CRJU 344: Crime Films, Popular Culture, and Criminology

Course Description

Within today’s popular culture, movies about crime and criminals are common. Such films have become so common and popular, that very few of us have not shared in the experience of watching a crime movie. We all share this experience and, to one degree or another, we all can (and often do) draw from this cultural resource when thinking about issues relating to crime, criminals, and criminal justice. Throughout this source, we explore this phenomenon, and learn how crime movies, combined with other elements of our popular culture (music, literature, websites, video games, and so on), have produced a “popular criminology” that runs parallel to its more scientific cousin: academic criminology. Once these domains have been defined and their differences explored, we will “take criminology to the movies” and begin to look at how these two domains interact. For instance, does popular criminology support or contradict our scientific theories? Or, does it simultaneously do both?