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This concluding chapter offers a brief summary of the book, along with some short illustrative anecdotes to close the text. It includes a discussion of some of the limitations of the visual criminology outlined in the book, along with a description and discussion of the problems of the senses presented by ocularcentrism and visuocentrism in contemporary culture and theory, and the ways in which it might lead a visual criminology away from important analyses and perspectives. The chapter concludes with some final thoughts on the role of visual criminology—as one dimension of a broader sensory criminology—in the contemporary world.

This chapter notes the ways in which the prison has been a key conceptual site in the development of visual criminology. Describing the major trends in the field, the chapter takes up prison architecture, carceral (in)visibility, and the various ways in which punishment outside of the prison is constituted and enacted visually. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the imaginative visualities of prison abolition.

This short chapter introduces the field of visual criminology and describes the context, content, and organization of the book. It introduces the names, concepts, tendencies, and themes that will animate the book including cultural criminology, critical criminology, early criminological interest in graffiti, protest and social movements. Finally, it addresses some key issues and controversies in the field.

This chapter describes the origins of visual criminology in visual anthropology, visual sociology, visual theory, cultural studies, media studies, and visual cultures. Noting the emergence of the visual as a field and object of study in a range of disciplines, it details the ways in which visual criminology has drawn on a diverse array of theoretical and methodological tendencies that preceded its formal development. This chapter also defines and operationalizes some key concepts and tensions in the field and in the book.

This chapter addresses the methodological dimensions of visual criminology. It describes the key methodological tendencies at play in the field—original photography, documentary criminology filmmaking, photo elicitation interviewing, photo-ethnography, and other techniques and tendencies—including their origins, their limitations, and their contemporary development. The chapter also includes an expanded discussion of some of the ethical issues implicated in and by visual criminology and how they might be negotiated.

This final thematic chapter traces the outlines of a theoretical visual criminology of police and police power. Describing the role of police images in media and visual culture, the chapter takes up body-worn cameras, police mugshots, and the always-lurking cultural figures of police and police violence. The chapter concludes with some notes on the ways that the image and the power of the visual have also been turned against police, and the ways that an imaginary of police abolition might be nurtured through visual challenges to police power.

This chapter describes the intersection of visual and green criminology. It offers a concise outline of the cross-fertilization of these tendencies—green-visual criminology—as well as examples of the theoretical and methodological trends developing from that intersection, and of the ways in which environmental crime and harm have been taken on visually. The chapter discusses the ways in which problems including climate change, wildfires, and species loss have been—and might be—taken up by a visual criminology. This chapter also notes and describes the ways in which the material environment has played a significant role in the construction of distinct and powerful forms of visuality.

This chapter addresses drugs as a key site around which visual criminology has grown, and around which it might continue to develop. The chapter considers the ways that photography, cinema, and other forms of visual culture have interpreted and made meaning from addiction and the world of illicit drugs. Tracing the place of drugs in popular and mediated discourses of crime, harm, and justice, like the global drug war and popular campaigns against marijuana, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine, the chapter outlines how a visual criminology of drugs can help us decode a visual culture teeming with drug images. This chapter also includes an expanded discussion of some of the ethical challenges facing a visual criminology of drugs.

Visual criminology has established itself as a site of criminological innovation. Its ascendance, though, highlights ways in which the ‘ocularcentrism’ of the social sciences is reproduced in criminology. We respond, arguing for attention to the totality of sensorial modalities. Outlining the possible contours of a criminology concerned with smell, taste, sound and touch—along with the visual—the paper describes moments in which the sensory intersects with various phenomena of crime, harm, justice and power. Noting the primacy of the sensorial in understanding environmental harm, we describe an explicitly sensory green criminology while also suggesting the ways that heightened criminological attention to the non-visual senses might uncover new sites and modes of knowledge and a more richly affective criminology.

