"Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised." Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call "crimesploitation:" spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting criminal behavior of "real people" and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture.
Situating these programs in the history of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, Kaplan and LaChance show how they helped to build a world in which mass incarceration and rising economic inequality became the "new normal." Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don't F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon the suffering of vulnerable others.
A key ingredient to its success is in creating the illusion that the viewer is witnessing unmediated reality, a sense of immersion that also doubles as a vicarious, choose-your-own freedom. Viewers can imagine themselves as being deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby (temporarily) escaping the unfreedom of a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, the show invites the audience to identify with law enforcement officials, through whom they can experience exercising violence, control, and "justice" on criminal others-a way to feel powerful amidst a political and economic powerlessness. Meticulously researched and compellingly argued, Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.
Industry Reviews
"Insisting that the consumption of other people's pain is a defining feature of the neoliberal carceral state, Crimesploitation will not let us meaninglessly 'escape' into our true crime media streaming and listening. Instead, Kaplan and LaChance move us toward a critical reckoning with the exploitative forms of (un)freedom that media's spectacle of crime and punishment have conjured. A powerful dose of thoughtful accountability, this volume points the way to getting truly 'real' about-and intervening in-the suffering that a culture of punishment has produced. I cannot wait to cite, teach, and buy copies of this book for friends and family."-Michelle Brown, The University of Tennessee
"Kaplan and LaChance show that crimesploitation programs help to maintain the status quo of the neoliberal carceral state. Crimesploitation's focus on individual pathology as a cause of crime and 'law and order' as the solution to crime steers viewers away from important structural causes of crime and the need for reform in the criminal justice system and society-at-large. They do so while exploiting people in their worst moments, showing a 'reality' of crime that carefully avoids being too real."-Andrew J. Baranauskas, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"[Crimesploitation] presents a well-grounded, readable argument for rethinking crime and justice reality television. It is unhesitantly recommended."-Ray Surette, Criminal Justice Review
"Kaplan and LaChance provide excellent and easily digestible accounts of the politics of reality TV crimesploitation, and their emphasis on connecting media representations of crime and punishment to existing social, political, and economic inequalities in the neoliberal era will provide political scientists, sociologists, and media scholars with abundant resources to continue exploring the relationship between popular culture and the practices and ideologies of policing in America."-Emma Cytrynbaum, Law, Culture, and Humanities
