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Abstract

Although the criminological literature is indeed flourishing in our days, few studies address the issue of crime in terms of its representation in society. The articles in the present volume try to scrutinise the "images of crime", as these are fabricated in the mass media, in literature, in other forms of art (such as photography or comics), even in scientific discourse, and exhibit both the mechanisms of such construction and its social consequences. They all tend to show how "images of crime and the criminal" are constructed by either scientific or lay views, and how these produce stereotypes, preconceptions or even policies. The fact that the contributors derive from such diverse disciplines as crimi nology, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history, law, or architecture, offers challenging perspectives for the broadening of our scope. In this sense, they attain a wider perspective in terms of what modern criminology could (or should) study.