In 2016, Colombia’s left-wing guerrilla FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo) began demobilisation. While demobilisation and the ensuing peace accords brought renewed hope that the country could imagine different political and social relations—and new ecological and economic conditions—multinational corporations filled the ‘void’ left by FARC-EP forces. Corporate interests in Colombia’s natural resources predated the demobilisation. However, extractive processes were restricted by the dynamics of the armed conflict. In 2016, immediately following the demobilisation, deforestation in Colombia jumped 44 per cent. In the transitional demobilisation period, huge swaths of the country were opened for economic development. Thus, while the environment is often a victim in armed conflict, in Colombia, conflict contributed to the preservation of some areas. Among the forms of development that have emerged in Colombia, ‘ecotourism’ has risen quickly to the fore. While ecotourism may offer some promise, it should be viewed with caution.

This article responds to green criminology. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the coal-producing region of Appalachia and the processes of mountaintop removal mining, the article engages contemporary philosophy, ecocriticism, and “dark ecology” to suggest that green criminology rethink its linguistic categories and epistemological assumptions. The article employs an analysis of some examples of horror cinema to suggest criminological engagement with “ecologies of horror” and the “horrors of ecology” that condition life in the shadow of harmful modes of resource extraction. It concludes with some thoughts on the potential of a “dark” green and green-cultural criminology.

This chapter describes some analytical, methodological and theoretical principles for the use of the photographic image as a method for researching environmental crimes and harms. The authors begin by discussing and exploring photo-elicitation methods—one technique for a green criminology with images, whereby the interviewer uses images to facilitate responses to questions and to delve deeper into the interviewee/participant’s verbal narratives. From here, the authors turn their attention to possible techniques for a green criminology about images (e.g., visual archival materials, images from popular visual culture, images taken by satellite or aerial photography), suggesting ways in which a green-visual criminology can contribute to the development of new forms of participatory research and praxis, as well as increased criminological insight into the visual dimensions of environmental change and harm, environmental conflict and resistance to environmental harm. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the broad potential and applicability of a green visual mode of analysis and research.

The unsustainable and exploitative use of scarce global resources of freshwater continues to create conflict and human dislocation on a grand scale. Instead of witnessing nation-states adopting more equitable and efficient conservation strategies, powerful corporations are permitted to privatise and monopolise diminishing water reservoirs based on flawed neo-liberal assumptions and market models of ‘global good’. The commodification of water has enabled corporate monopolies and corrupt states to exploit a fundamental human right, in the process, creating new forms of criminality. This chapter thus explores the ways in which corporate power, supported and sponsored by government initiatives and legal frameworks, monopolises an essential global resource with devastating environmental and human consequences.

This paper engages the cultural politics of criminal classifications by aiming at one of the state’s most powerful, yet ambiguous markers—the ‘gang.’ Focusing on the unique cases of ‘crews’ and collectives within the ‘straight edge’ and ‘Juggalo’ subcultures, this paper considers what leads members of the media and police to construct—or fail to construct—these street collectives as gangs in a seemingly haphazard and disparate fashion. Juxtaposing media, cultural, and police representations of straight edge ‘crews’ and Juggalo collectives with the FBI’s Gang Threat Assessment, we detail how cultural politics and ideology underpin the social reality of gangs and thus the application of the police power. This paper, furthermore, considers critical conceptualizations of the relationship between police and criminal gangs.

The immediate aftermath of Earth Day 1970 ushered in a host of environmental legislation: in the United States alone, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, National Forest Management Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and Toxic Substances Control Act were all passed with bipartisan support in the 1970s. [...]in 2020, we are bearing witness to disappearing Arctic ice, dying coral reefs, floating plastic garbage patches, floods, greenhouse gas emissions, intensifying storms, raging wildfires, a precipitous sea-level rise and searing summer heat—as well as mourning the loss of human and nonhuman life in the Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana, which occurred ten years ago this April (on almost the exact day of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day) and set into motion the biggest oil spill in the history of the United States (Editorial Board 2020). The result has been an area of scholarship which has blossomed to encompass and speak to a diverse range of interests and concerns, including air and water pollution, climate change, deforestation, the extraction and metabolization of natural “resources,” harms to animals other than human animals, environmental (in)justice and relationships between “nature” and “culture.” Continuing the theme of nonhuman animals, James Gacek and Richard Jochelson, in “Animals as Something More Than Mere Property: Interweaving Green Criminology and Law,” further probe the edges of human–animal relations by discussing and describing the development of laws governing human ownership and management of nonhuman animals, arguing that the studies of law and green criminology, when interwoven, “have the potential to reconstitute the animal as something more than mere property.”

