The different movies and shows depict criminal justice from different perspectives. The first work chosen for the analysis is the movie called Taking Lives (Caruso, 2004). Criminal justice is depicted through the cooperation of the FBI and local police department. The crime control is realized through the state’s legal procedures in which the movie’s main actions are represented. The police consider the serial criminal an ultimate evil having no right to be understood. As a result, crime control is realized through pointless attempts to catch the criminals through patrolling. This is the main problem of crime control depicted in the movie.
However, the FBI agent tries to understand the criminal treating him as a personality. Such an approach is condemned by the police but turns out to be efficient. The agent’s actions can be treated as a part of the critical criminology approach (Keneth, 2021). The criminal’s actions result from the sociological humiliation in childhood. The idea that crime control should be analyzed deeper, touching the family and education institutions, is proposed (Lighton & Reiman, 2020). The image of police is quite realistic because the US justice system considers criminals as rotten people. As a result, police often fail to catch dangerous criminals treating them differently from other people.
The series called Dexter depicts the other image and measures of crime control. The film points out that the court and police decisions are often corrupted (Buck et al., 2006-2013). As a result, the criminals are left unpunished, causing potential harm to others. Such an unscrupulous criminal justice leads the detective to madness in killing the unpunished criminals. The most dangerous problem of the crime control depicted in the film is the possibility of corruption of the judicial system in the capitalistic society. Compared to the first film, the crime control measures are weak and based on the traditional understanding of crimes evolving the stigmatization. Most of the unpunished criminals are the representatives of prosperous crimes. In some series, even white-collar crimes are depicted (Buck et al., 2006-2013). Such a corrupted image of criminal justice is pretty accurate considering the domination of material assets over moral values in American political and judicial systems. Often the crime control is inefficient due to corruption.
References
Buck, S., Cerone, D., Colleton, S., Coto, M., Eglee, C., Goldwyn, J., Hall, M., Phillips, C., Schlattmann, T., Richdale, J., Rosenberg, M., West, W. (2006-2013). Dexter. [TV series]. The Colleton Company.
Caruso, J. (2004). Taking Lives. [Film]. Village Roadshow Pictures.
Kenneth, L. (2021). Critical criminology and race: Re-examining the whiteness of US criminological thought. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 60(3), 384–408. Web.
Lighton, P., & Reiman, J. (2020). The rich get richer and the poor get prison. Routlege.