Law and Justice as Seen on TV (review)

From Court TV to primetime drama, television simultaneously satisfies and whets a seemingly insatiable public appetite for stories about law and justice, crime and punishment, and consequently, mediates a conservative trend toward the "criminalization" of American life. This trend is documented by Elayne Rapping in her provocative and detailed study titled Law and Justice as Seen on TV.

In part one of her book, Rapping traces the growing conservatism within American politics and ideology since the 1980s by exploring the ideological implications embedded within primetime courtroom narratives, tabloid TV programming, and Oz, the HBO series focusing on prison life, a heretofore "hidden" genre on American television. In part two of her book, Rapping examines the television news and documentary genres, devoting attention to Court TV and news coverage of highly publicized trials, and to representations of domestic violence in a variety of TV genres. Rapping draws parallels between these television programs to representations of family dysfunction on daytime talk shows and television's growing demonization of youth. In conclusion, Rapping examines the intersection of TV melodrama with the victims' rights movement, which displaces the liberal emphasis on rehabilitation with a "far more repressive and punishment oriented" approach (248).

Rapping examines the shift from the days of Perry Mason, with its defense-attorney-as hero/prosecutor-as-villain formula, to the contemporary casting of prosecutors as lauded heroes. As seen in the context of the 1980s "tough on crime" policies supported by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, and further fueled by the current Bush administration's post-9/11 "war on terror," this reversal both mediates and supports a conservative trend in criminal justice that removes crime from its complex economic, racial, and gender causalities. According to Rapping, we have only to look at reality shows like Cops to recognize the broad strokes with which petty criminals are defined as "Other" and the public is mobilized by vague paranoia or the outright fear that crime will erupt unpredictably in their own small towns and suburbs.

Rapping's contention that "social issues have increasingly been 'criminalized,'" and the criminal justice system "made to substitute for the larger public forums and political processes of deliberation and debate," is well illustrated in her chapter on representations of gender violence (126). In her discussion of the early 1980s docu-drama, The Burning Bed, for instance (focusing on the long-term domestic violence suffered by Francine Hughes, acquitted of murdering her husband), Rapping points out that through character development, the drama examines the economic and psychological factors contributing to domestic violence and exposes the legal system's egregious disregard of this issue until fairly recently. In contrast, more recent Lifetime movies dealing with the subject reduce characters to stereotypical victims and villains, thus denying women both narrative and political agency, particularly when closure so often depends upon a "good man" or the "good law" rushing to the rescue. Here Rapping aptly acknowledges the double bind in which feminists are caught, for the woman-as-victim ultimately "serves the needs of a government intent on punishment and incapacitation" (167). Rapping provocatively argues that feminists need to consider the larger implications of "retreat into the 'protective' arms of the state," regardless of "how victimized we may in fact have been by a male abuser" (167–8).

Storytelling and the state's power to authorize speech are concerns central to Rapping's study, as they are to the work of many legal and media scholars. The narrative function embedded within the legal process itself is fraught with ideological implications—whether manifested in witnesses telling their versions of truth or in prosecution and defense attorneys creating a narrative arc through the choice and order of witness testimony or questions posed. A shared storytelling function has forged a symbiotic relationship between the media and the law—with the legal system providing camera-ready stories and the media providing narrative frames in which law itself emerges as the true...