The biosphere of planet Earth can be described as ‘a seamless continuum’ comprised of the interacting elements of water, soil, air and living organisms. This is the system that sustains and reproduces life and, as Everard (2013: 28) points out, the depth of the interdependence of these constituent parts is ‘exemplified by the water cycle’

The phrase ‘water is the next oil’ is widely used to describe the exorbitant profits produced as a result of its growing commodification (Zabarenko 2009). As McGee (2014) observes, ‘Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit—Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources’.

‘Environmental security’ has been defined as ‘[t]he current and future availability (determined by the factors—supply, accessibility and management) of life-supporting ecosystem services and goods for human needs and natural process which contribute to poverty alleviation and conflict deterrence’ (Hecker 2011: 12). While other permutations have been offered, in general, the concept of environmental security tends to ‘link environmental degradation and the associated scarcity of resources with human conflict at individual, group, and state levels’ (Hall 2013: 228; 2015: 44–45; South 2012: 104–109). With the end of the Cold War and increasing knowledge of the negative effects of environmental degradation, scholars have come to recognize that environmental destruction and despoliation present severe threats to ‘human security’ (itself a contested term: compare Bennett and colleagues (2015); Cao and Wyatt (2016); Mobley (2011); Newman (2016); Shearing (2015); Valverde (2014)) and all life of Earth—that the harms and crimes of air and water pollution, deforestation and soil erosion from civilian and military activities can and do adversely and dramatically impact our living conditions—and that such environmental damage can be both a cause and consequence of environmental conflict (Graeger 1996; see also Brisman et al. 2015).

Most countries will impose restrictions on the discharge of pollutants into water and, in particular, will set standards for the quality of drinking water. Of course, whether these restrictions are applied with any rigour and whether these standards are met raise the kind of questions with which this book is concerned. We start here with the issue of pollution of water because it tends to be the most common water concern, crime or harm of which people are aware: often, although not always (as we will discuss below in the context of Flint, Michigan), polluted water looks, tastes or smells foul. Of course, for many people across the world, the greater issue is access to water in the face of drought—thirst and related starvation—and in such circumstances, polluted water is consumed on the basis that dirty water is better than no water at all. In other instances, water pollution leads to issues of water scarcity: a region may rely on a specific water body and when it becomes polluted, access to clean freshwater becomes frustrated (see generally Smith 2015).Our point is that while water pollution and access to clean water are often conceptualized as separate problems with different socioeconomics and geopolitics, this is not always necessarily the case (McClanahan et al. 2015).We shall discuss these circumstances and the issues related to health and inequalities in a later chapter. For now, back to pollution—and to the different ways in which it occurs—not always so easily detectable as might be assumed—as well as the different ways in which it is responded to, for purposes of prevention and prosecution of polluters.

In their proposal for a new paradigm for environmental sociology, Dunlap and Catton (1979) have argued for the necessity of a broader understanding of the interdependence between humans and the biophysical environment of which they are a part. This includes recognition of systems of reciprocity and feedback. Ultimately, ecological processes will impose limits on the constant human quest for growth and consumption. Perhaps ‘water’ provides the most significant test case regarding this proposition as we begin to understand the extent and implications of the processes of global warming and climate change that are underway.

As we have described and discussed in the preceding chapters, water issues take shape in a variety of ways. From concerns regarding access and pollution, to drought and flooding as attendant effects of global climate change, to privatization and corporate consolidation of water supplies and the deceptive marketing of bottled water, water is at the centre of a diverse array of issues with unique criminological relevance. Indeed, as our title and framing suggest, water issues can be thought of as constituting and falling on a spectrum of extremes—water is often too dirty, expensive or secured, access to water is too restricted, while flooding and geographically and socially dependent overabundance give some too much water. In this chapter, we demonstrate a global recognition of the importance of water by highlighting and describing a few of the countless social, political and cultural moments and movements resisting the harms associated with inadequate access, poor quality, privatization and habitus. Each of the moments of resistance noted in this chapter is connected: at the centre of each is a call for ‘water justice’.

