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7 Crime Media Culture 3 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre7 and id is 1 raw text is: EditoriaL Crime Media Culture 7(1) 3-4 Into the Future, Darkly © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission sagepub.co, uk/journalsPermissions. nav DOI 10.1177/1741659011407053 cmc.sagepub.com Mark Hamm and Chris Greer OSAGE As Volume 7 Issue 1 of Crime, Media, Culture leaves for our presses from New Delhi, winds carry- ing radioactive iodine from Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are headed for Tokyo. With hundreds already dead and tens of thousands homeless in Japan's greatest environmental catastrophe, government officials stand accused of massive incompetence and systemic institu- tional failure in dealing with the crisis. While experiments in indigenous populism have recently cracked opened new democratic vistas in Egypt and Tunisia, in Libya government snipers are shooting protesters from artillery helicopter gunships as thugs armed with hammers and swords attack families in their homes - all of this in an attempt to weaken opposition from students, intel- lectuals and the middle class through the wholesale destruction of urban culture. Confronted with challenges never before encountered, and social institutions no longer a viable frame of reference for human action, people the world over are seeking alternative ways to organize their lives. Faced with ecological disaster, government corruption, police repression, torture and economic dead ends, millions leave their homes each year for promised lands abroad. Others remain and organize themselves into resistance movements. Today, these activists are turning more and more to social media to bring attention to their growing discontent. Facebook is used to schedule protests, Twitter to coordinate events, and the world is simultaneously informed, enthralled and scandal- ized through YouTube and Wikileaks. It comes as no surprise, then, that scholars of crime and justice are also being pulled by the dark prospects of liquid modernity. CMC Volume 7 Issue 1 is a testament to those risks. We begin with a topic familiar to readers of this journal. In 'Images of Torture', Eamonn Carrabine moves beyond traditional explanations of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal -typically lodged in American visions of popular culture - by arguing that the visual power of the Abu Ghraib photographs is consistent with a European classical art tradition. Through this unique framing, Carrabine irradi- ates the complex ways that moral relations between strangers are mediated in the modern world. The relationship between media consumption and punitive criminal justice policies has long inter- ested criminologists. Yet this work has been limited primarily to media consumers in the United States and Britain. Ray Surette and colleagues provide a corrective to this shortcoming in 'Preventive and Punitive Criminal Justice Policy Support in Trinidad'. Through a national telephone survey of residents in Trinidad and Tobago, the researchers find that crime dramas are perceived as reality while crime news is typically perceived as accurate - yet neither finding is an especially strong predictor of support for the punishment of criminal transgressors. An estimated 200 million people are migrants around the world today. About 9 million of them are Mexican citizens who have entered the United States as undocumented workers. This highly contentious policy issue is addressed by Hille Koskela in 'Don't Mess with Texas!' Koskela exam- ines the government-funded Texas Virtual Watch Program through the lens of contemporary

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