Abstract
Andrea Mayr and David Machin’s book has nine well developed chapters. Three operational ‘divisions’ are discernible: an overview and closing of the text (Chapters 1 and 9), theoretical substructures (Chapters 2 and 3) and application of theory to crime discourses (Chapters 4 to 8).
In Chapter 1, the authors situate the text both in societal conditions and the literature on crime and deviance, critical discourse analysis and media research. As a platform for the discussions in subsequent chapters, they preliminarily review ‘discourse’, ‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘media theory and news production’. Having stated and justified their preference for a multimodal approach, they end the chapter with a section in which the contents of the book are previewed.
Chapters 2 and 3, ‘Simple Word Choice and the Representation of People and Action in Crime’ and ‘Concealment and Evasion in Crime Reporting through Grammar’ respectively, explore lexical fields imbued with ideologically loaded meanings in crime discourses and the linguistic toolkits used in media representations of actions. In Chapters 4 to 8, the linguistic resources discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 are applied to media constructions.
In Chapter 4, the authors analyse knife crime in the UK as presented in newspaper articles and a BBC programme, and demonstrate that media reports on youth crime largely rely on stock and recycled lexical choices and discourses which avoid differing from stereotypical perspectives on youth crime in the British context. Chapter 5 focuses on gender-infused media representations of women. In a multimodal analysis, the authors dissect the construction of women who are deviant as the ‘other’, the media utilization of criminal or violent women’s images as indexical of violation of gender norms set up by society, and the mythical sainthood built up for women by society in respect of crime and deviance. Chapter 6 is devoted to a phased analysis of media portrayal of policing and the police in Britain. The authors demonstrate, through a close multimodal analysis of the television crime programme Crimewatch, that while the many key policing discourses privileged by the electronic media are appropriate, the discourses may not help the public in understanding either the police or their crime fighting efforts because the representations are not connected. In Chapter 7, the authors’ linguistic analysis reveals that media representations of the prison, which cast prison discourses in the frames of fear and dangerousness, perspectivize contemporary British society’s approach to punishing offenders. The multimodal analysis ultimately unveils an apologist agenda of the British media and popular press betrayed by their delegitimization of prisoners and legitimization of prison authorities which propose no coherent avenue for critical considerations of alternatives to or legitimacy of prisons. Chapter 8 addresses the discourse of corporate crime, sampling the 1999 Paddington rail crash in London. The submission is that the special nature of the crime, founded in a complex web of perspectival, ownership, legal and news tradition-related issues constrains its representations in the news.
In Chapter 9, the authors make a detailed discussion of the relevance of the book to the literature on crime and deviance, multimodal critical discourse analysis and crime discourse. The chapter winds up with an invitation for more work on all aspects of the book.
One major strength of The Language of Crime and Deviance is its fine analysis of media reports, which takes maximal advantage of the multimodal critical discourse analytic resources. After some apt background information has been provided on each discourse topic, the authors undertake an incisive linguistic and visual analysis of their data, and point out clearly the ideological implications of the discourses analysed in every case. Each new chapter refreshes the thesis of the preceding chapter and is linked up with the linguistic toolkits set up in Chapters 1 to 3, thus giving the book a holistic, theoretic and empirical flavour. The samples analysed, though largely restricted to the UK, are representative of the issues centrally aggregated in crime discourses. This scope largely contributes to the acceptability and reliability of the analyses and generalizations in the book.
However, this geographical limitation of the data needed to be operationalized in the introduction, where instead the reader is led to expect more wide-ranging examples and citations. While this issue has received some redress in the authors’ recommendation of more work on all aspects of the book, the restricted range of the data should have been justified.
Other points which could have been improved are that some examples are either not or disproportionately (when compared to others) analysed (e.g. pp. 45 and 46); more details are needed for sharper pungency (e.g. p. 53); clearer definitions are required (e.g. p. 54); and some linguistic and visual analyses of the same texts are not connected (e.g. p. 92). Also, there are some, though only a few, careless linguistic infelicities in the book.
Overall, The Language of Crime and Deviance anatomizes the multimodal properties of media representations of crime discourses. Its exceptional excavation of the ideological inhumations in the language of media reports on crime and ambidextrous blending of sociological, media and linguistic methodologies produce an outstanding text with great multidisciplinary appeal. The book is therefore commended to linguists, criminologists, media practitioners and scholars, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and other professionals who are interested in crime discourses.