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Volume #5
Dramaturgical Analysis of Crime and Criminal Justice Rituals

 


 

1). LAW, LEGAL EDUCATION, AND CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF CRIME: THE DENIAL OF VOICES   By Mark Facchini

The discourse used in law is unfamiliar to the victim/offender (subject in law). The victim/offender is forced, by a lack of alternative discourses in law, to quickly identify with a new dis-empowering legal discourse. Facchini employs the work of psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan and his four discourses to model and discuss: 1). the lack of expression in law between attorney and client, 2). the repressive form of law first embodied in law school, and 3). cinematic representations of crime.

 

2). MURDER AND EXECUTION: MANAGING TWO DEATHS THROUGH THE RITUALIZED CONSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE DISCOURSE By Ghislaine Thomas and Danielle Laberge

The authors report findings of a research project studying penal sanctions as the discursive practice involved in the shaping of two simultaneously occurring events: a crime and a hanging, the work of a criminal hand and the work of the justice system. It concerns itself with a hanging that took place in Quebec in 1930. Michel Foucault's archeo-genealogical method is used as the approach for analytical interpretation. Thomas and Laberge present an analysis of specific practices that helped shape the significance of both events. With regard to the criminal act itself, they examine the confession and the coroner's report on the victim's body, and, relative to the hanging, the handling of the condemned and of the corpse of the condemned, as well as the coroner's report. The analysis shows, primarily, the ritual aspects of the judicial process, the process of conforming to various prescriptive formulas that takes place in the work of the jurors, the coroner and the detective, the processes of statutory degradation and statutory gradation, as well as the characteristics of various strategies and tactics enacted to obtain the desired results.

 

3). GENUFLECTING AT THE BENCH: RITUALS OF POWER AND POWER OF RITUALS IN AMERICAN COURTS By David Asma

An irony of our judicial system is that the ritual of due process intended to provide an equal playing field between the prosecution and defendants also contains the potential to increase the powerlessness that defendants feel. Institutionalized forms of interaction, control of knowledge and legal proceedings, and manipulation of the ceremonial trappings of justice are among the events and processes that contribute to defendants' framing of their experience as a theater of powerlessness. By focusing on the experiences of defendants in a courtroom setting, Asma examines the processes by which this drama plays out.

 

 

4). CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY AT THE TRIAL OF JOSEPH K: A TRIAL JUDGE’S REFLECTIONS ON ASMA’S CRITIQUE By Steve Russell

 An accomplished trial judge contemplates issues raised by Asma's GENUFLECTING AT THE BENCH. The author supplements the critical criminology dialogue with his own views "from the bench."

 

5). WELCOME TO JAIL: SOME DRAMATURGICAL NOTES ON ADMISSION TO A TOTAL INSTITUTION By David Asma

Using Goffman's study of institutional life (Asylums,1961) as a template, this paper identifies methods by which degradation/mortification of the self occurs with respect to inmate situation(s) within a custodial, incarceration facility. More specifically, observations are made regarding the "welcome" experienced by inmates upon entering a jail institution.

 

6) CRITICAL DIMENSIONS IN DRAMATURGICAL ANALYSIS: WATERGATE AS THEATRE by TR Young.    
    A paper written in 1976 using the elements of theatre to analyse the ways in which some of the political crime of the Nixon WhiteHouse were artfully managed to manage understandings about the 'investigation' and 'discovery' of the perpetrators of the White House burglary.