The Language of Crime and Deviance

Reviews / Votes

The Language of Crime and Deviance fills an important gap, focusing on the language and discourses through which criminal behaviour is communicated to the public. Examining numerous apposite cases, Mayr and Machin illustrate how particular individuals and deviant behaviours have been transformed via the pages of the popular press into dangers and risks. This book will be an especially useful resource for students undertaking dissertations on media and crime, who frequently want to employ critical discourse analysis but lack the tools to do so. Mayr and Machin's razor-edged analysis slices through the visual and linguistic obfuscations that make up mediated constructions of crime, in the process confirming that these ideological formations matter more than we might imagine. On the whole, The Language of Crime and Deviance constitutes an invaluable intellectual and methodological armamentarium for scholars in criminology, media studies, and related fields-just the thing for a surgical disassembling of mediated discourse around crime and justice. With great cogency and insight Andrea Mayr and David Machin offer new ways of seeing what they term "mediatized language of crime". They provide an invaluable analytical tool-kit for such analysis, which is put to work on stimulating examples. From "chavs" to "drug addicts" and the crimes of the powerful, the authors explain the social practice of media discourse: what language does as well as what it says. Skilfully narrated, and assiduously assembled, The Language of Crime and Deviance is an important intervention into the studies of language, and cultural constructions of crime.