Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Violent crime does not drive mass incarceration »

Whether as a result of low crime rates, the financial pressures of the 2008 credit crunch, or other factors, policymakers on both sides of the aisle are trying to rein or even reduce the US incarceration rate after an unprecedented forty-year expansion. Unfortunately, reforms are hampered by the fact that we do not have a solid empirical understanding of what caused the explosion in the first place. In fact, the “Standard Story” of prison growth generally overemphasizes less important factors and overlooks more important ones. This essay thus does two things. First, it points out the flaws in five key aspects of the Standard Story: its argument that the War on Drugs is of central importance, that trends in violent and property crimes are relatively unimportant, that longer sentence lengths drive growth, that the “criminal justice system” is a fairly coherent entity advancing specific goals, and that the “politics of crime control” is uniquely dysfunctional. And second, it argues that an increased willingness of the part of prosecutors to file charges—a causal factor almost completely overlooked by the Standard Story—is likely the most important force behind prison growth, at least for the past two decades.

Incarceration rates in the United States are far higher than the world's other Western democracies, so high that they are referred to as mass incarceration. After nearly 40 years of sustained growth in US incarceration rates, a broad consensus exists to bring them down. The Iron Law of Prison Populations directs attention to the fact that 51 different jurisdictional-level penal policies, rather than crime, drive incarceration rates, making systematic policy reform difficult. However, the fact that prison populations have already begun to decline, combined with the emerging public will to reduce incarceration and dropping age-specific incarceration rates, promotes optimism in the decarceration agenda. Three issues remain to be resolved: the eventual target rate of incarceration, what to do with people convicted of violent crimes, and how to avoid the distracting focus on reentry programming. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 6 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. 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Introduction Many people interpret the word ‘cult’ through specific connotations, including, but not limited to, a community of like-minded people on the edge of civilization, often led by a charismatic leader, with beliefs that are ‘other’ to societal ‘norms’. Cults are often perceived as deviant, regularly incorporating elements of crime, especially physical and sexual violence. The adoption by some cults of a special uniform or dress code has been readily picked up by popular culture and has become a key ‘defining’ characteristic of the nature of a cult. In this article, we use the semiotic framework of myth, as discussed by Barthes, to demonstrate how cult uniforms become semiotic myths of popular culture. Narratively, the myth of the cult communicates violence, deviance, manipulation, and brainwashing. The myth of on-screen cults has derived itself from a reflexive pop culture foundation. From popular culture inspiring cults to cults inspiring popular culture and back again, society generates its cult myth through three key mechanisms: medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. This means we are at risk of misrepresenting the true nature of cults, creating a definition incongruent with reality. This article traces the history of cults, the expectations of cult behaviour, and the semiotics of uniforms to start the discussion on why society is primed to accept a confusion between nature and the semiotic messaging of “what-goes-without-saying” (Barthes Mythologies 11). Semiotics and Myth Following the basic groundwork of de Saussure in the early 1900s, semiotics is the study of signs and how we use signs to derive meaning from the external world (de Saussure). Barthes expanded on this with his series of essays in Mythologies, adding a layer of connotation that leads to myth (Barthes Mythologies). Connotation, as described by Barthes, is the interaction between signs, feelings, and values. The connotations assigned to objects and concepts become a system of communication that is a message, the message becomes myth. The myth is not defined by the object or concept, but by the way society collectively understands it and all its connotations (Barthes Elements of Semiology 89-91). For scholars like Barthes, languages and cultural artifacts lend themselves to myth because many of our concepts are vague and abstract. Because the concept is vague, it is easy to impose our own values and ideologies upon it. This also means different people can interpret the same concept in different ways (Barthes Mythologies 132). The concept of a cult is no exception. Cults mean different things to different people and the boundaries between cults and religious or commercial organisations are often contested. As a pop culture artifact, the meaning of cults has been generated through repeated exposure in different media and genres. Similarly, pop culture (tv, films, news, etc.) often has the benefit of fiction, which separates itself from the true nature of cults (sensu Barthes Mythologies). Yet, through repeated exposure, we begin to share a universal meaning for the term and all the behaviours understood within the myth. Our repeated exposure to the signs of cults in pop culture is the combined effect of news media and fiction slowly building upon itself in a reflexive manner. We hear news reports of cults behaving in obscure ways, followed by a drama, parody, critique, or satire in a fictitious story. The audience then begins to see the repeated narrative as evidence to the true nature of cults. Over time the myth of the cult naturalises into the zeitgeist as concretely as any other sign, word, or symbol. Once the myth is naturalised, it is better used as a narrative device when affixed to a universally recognised symbol, such as the uniform. The uniform becomes an efficient device for communicating meaning in a short space of time. We argue that the concept of cult as myth has entered a collective understanding, and so, it is necessary to reflect on the mechanisms that drove the correlations which ultimately created the myth. Barthes’s purpose for analysing myth was “to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there” (Barthes Mythologies 11). For this reason, we must briefly look at the history of cults and their relationship with crime. A Brief History of Cults ‘Cult’ derives from the Latin root, cultus, or cultivation, and initially referred to forms of religious worship involving special rituals and ceremonies directed towards specific figures, objects, and/or divine beings. Early to mid-twentieth century sociologists adopted and adapted the term to classify a kind of religious organisation and later to signal new forms of religious expression not previously of primary or singular interest to the scholar of religion (Campbell; Jackson and Jobling; Nelson). The consequences were such that ‘cult’ came to carry new weight in terms of its meaning and reception, and much like other analytical concepts developed an intellectual significance regarding religious innovation it had not previously possessed. Unfortunately, this was not to last. By the early 1990s, ‘cult’ had become a term eschewed by scholars as pejorative, value-laden, and disparaging of its supposed subject matter; a term denuded of technical and descriptive meaning and replaced by more value-neutral alternatives (Dillon and Richardson; Richardson; Chryssides and Zeller). Results from well-published surveys (Pfeifer; Olson) and our own experience in teaching related subject matter revealed predominantly negative attitudes towards the term ‘cult’, with the inverse true for the alternative descriptors. Perhaps more importantly, the surveys revealed that for the public majority, knowledge of ‘cults’ came via media reportage of particularly the sensational few, rather than from direct experience of new religions or their members more generally (Pfeifer). For example, the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidian, and Heaven’s Gate groups featured heavily in news and mass media. Importantly, reporting of each of the tragic events marking their demise (in 1978, 1993, and 1997 respectively) reinforced a burgeoning stereotype and escalated fears about cults in our midst. The events in Jonestown, Guyana (Peoples Temple), especially, bolstered an anticult movement of purported cult experts and deprogrammers offering to save errant family members from the same fate as those who died [there]. The anticult movement portrayed all alleged cults as inherently dangerous and subject only to internal influences. They figured the charismatic leader as so powerful that he could take captive the minds of his followers and make them do whatever he wanted. (Crockford 95) While the term ‘new religious movement’ (NRM) has been used in place of cults within the academic sphere, ‘cult’ is still used within popular culture contexts precisely because of the connotations it inspires, with features including charismatic leaders, deprogrammers, coercion and mind-control, deception, perversion, exploitation, deviance, religious zealotry, abuse, violence, and death. For this reason, we still use the word cult to mean the myth of the cult as represented by popular culture. Representations of Cults and Expectations of Crime Violence and crime can be common features of some cults. Most NRMs “stay within the boundaries of the law” and practice their religion peacefully (Szubin, Jensen III, and Gregg 17). Unfortunately, it is usually those cults that are engaged in violence and crime that become newsworthy, and thus shape public ‘knowledge’ about the nature of cults and drive public expectations. Two of America’s most publicised cults, Charles Manson and the Manson Family and the Peoples Temple, are synonymous with violence and crime. Prior to committing mass suicide by poison in Jonestown, the Peoples Temple accumulated many guns as well as killing Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his party. Similarly, Charles Manson and the Manson Family stockpiled weapons, participated in illegal drug use, and murdered seven people, including Hollywood actor Sharon Tate. The high-profile victims of both groups ensured ongoing widespread media attention and continuous popular culture interest in both groups. Other cults are more specifically criminal in nature: for example, the Constanzo group in Matamoros, while presenting as a cult, are also a drug gang, leading to many calling these groups narco-cults (Kail 56). Sexual assault and abuse are commonly associated with cults. There have been numerous media reports worldwide on the sexual abuse of (usually) women and/or children. For example, a fourteen-year-old in the Children of God group alleged that she was raped when she disobeyed a leader (Rudin 28). In 2021, the regional city of Armidale, Australia, became national news when a former soldier was arrested on charges of “manipulating a woman for a ‘cult’ like purpose” (McKinnell). The man, James Davis, styles himself as the patriarch of a group known as the ‘House of Cadifor’. Police evidence includes six signed “slavery contracts”, as well as 70 witnesses to support the allegation that Mr Davis subjected a woman to “ongoing physical, sexual and psychological abuse and degradation” as well as unpaid prostitution and enslavement (McKinnell). Cults and Popular Culture The depiction of cults in popular culture is attracting growing attention. Scholars Lynn Neal (2011) and Joseph Laycock (2013) have initiated this research and identified consistent stereotypes of 'cults’ being portrayed throughout popular media. Neal found that cults began to be featured in television shows as early as the 1950s and 1960s, continually escalating until the 1990s before dropping slightly between 2000 and 2008 (the time the research was concluded). Specifically, there were 10 episodes between 1958-1969; 19 in the 1970s, which Neal attributes to the “rise of the cult scare and intense media scrutiny of NRMs” (97); 25 in the 1980s; 72 in the 1990s; and 59 between 2000 and 2008. Such academic research has identified that popular culture is important in the formation of the public perception, and social definition, of acceptable and deviant religions (Laycock 81). Laycock argues that representations of cults in popular culture reinforces public narratives about cults in three important ways: medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. Medicalisation refers to the depiction of individuals becoming brainwashed and deprogrammed. The medicalisation of cults can be exacerbated by the cult uniform