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Purpose – During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian jurisdictions have varied in terms of their reporting of COVID-19 cases among prisoners and prison staff. Engaging with literatures on the policing of criminological knowledge and prison opacity, this chapter examines how multiple approaches to newsmaking criminology including blog posts, op-ed writing, report publishing, and expert commentary can challenge state secrecy in ways that help generate proactive disclosure of additional information about the impact and management of the coronavirus behind prison walls.

Methodology/Approach – The authors explore how “flooding the zone” of public debates on pandemic management with the limited, incomplete data made available by authorities works as a knowledge mobilization and research strategy.

Findings – The analysis in this study reveals how a newsmaking criminology approach can help researchers access previously unpublished information from Canadian prison authorities that is crucial to understanding prison policy, practice, and outcomes related to COVID-19.

Originality/Value – This chapter highlights the value of newsmaking criminology as a means of communicating and mobilizing criminological knowledge, as well as generating data in the service of emancipatory research and advocacy.

This paper presents the results of two research projects designed to evaluate the extent and nature of the use of the World Wide Web by criminal justice agencies. Discussion focuses on the extent and nature of Web use by type of agency, who links to whom, and the use of the Web to disseminate information from a news‐making criminology perspective.

Stories govern the criminal justice system and consequently the millions of individuals under its control. In the US the harms experienced by those individuals, their families and their communities are massive. A prominent system-sustaining story is that antisocial persons, who are essentially different from the rest of us, get that way through negligent parenting. The story's moral oppositions rest on textual absences concerning crime, work, care, humanity and the mind of the scholar. In this chapter, first, I discern what goes unsaid via close analysis of the story of antisociality constructed by Gottfredson and Hirschi in their 1990 book A General Theory of Crime. Second, I offer a method for cataloguing what goes unsaid in stories that effect control, by (1) evaluating figurative language and other means of ambiguation; (2) assessing patterns of elaboration and explanation and (3) asking what and whose knowledge is missing. Rigorously deployed with a reflexive stance on one's position as to what should be said, the method can help uncover subtext, understatement and silencing.

The way crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’ use in rural Australia has been represented for national television audiences provides rich evidence of the intersections between media, crime and rurality. This chapter explores these connections through a framing analysis of three Australian television news and current affairs features about this topic. It investigates how concepts such as ‘fluidity’ and ‘boundedness’ operate in relation to the representation of ice use and drug-related crime in rural and regional communities. This raises questions about how certain images and associations come to circulate through media as well as their potential to evolve and change over time or to even be contested – sometimes by the very individuals and communities who serve as the subjects of stories about such problems in society.

Purpose: This study examines representations of criminal victims and offenders on television’s Law and Order, which ran for 20 years. Law and Order was praised by viewers as a realistic and lifelike representation of the criminal justice system. Given its popularity and perceived realism, Law and Order was likely a major source of information about the criminal justice system, victims of crime, and criminals. Methodology/approach: Utilizing an ethnographic content analysis of 50 episodes of Law and Order, the data include demographic and contextual information on over 1,500 characters. The analyses in this study focus on the sociodemographic characteristics of victims and offenders in total and across time. Findings: Results find that Whites, women, and those from middle- and upper-classes were disproportionately presented as victims. Offenders were disproportionately White, male, older, and from the middle- or upper-classes. People of color were underrepresented in all roles, and Latinx characters were more likely to be portrayed in a negative light. Research limitations: The study lacks qualitative data, which would have contributed to a deeper understanding of victim and offender representations. Originality/value: The study represents the most robust content analysis of one of the most popular crime series of all time. Given the popularity and long running success of the show, it is likely that Law and Order is at least partially accountable for misconceptions and reinforcement of viewer’s misperceptions of what it means to be a “victim” and an “offender.”

The front page of the Toronto Sun displayed an image of Karla Homolka bruised and battered and read, ‘Bernardo Did This to Karla: Crown’. In 1993, Karla Homolka entered into a plea deal in exchange for the testimony against her then-husband Paul Bernardo. Though Homolka pled guilty to two counts of manslaughter, Canadian media outlets painted Homolka as a subservient and battered woman fearful of the abusive Bernardo's reprisal. Then, during Bernardo's trial, rumoured videotapes finally surfaced that exposed Homolka's seemingly wilful role in the gruesome murders of the young girls Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy, and her sister Tammy Homolka. Although Tammy Homolka's death had been deemed accidental, her body was exhumed, and autopsy reports found lethal traces of sedative drugs in her system. While sedated, both Bernardo and Homolka raped her as she choked and died on her own vomit. After these videotapes surfaced, media representations shifted drastically – referring to Homolka's plea deal as ‘the deal with the devil’.

This chapter outlines the crimes committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka – also known as the Barbie and Ken Killers. Furthermore, it employs a qualitative literature review to document the evolution in the media representations of Homolka and exposes the media's role in the creation of this ‘monstrous’ woman in Canadian history. As this chapter outlines the representational shift of Homolka in the media, it deconstructs the hegemonic notions of proper femininity that often characterise women as deviant. Moreover, from a social constructivist lens, the brutality of Homolka's crimes are considered and examined in the context of the normative ideologies surrounding ideal womanhood and sexuality. I will argue that by dismantling these socially constructed ideologies, the significance of Homolka's whiteness also becomes apparent. As Homolka seems to deviate from her whiteness, media depictions illustrate an incitement of hysteria. Thus, this article questions the validity of the media representations that once depicted Homolka as ‘the girl next door’ – who was acting in accordance with her whiteness – but also inevitably paint her as the ‘devil’.

This study set out to advance knowledge on the reporting of police shootings in print media. Media is the main source of information on criminal justice issues for most citizens. Thus, understanding the presentation of police-involved shooting incidents is important for determining the manner in which media might shape the opinions of readers.

The current study content analyzed relevant newspaper articles gathered from a large database of journalistic documents compiled by Lexis Nexis. Articles pertaining to police shootings published between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015, were identified and coded to document various dimensions of how these encounters are portrayed in print media.

Results indicate that explicit racialization of the stories was limited, which is contrary to what was expected. Neither the race of the suspect or officer was mentioned in most stories, making it difficult to assess explicit reporting bias of these incidents. However, results indicate that implicit bias might play a role in shaping the content portrayed in print news accounts of police-involved shootings.

The current study represents one of the first – if not the first – content analysis of news stories centered on police-involved shootings. Given the significant role media plays in delivering information about crime and justice topics to the citizenry, a working knowledge about the media’s portrayal of these events is important for understanding how media consumption may shape citizens’ opinions about police-involved shootings.