Under the Gun Criminology Goes Back to the Movies

"Two of criminology's fiercest thinkers will disrupt the way you watch films about crime and punishment. Through their eyes, we see how the systems that produce crime efface our ability to see the real solutions to our social problems: education and housing, food and healthcare, love, family and camaraderie. Michelle Brown and Travis Linnemann make theory necessary and urgent to our understanding of visual power, and the seduction and satisfaction of watching crime on the screen. This book is as much about how to make good crime theory as it is about how to watch crime movies. Under the Gun demands that we re-think our need for criminology at a time of global transgression, where monsters and demons lurk in every theory of crime. Take this book wherever you go to resist criminology: the classroom, the library, the barricades, the cinema." - Katherine Biber, author of In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence

"Before I read Under the Gun, I had never thought about how movies could capture, reflect, and challenge the ideas at the core of the history of criminology. Try seeing some of the movies that you love (or hate) in the same way after reading this fascinating, thoughtful, challenging, and (yes!) entertaining book." - Leigh Goodmark, author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism

"In Under the Gun, two of criminology's most innovative theorists turn their attention to the intertwined issues of cultural representation and criminological theory. Each of the book's chapters offers a sparkling, sharp-minded analysis of a popular film and its criminological context. Reading and counter-reading these films, Brown and Linnemann in turn explore the contradictory potential of a more general popular criminology, and craft a damning critique of academic criminology's ongoing crisis. This is a genuinely dramatic book; were it a film, it would surely be up for an Oscar." - Jeff Ferrell, author of Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

"Offering deep dives into a diverse collection of films, Under the Gun examines and troubles both criminological theory and the cultural work it performs in media. The book traverses theory across the demonic, biological, and social explanations of crime to those approaches that disrupt the very ontological security of criminology's foundational concepts. Examining classic movie portrayals of crime and cops that deepen the worn grooves of criminological common sense as well as films that offer new if provisional visual language for thinking about climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, Brown and Linnemann take a hard look at a discipline firmly rooted in state violence and offer us glimpses into the kinds of cultural productions and political formations that may lead us elsewhere." - Judah Schept, author Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia