‘No one wins. One side just loses more slowly’: The Wire and drug policy
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Author | Stephen Wakeman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480613512669 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
512669TCR18210.1177/1362480613512669Theoretical CriminologyWakeman
research-article2013
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 224 –240
‘No one wins. One side just
© The Author(s) 2013
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loses more slowly’: The Wire
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480613512669
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and drug policy
Stephen Wakeman
University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
This article presents a cultural analysis of HBO’s drama series, The Wire. It is argued
here that, as a cultural text, The Wire forms a site of both containment and resistance,
of hegemony and change with recourse to the regulation of illicit drug markets. In this
sense The Wire constitutes an important cultural paradigm of drug policy debates, one
that has significant heuristic implications regarding both the present consequences and
future directions of illicit drug policy. Ultimately, it is demonstrated below that through its
representations of the tensions and antagonisms characteristic of drug control systems,
The Wire reveals larger predicaments of governance faced by neoliberal democracies today.
Keywords
Cultural criminology, drugs, regulation, representations, The Wire
Introduction
Real is pretend, and pretend is real.
(From the autobiography of Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson; Pearson and Ritz, 2007: 224)1
Recent years have seen the significant growth of criminological interest in various forms
of media and their symbolic and textual meanings. Photographic images (Carrabine,
2012), children’s cartoons (Kort-Butler, 2012), video games (Groombridge, 2008) and
films (O’Brien et al., 2005; Rafter, 2007; Tzanelli et al., 2005) have all been fruitfully
Corresponding author:
Stephen Wakeman, Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, University of Manchester,
Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: stephen.wakeman@manchester.ac.uk
Wakeman
225
investigated with recourse to the role(s) they play in the construction and development of
public understandings of crime and justice. Since television programmes are one of the
most powerful vehicles driving and informing such popular understandings, their inclu-
sion within criminological analysis is not only justified, but critically important to the
continued development of criminology as a field of study. In this article, following
Rafter’s (2007) call for the extended exploration of such ‘popular criminologies’, I
investigate HBO’s drama series The Wire in this light.
Given that The Wire only concluded in 2008, the level of interest it has generated from
within various academic disciplines is impressive; its sociological significance is now
well established (Penfold-Mounce et al., 2011).2 However, with the exception of Brown
(2007), there has been little sustained cultural criminological engagement with its repre-
sentations of drug markets and drug policy. Considering the centrality of these issues to
the show (and the high level of criminological interest in illicit drugs), this oversight is
surprising. The present article aims to bridge this void by delineating The Wire’s heuristic
potential in this context.
To this end I open with a brief introduction to criminological analysis of popular cul-
ture which then leads into a discussion of the complexities inherent in the article’s start-
ing point; the epistemic and methodological complexities of analysing The Wire as a
cultural text. Following that I provide an exposition of existing scholarship on The Wire
and a brief synopsis of two of the show’s main themes: (1) the unintended consequences
of contemporary drug policy; and (2) the role of experimental alternative systems in drug
policy’s future evolution. The mainstay of the article then renders these themes–as they
are (re)presented in The Wire—as indicative of the show’s status as a cultural paradigm
of drug policy debates. In this section The Wire is presented as a prime example of what
Stuart Hall (1981) called the ‘double stake’ of popular culture, forming a site of both
containment and resistance, of hegemony and change, with recourse to the regulation of
illicit drug markets. Finally, I consider how The Wire’s depiction of drug policy debates
is emblematic of the larger-scale contradictions and complexities of neoliberal govern-
ance itself.
Criminology, media and moving images
The relationship between crime and media is one of criminology’s most researched
subjects (see Carrabine, 2008 and Jewkes, 2011 for excellent overviews). However,
it is only relatively recently that the discipline has witnessed what Michael Schudson
(1987) once called the ‘new validation’ of popular culture in academic study. If the
irresolvable debates about media–crime causality can be sidelined for the purposes
of this article, it is possible to locate the roots of this validation process in the moral
panic theories of the 1970s (e.g. Cohen, 1972; Young, 1971). Here sociologists of
crime and deviance started to pay attention to the ways in which media ‘constructed’
crime and criminals. Important as these studies were, however, it is almost certainly
the case that the ‘media’ remained conceptually and theoretically ambiguous in
them. Also, such works were more concerned with crime’s misrepresentation and
the formation of dominant knowledges than they were with symbolic and/or textual
meaning.
226
Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
However, the ensuing proliferation of entertainment media from the 1980s onwards
was accompanied by growing academic recognition of their relevance. For Hall (1981),
an important step in this process involved accounting for ‘popular culture’. He argued
that it was no longer feasible to view culture as ‘monolithic’, as an all-encompassing
structural entity that simply fed passive consumers ideological frameworks of meaning.
Such a conceptual error was evident in the moral panic theories that juxtaposed reality
and its representation between the actual lives and practices of the Mods and Rockers in
Cohen’s study, and their representation as something else in the media. For Hall, such a
polarization created and sustained a false reality–representation dichotomy. McRobbie
and Thornton (1995: 570) reached similar conclusions, claiming that: ‘media is no longer
something separable from society. Social reality is experienced through language, com-
munication and imagery. Social meanings and social differences are inextricably tied up
with representation.’ In short, theorists of crime and media increasingly came to recog-
nize the boundaries between the two as being irrecoverably blurred. Representations
came to be recognized as sites of knowledge in of themselves, as the spaces within which
contestations of meaning are continually played out.
Before progressing any further, it is important to assert the critical and generative
capacity of this blurring. As Sparks (1992) noted, transcending the simplistic notion of
televisual representations being the ideological tools of capital means they can be recog-
nized as sites where meaning is contested and/or generated too. They are sites where
traditional notions of law and order can be challenged, where meaning and identification
in popular imaginations are far from guaranteed. O’Brien and colleagues (2005: 18,
emphases in original) are certainly right when they claim that film:
is not a monolithic site of symbolic interpolation into conventional mores about crime. It is also
a space in which law and crime are re-imagined in many different ways and in which it is not
inevitable that audiences will identify with the law or view film narrative through the law.
It is not simply that representations play a role in the maintenance and proliferation of a
priori knowledge about crime, law and order, but rather, that representations are the
sites—as they exist in and of themselves—through which knowledge and meaning are
simultaneously created, maintained and/or contested.
Taking the above as her starting point, Rafter (2007) argues the current assortment
of media representations of crime are best understood through the umbrella concept
of ‘popular criminology’. She defines this as ‘a category composed of discourses
about crime found not only in film but also on the Internet, on television and in
newspapers, novels and rap music and myth’ (Rafter, 2007: 415). Rafter’s popular
criminological project is the investigation of the relationship between representa-
tions and academic criminology (see also Rafter and Brown, 2011). Such a view
recognizes alternative ‘ways of knowing’, crafting an ‘egalitarian epistemology’
with the potential to transcend the disciplinary confines of traditional criminology.
From this position, a potentially limitless array of topics can be (and have been)
researched regarding the ways in which they are culturally represented. However
such variety has also meant that the methods by which such analyses are conducted
vary considerably.
Wakeman
227
In doing research on popular culture there is a subtle yet important epistemic distinc-
tion that needs to be made between ‘ideological’ and ‘postmodern’ sensibilities (Yar,
2010). Some scholars prioritize the creation and maintenance of hegemonic ideologies
(e.g. Adorno, 1991), while others adopt postmodern positions that are sceptical of efforts
to affix or inscribe meaning(s) to any given text (e.g. Young, 1996). Such distinctions are
evident in the qualitative/quantitative divide within the literature on how drug users and
dealers are culturally...
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