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This doctoral thesis is intended to demonstrate that my research, scholarship and publications have made a significant and coherent contribution to the development of criminology as a popular discipline in the higher education sector. My growing interest and research into the relationship between the media and crime and criminal justice is reflected in the structuring of this thesis, with the major substantive sections being examples of my work in this area (chapters 2 to 8). This interest has also been driven by an essentially realist position and belief that crime is a real issue for both people and society. This submission consists of a brief contextualizing introduction to my research, scholarship, writing and publication in relation to my own career in higher education and to the development of the discipline of criminology plus a number of chapters containing specific examples from my publications. The final section continues from the commentary provided in the introduction, reviewing the body of my work in relation to my academic career generally as it moved from sociology to criminology as that discipline emerged and grew within the higher education sector. Here I have attempted to summarise my theoretical stance; this is not a straightforward task as I have been involved in scholarship, research, writing and publishing in sociology and criminology for well over thirty years, as well as teaching and developing courses and programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels; and it is difficult to step outside of this work to envisage it as an academic journey. Nevertheless, I feel in recent years that my work has come to represent almost a complete circle, or at the least to have a recognisable path and pattern, which is really the impetus behind this submission. The submission is based around my more recent scholarship and writing on the media, crime and criminal justice; this work is a development and to some extent culmination of my academic career as a researcher, scholar, lecturer and writer. Although I have written quite widely on social theory, sociology and particularly criminology and criminal justice, my more recent research and writing has been to examine and analyse the importance of the media’s representation of crime and justice. In doing this, and in the body of my writing and publishing, there has been what might be termed a theoretical style or thread which I feel indicates a certain coherence and also provides a cogent case for this doctoral submission. Overall, my argument is that my work generally and as evidenced in this submission particularly, has helped to conceptualise how media representations have played a key role in helping develop a greater understanding of crime, criminals and justice. Furthermore, and while adopting an objective and critical approach, how such representations deserve to be accepted as real and therefore legitimate and important areas of examination. I have tried to argue that the academic study of crime and justice, in all its forms, should take account of the importance of the media, both historically and throughout its development, in helping an understanding of the extent and form of, and also the explanations for, crime and the control of it.

The thesis critically examines contemporary approaches to the problem of suicide and suicide prevention. An analytic strategy broadly Foucauldian in orientation (focusing on relations of power, knowledge and the subject) is employed to map the formation, consolidation and expansion of a 'regime of truth' centred on a compulsory ontology of pathology in relation to suicide. The conditions of possibility for such a regime, the site of its formation, the means by which relations of power and of power-knowledge acted to produce its truths and justify its practices, and its effects in terms of the objects, concepts and subjects formed, are identified. It is argued that suicide came to be newly problematised in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Understood in relation to shifting 'economies of power', suicide comes to represent less a transgression against God or the Sovereign necessitating punishment, and more an affront to a biopolitical rationality that sought to foster life and disavow death. The asylum emerges as the site where new, medico-scientific, truths can be formed, and medical authority asserted, with regards to suicide and the suicidal. Constituted primarily as patients, in the asylum the suicidal are confined, constantly watched and restrained. Here they could also be examined, diagnosed, and treated, the knowledge. produced through such means justifying the practices employed. New truths of suicide come to be formed by reference to insanity, and concurrently emerging theories of mental pathology are defined in part by reference to suicide. Through, in part at least, such a productive configuration of power-knOWledge the nineteenth century sees suicide established as an act of madness, the insane constituted as dangerous, and the necessity of alienism (later psychiatry) confirmed. Suicide as an act, the suicidal patient, as well as the responsible, accountable and culpable clinician, all come to be formed in relation to the production and circulation of medical I psychiatric truths and such processes are mapped in the thesis up to the present day. Suicide is now read, almost always, as a tragedy, one caused primarily by pathological processes internal to the individual that require expert diagnosis and management. The possibilities for thought and action of such a 'regime' are analysed, as are the limitations imposed by its dominance. Other meanings of self-accomplished death - an act of protest or resistance, of self-determination, choice or will, an event of moral, criminal or political concern, even as a subject of philosophical debate - have come to be marginalised. Established as an act of path910gy, suicide prevention for the most part now involves the identification, treatment or containment of an internal destructive 'force', usually linked to various forms of mental illness. The effectiveness of the 'regime of truth' to utilise self-accomplished deaths as evidence for the necessity of maintaining and I or extending psychiatric practices, and for the production of more knowledge in terms of causation and prevention, is noted, as is the vulnerability of individual clinicians within such a system to criticism and blame. In seeking to problematise the effects of such a dominant 'regime of truth' this thesis offers an original analysis that can serve to open up new lines of enquiry in the study of suicide.