By making the distinctions, we are better equipped to understand what violent movies say about the nature of crime, law, and criminals; we are also better able to understand them as films.

These legal discourses often revolve around the theme ofintrusion. A psycho penetrates a previously lawful space, creates havoc, and immobilizes the law. Rendered helpless, other characters have no idea how to react. They turn to traditional legal means only to find these ineffective. Gradually they conclude that they must take the law into their own hands

This chapter pries open the ideological frameworks of violent films to explore what they say about criminal nature. 1 Examining three types of violent cinema-slasher, serial killer, and psycho movies-it tries to see how these differ in their constructions of the arch criminal and to catch them in the act (so to speak) of generating popular beliefs and mythologies about serious crime.

It must also be noted that this transformation took place not only from medicine towards law, as though the pressure of rational knowledge on older prescriptive systems; but that it also operated through a perpetual mechanism of summoning and of interacting between medical or psychological knowledge and the judicial institution

Legal justice today has at least as much to do with criminals as with crimes.

"Can one condemn to death a person one does not know?"

"Who are you?

Recog-nising strangers is here embedded in a discourse of survival: it is a question of how to survive the proximity of strangers who are already figurable, who have already taken shape, in the everyday encounters we have with others.

How does this recognition take place? How can we tell the difference between strangers and other others?

In this chapter, I analyse how the discourse of stranger danger produces the stranger as a figure-a shape that appears to have linguistic and bodily integrity-which comes then to embody that which must be expelled from the purified space of the community, the purified life of the good citizen, and the purified body of 'the child'.

Love and marriage

Table 1.Timeline of events.

it is vital to pay more attentionto the role of assumptions about sexual harm in ideas about what constitutesnormal, good, consensual sex.

explore the limitsof and problems with the construction the online predator as a key site of sexualdanger that is located in a specific embodied identity.

use discourse analysis (Rose, 2001) to examinetaken-for-granted assumptions about sexuality and technology in mainstreammedia coverage of this case, including print and television news, three episodesof the US TV talk showDr. Phildedicated to the case, and aSeventeenmagazinearticle.

According to Peter Biehl, "We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other peo­ple have to say, to ask: 'Why do these terrible things hap­pen?' instead of simply reacting."

hese alternatives are attempting to reverse the impact of the prison industrial complex on our world.

The decriminalization of alcohol use serves as a historical example. In both these cases, decrimi­nalization would advance the abolitionist strategy of decarceration-that is, the consistent reduction in the num­bers of people who are sent to prison-with the ultimate aim of dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode of punishment. A further challenge for abolitionists is to iden­tify other behaviors that might be appropriately decriminal­ized as preliminary steps toward abolition.

chools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished comrmmities of color-including the presence of armed security guards and police-and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care sys­tem, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe men­tal and emotional illnesses.

Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alterna­tives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revital­ization of education at all levels, a health system that pro­vides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice sys­tem based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retri­bution and vengeanc

If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, per­ceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easi­er to think about alternatives. In other words, a more com­plicated framework may yield more options than if we sim­ply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison sys­tem. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.

There are a number of reasons why we tend to balk at the idea that it may be possible to eventually create an entirely different-and perhaps more egalitarian-system of justice.

The term "prison industrial complex" was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevail­ing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new struc­tures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit.

3 Imprisonment and Reform

this may lead us to take seriously the prospect of declaring prisons obsolete.

Introduction-Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012

The third kind of work is building alternatives.

Identifying what pathways and apparatuses funnel our people into danger and fighting against these systems that are devouring us is vital work.

Directly helping each other during our moments of crisis is essential-especially when we do it in ways that are politically engaged, that build shared analysis of the systems that produce these dang

Three kinds of strategies are being taken up by queer and trans activists

people are jUstifiably scared of violence and that £ · . , ear is cultivated· by a constant feed of television shows portraymg horrifying violence and brave police and prosecutors . who put serial rapists and murderers in pnson.

Most violence does not happen on the street between strangers, like on TV, hut between people who know each other, in our homes, schools, and familiar spaces.

More than 60% of people in U.S. prisons are people of color

Many people working to dismantle racism identify the criminal punishment system as one of the primary apparatuses of racist violence and probably the most significant threat to black people in the U.S.

Five realities about violence and criminal punishment are helpful for analyzing the limitations of hate crime leg1slat1on

what does it mean to call on that system for justice and accountability?

The idea that we are in danger rings true, and the message that law enforcement will deliver safety is appealing 1n the face of fear. The problem is that these prorruses are fa~se, and are grounded in some key myths and lies about Violence and criminal punishment.

lthough it's true that you can't keep answer-ing them forever and at a certain poim must say enough IS enough. Although a determined skeptic can infinitely ask why something rnatters-"Why should 1 care about earning a salary? And why should 1 care about supporting a family?"-you have to stop answering at some point in your text.

Exercises

Regardless of how interesting a roptc may be to you as a writer, readers always need to know what is at stake in a text and why rhey should care. All roo often, however, these ques-tions arc left unanswcrcd-nu11nly because writers and speak-ers assume that audiences wtll know the answers already or wtll fiuure them our on their own.

What Grady impl1cidy says here is "Look, dear reader, you may think char these que5tions about the nature of fat cells I've been pursuing have licdc ro do wnh everyday life. In fact, however, these questions arc extremely importam-particularly in our 'incre<lSingly obese world' in which we need co pn:vem obesity from destroying our health."

Whereas the "who cares?" question asks you to identify an interested person or group, the "so what?" question asks you to link your argument to some larger matter that readers already deem important.

To address "who cares?" questions m your own writing, we sug, gesc using templates

Notice how Grady's wnring reflects che cenual advice we give in this book

con-skier rhe following passage from rhe sc1cncc writer Dcntse Gr<tdy.

A II writing is conversational. So what? Who c"res? Why Joes any of rhts marter? How rnany times have you had reason to ask these quel>-tions?

Rather than assume that audiences will know why their cl<1ims mattl!r, all writers net!d w answer the "so what?'' and "who cares?" questions up from.