Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television

178 Pages·2022·10.291 MB·English

by  Paul Kaplan, Daniel LaChance

Crimesploitation
The Cultural Lives of Law
Edited by Austin Sarat
Crimesploitation
Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television
Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaplan, Paul, 1968– author. | LaChance, Daniel, 1979– author.
Title: Crimesploitation : crime, punishment, and pleasure on reality
television / Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance.
Other titles: Cultural lives of law.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. |
Series: The cultural lives of law | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021062079 (print) | LCCN 2021062080 (ebook) | ISBN
9781503613683 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631731 (paperback) | ISBN
9781503631748 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: True crime television programs—United States—History and
criticism. | Reality television programs—United States—History and
criticism. | Crime on television. | Punishment on television.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.T78 K37 2022 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.T78
(ebook) | DDC 791.45/6556—dc23 /eng20220302
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062079
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062080
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover photos: iStock
For our mentors:
Elaine Tyler May, Lary May, and Austin Sarat (DL)
Kitty Calavita, Simon Cole, Valerie Jenness, and Richard Leo (PK)

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Disciplined and the Delinquent 1
1 Humilitainment, Inc.: Policing the Criminal on Primetime 17
2 Watching the Night Creatures: Crimesploitation
and Boredom 38
3 Cuffs of Love: Punishment and Redemption
in Crimesploitation 70
4 Middlebrow Crimesploitation 92
Epilogue: W(h)ither Crimesploitation? 117
Notes 127
Index 157

Acknowledgments
It takes a village to “raise” a book, and we are grateful for the feedback of
colleagues who offered feedback and advice on this project at various stages:
Michelle Brown, Hank Fradella, Stuart Henry, Caley Horan, Alex Milla,
Ryan Murphy, Keramet Reiter, Alessandra Rellini, and Colin Reynolds.
Particular thanks go to Renée Cramer and Ashley Rubin, who read and com-
mented on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Michelle Lipinski’s editorial
enthusiasm for this project in its earliest stages convinced us to turn it into
a book and submit it to the “Cultural Lives of the Law” series at Stanford
University Press. We are grateful for the support of the press and, in par-
ticular, Sunna Juhn and Marcela Maxfield. Emory undergraduate students
Sueda Polat and Jenna Yun provided exceptional research assistance. Finally,
we appreciate the ongoing intellectual and logistical support we receive from
our colleagues in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University
and the Department of History at Emory University.
Parts of the introduction and chapters 2 and 4 have been published
elsewhere in different forms. Some of the material on To Catch a Predator ap-
peared in Law, Culture, and Humanities 15, no. 1 (2019): 127–50. Some of the
material on Making a Murderer appeared in Crime, Media, Culture 16, no. 1
(2020): 81–96. We introduced crimesploitation as a term in contributions to
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (2017)
and The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (2017).
Our work has benefited from feedback we received from colleagues
at the Annual Meetings of the American Criminology Society, the Asso-
ciation for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, the Law and