Some commentators have recently sought to cast climate change as primarily an issue of national security, thereby necessitating a “war on climate change.” In this article, we argue that the adoption of a securitizing and war-making approach is problematic in that it proposes solutions that parallel the very human actions that contribute to climate change. Because the securitizing responses to the problem of climate change only further the hierarchical domination that contributes to the problem, we contend that we must approach climate change from a critical perspective informed by peacemaking and liberation rather than war-making. Given the harms attendant to war, neoliberal capitalism, security and domination, we maintain that solutions to climate change that rely on making war, securitizing and commoditizing are likely to only exacerbate and extend the negative impacts of anthropogenic climate change. As such, this article proposes that peacemaking and liberation be integrated into human–environment interaction(s) by calling for the rejection of a “war on climate change” and by suggesting what a “peace treaty with the earth” would look like.

Since first proposed by Brisman and South, green cultural criminology has sought to interrogate human-environment interactions in order to locate meaning. Within the broad framework of green cultural criminology, work has emerged that follows visual criminology in looking to the visual cultural register for insights into the intersections of crime, harm, justice, culture and the natural environment. This article turns the green cultural criminological gaze towards motion pictures, by considering how cinema can serve as a central and essential site of the cultural production and communication of knowledge and meaning(s) that inform human interactions with the natural environment. Indeed, environmental crimes, harms, and disasters are constructed and imagined and represented in cinema, and the films discussed in this article illustrate the ways in which the environment-culture connection in the contemporary cinematic mediascape has influenced public discourses concerning environmental change and harm. This article begins by examining the capacity of documentary film to raise public awareness and generate shifts in public consciousness about environmental harms. From here, it explores cinematic science fiction representations of apocalyptic climate disaster, noting the power of the medium in communicating contemporary anxieties surrounding climate change. Finally, filmic communications of a central category of interest for green cultural criminology—resistance to environmental harm—are described, in addition to the various ways that resistance by environmentalists has recently been represented in popular cinema. The films discussed throughout—including An Inconvenient Truth, Cowspiracy, The East, If A Tree Falls, Night Moves, and Snowpiercer—are not an exhaustive sampling of contemporary representations of environmental issues in cinema. Rather, they represent the most salient—and are among the most popular—moments of contemporary cinematic engagement with the nexus of environmental harm and culture. This article concludes by contending that a green cultural criminology should continue to look to the visual register because sites of cultural production often overlooked by criminology (e.g., cinema, literature) can reveal significant and essential information about the moments in which environmental harm, justice, and culture intersect and collide.

In this article, we will respond to recent calls for a ‘green cultural criminology’ by attempting to open the way for new visual explorations of environmental harms and crimes, and by suggesting some methodological perspectives that can be advanced by the use and analysis of the photographic image. To demonstrate the power, potential and possibility—as well as some potential limitations—of a green cultural criminology with images, we draw on two ethnographic studies carried out in Huelva (Spain) and central Appalachia (United States). The described methods have the advantage of (1) bringing together the multiple and complex experiences of those who live in polluted areas; (2) considering the cultural meaning given to experiences of ecological change and destruction; and (3) exploring how those experiences are represented, communicated and understood. We conclude with a call to use qualitative visual approaches for carrying out research in an emergent green cultural criminology designed to develop a complex understanding of the multiple forms of environmental harms and crimes.

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi: 10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8 , 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.

Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, ‘green criminology’ has focused on environmental crimes and harms affecting non-human and human life, ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. Describing global trends toward privatization of water supply systems and the criminalization of several water conservation activities and tactics, this paper employs theoretical perspectives offered by green, cultural, and critical criminologies, focusing on overt resistance to water privatization and oppressive regulations governing rainwater storage and residential water recycling. Taking a critical theoretical perspective, this paper examines water access and autonomy, individuals and groups openly resisting the criminalization of household water reuse and storage, and the cultural significance of water. This paper concludes with an exploration of the potential benefits of a green cultural criminology.