"In their book “Cultural Criminology” Ferel and Sanders (1995) argue that to make sense of crime, it is necessary to make sense of culture. The authors propose the development of a “cultural criminology” that recognizes criminality and criminalization as cultural enterprises that must be studies through a synthesis of divergent perspectives including social, feminist, and cultural theories. From this perspective, criminal behavior (and its control) is constructed, in part, through media, popular culture, and the “aesthetics” of authority that dictates what is beautiful,” decent,” clean,” and “appropriate” (p.15). Criminal identities are born and shaped within culture and within criminal subcultures0collective criminal aesthetic and style, symbolism, and meaning are important factors in understanding the criminality. Ferrell and Hamm (1998) suggest that “jailhouse criminology,” which has attempted to study crime through official sources, social science surveys, and traditional quantitative measures, has prohibited true understanding of crime or “criminological verstehen.” Criminologists have neglected findings produced through ethnographic studies that offer the insider perspective on crime and deviance. To truly understand criminal behavior, researchers must study crime with quantitative (surveys, available data) and qualitative (ethnographic) methods that together are able to tell the complete story of crime. For example, official statistics tell us things like what percentage of armed robbers are male, what percentage of known serial killers have been physically and sexually abused, the correlation between age and violence, and so on. However, this sort of information tells us little about the personal style and aesthetics of bank robbers, the nature of the communities and subcultures within which they spend their time, the specific ways in which girls and women learn that aggression is not a tool with which they are able to obtain resources, the process by which a serial killer comes to attach meaning to particular types of victims or crime scene trophies, or the complex nature of the collusion between youth culture, media and pop culture, alternative style and meaning, and crime."
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pp.75, 78
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Crime
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