Book Review: Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480606065921 |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Author | Elliott Currie |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Engaging with some of the debates and criticisms inspired by this work would
have enabled Holohan to strengthen her own thesis.
Holohan evidently regards Stuart Hall et al.’s (1978) Policing the Crisis as
the ‘work that relates most closely relates to my objective’ (p. 3) though she
does acknowledge some later developments in the field. Somewhat surprisingly,
she largely ignores others that have highlighted the extent of conflict in
newsrooms. For instance, she might have considered Schlesinger and Tumber’s
(1994) more fluid and contingent picture of news production in Reporting
Crime that, at the very least, qualifies the conspiratorial determinism of 1970’s
media research. Such an account would have enabled her to call into question
the coherence, effectiveness and pervasiveness of powerful elites to secure
popular consent, defend economic interests and set the political agenda and
might have challenged the strong dominant ideology thesis that runs through-
out her analysis. Without such a viewpoint, some of the complexities surround-
ing the production and consumption of media stories are glossed over in the
book so that the ideological is privileged over other possible readings. Never-
theless, the book deserves to be read as it does genuinely attempt to advance
our thinking of media representation through some quite sophisticated and
original theoretical interpretation.
References
Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York:
Free Press.
Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
Hall, S., C. Critchley, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
Schlesinger, P. and H. Tumber (1994) Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of
Criminal Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bernard Harcourt
Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 278 pp. ISBN
0–226–31609–2.
•Reviewed by Elliott Currie, University of California, Irvine, USA
DOI: 10.1177/1362480606065921
In the year 2000, Bernard Harcourt tells us, he went to the Catalina Mountain
School, a juvenile institution in Arizona, to ‘explore the symbolic dimensions of
guns and gun carrying among a group of incarcerated male youths in order to
better understand and assess the laws and public policies in the United States
Book Reviews 407
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