system rather than on racism as an explanation for
criminal behavior. Media Violence was little discussed either in
the groups or on op-ed pages, yet there was also little effort to
refute the argument, which seems generally accepted.
In his analysis of these data, Sasson argues that the ability to
make strong arguments for any frame depends on the availability
of "resources" such as personal experience, media
discussion, and popular wisdom and that those which appear most
strongly are those which draw on all these sources of knowledge.
The fundamental argument of the book is that the pervasiveness of
any frame depends on the extent to which it reflects a
convergence of views based on shared cultural themes, mass media
depictions, personal experiences, and differential experiences
based on race and class locations. For example, among black
groups, Faulty System, Social Breakdown, and Racist System were
commonly deployed frames because they drew on personal and
cultural knowledge, while whites referred infrequently to Blocked
Opportunities and Racist System because they lacked the knowledge
base for these frames. Well-educated whites working in the public
sector tended to express Blocked Opportunities. All of the frames
draw on shared American cultural conceptions of self-reliance and
individualism.
This book provides a rich description of popular consciousness
about crime in American society today. The chapters are full
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of quotes from the discussion groups and from the op-ed pages of
newspapers. The speakers are helpfully located in class and
racial categories and there is some analysis of how blacks and
whites differ in their views. I found that the similarity between
blacks and whites on almost all frames except the Racist System
frame was surprisingly undeveloped in the analysis as were
differences among whites by educational level in their
assessments of the Blocked Opportunities and Faulty System
models. There was clear acknowledgment that the study groups did
not include the urban underclass but no discussion of the
significance of the overrepresentation of people aged 40 and
above or of women (71% of the participants).
Overall, the book explained variations in popular consciousness
about crime in terms of popular wisdom, media portrayals, and
everyday experience. But there is not much analysis about how
these frames emerged historically, how they relate to larger
changes in the political economy or social structure of
contemporary America, or why people hear and accept one or
another argument at any one time. The frame analysis is very
helpful in sorting out the various stories, but it also produces
rather rigid categories which are sometimes difficult to impose
on the discussion material. This is an inevitable aspect of
typologies: they both sort out and clarify the social world but
resist fluidity and ambiguity.
The book concludes with an interesting discussion of the
political implications of this material. It shows considerable
popular support for the view that crime is the result of social
breakdown and a decline in family values. Although for many
participants in the study this view is ideologically neutral, it
is compatible with conservative theories about the crime problem.
On the other hand, there is relatively little support for more
progressive ideas that crime results from a lack of
opportunities, poverty, and racism in the criminal justice
system. Sasson suggests that if progressives are to gain more
popular support for their arguments, they need to articulate a
progressive version of the social breakdown theory which focuses
on the strains to family and community life caused by economic
insecurity, poverty, and racial discrimination. Thus, the
description and typology offered in the book incorporates a
valuable political analysis with implications for people
interested in promoting progressive politics.
The book is readable and accessible to undergraduates as well as
graduate students. It provides extensive textual material
suitable for further discussion and analysis. And it addresses an
important question, the shape of popular consciousness about
crime, through detailed ethnography. Reading this book along with
other analyses of the structures of race, class, gender, and age
in American society would provide an excellent view of cultural
perspectives on criminality in the contemporary United States.