and clinical, ritualistic behaviours. Deviance amplification, a term coined by Leslie Wilkins in the 1960s, is the phenomenon of ‘media hype’, where the media selects specific examples of deviant behaviour, distorting them (Wilkins), such that a handful of peripheral cases appears representative of a larger social problem (Laycock 84). Following the deviance amplification, there is then often a 'moral panic' (a term coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972) where the problem is distorted and heightened within the media. Cults are often subject to deviance amplification within the media, leading to moral panics about the ‘depraved’, sexual, criminal, and violent activities of cults preying on and brainwashing innocents. Convergence “is a rhetorical device associated with deviance amplification in which two or more activities are linked so as to implicitly draw a parallel between them” (Laycock 85). An example of convergence occurred when the Branch Davidians were compared to the Peoples Temple, ultimately leading the FBI “to end the siege through an aggressive ‘dynamic entry’ in part because they feared such a mass suicide” (Laycock 85). The FBI transferred responsibility for the deaths to ‘mass suicide’, which has become the common narrative of events at Waco. Each of the three mechanisms have an important role to play in the popular culture presentation of cults to audiences. Popular media sources, fictional or not, are incentivised to present the most diabolical cult to the audience – and this often includes the medicalised elements of brainwashing and manipulation. This presentation reinforces existing deviance amplification and moral panics around the depraved activities of cults, and in particular sexual and criminal activities. And finally, convergence acts as a 'cultural script’ where the portrayal of these types of characteristics (brainwashing, criminal or violent behaviour, etc.) is automatically associated with cults. As Laycock argues, “in this way, popular culture has a unique ability to promote convergence and, by extension, deviance amplification” (85). The mechanisms of medicalisation, deviance amplification and convergence are important to the semiotic linking of concepts, signs, and signifiers in the process of myth generation. In efficiently understanding the message of the myth, the viewer must have a sign they can affix to it. In the case of visual mediums this must be immediate and certain. As many of the convergent properties of cults are behavioural (acts of violence and depravity, charismatic leaders, etc.), we need a symbol that audiences can understand immediately. Uniforms achieve this with remarkable efficiency. Upon seeing a still, two-dimensional image of people wearing matching garb it can be made easily apparent that they are part of a cult. Religious uniforms are one of the first visual images one conjures upon hearing the word cult: “for most people the word ‘cult’ conjures up ‘60s images of college students wearing flowing robes, chanting rhythmically and spouting Eastern philosophy” (Salvatore cited in Petherick 577; italics in original). The impact is especially pronounced if the clothes are atypical, anachronistic, or otherwise different to the expected clothes of the context. This interpretation then becomes cemented through the actions of the characters. In Rick and Morty, season 1, episode 10, Morty is imprisoned with interdimensional versions of himself. Despite some morphological differences, each Morty is wearing his recognisable yellow top and blue pants. While our Morty’s back is turned, five hooded, robed figures in atypical garb with matching facial markings approach Morty. The audience is immediately aware that this is a cult. The comparison between the uniform of Morty and the Morty cult exemplifies the use of cult uniform in the myth of Cults. The cult is then cemented through chanting and a belief in the “One true Morty” (Harmon et al.). Semiotics, Clothes, and Uniforms The semiotics of clothes includes implicit, explicit, and subliminal signs. The reasons we choose to wear what we wear is governed by multiple factors both within our control and outside of it: for instance, our body shape, social networks and economic status, access to fashion and choice (Barthes The Fashion System; Hackett). We often choose to communicate aspects of our identity through what we wear or what we choose not to wear. Our choice of clothing communicates aspects of who we are, but also who we want to be (Hackett; Simmel; Veblen) Uniforms are an effective and efficient communicative device. Calefato’s classification of uniforms is not only as those used by military and working groups, but also including the strictly coded dress of subcultures. Unlike other clothes which can be weakly coded, uniforms differentiate themselves through their purposeful coded signalling system (Calefato). To scholars such as Jennifer Craik, uniforms intrigue us because they combine evident statements as well as implied and subliminal communications (Craik). Theories about identity predict that processes similar to the defining of an individual are also important to group life, whereby an individual group member's conceptualisation of their group is derived from the collective identity (Horowitz; Lauger). Collective identities are regularly emphasised as a key component in understanding how groups gain meaning and purpose (Polletta and Jasper). The identity is generally constructed and reinforced through routine socialisation and collective action. Uniforms are a well-known means of creating collective identities. They restrict one’s clothing choices and use boundary-setting rituals to ensure commitment to the group. In general, the more obvious the restriction, the easier it is to enforce. Demanding obvious behaviours from members, unique to the community, simultaneously generates a differentiation between the members and non-members, while enabling self-enforcement and peer-to-peer judgments of commitment. Leaders of religious movements like cults and NRMs will sometimes step back from the punitive aspects of nonconformity. Instead, it falls to the members to maintain the discipline of the collective (Kelley 109). This further leads to a sense of ownership and therefore belonging to the community. Uniforms are an easy outward-facing signal that allows for ready discrimination of error. Because they are often obvious and distinctive dress, they constrain and often stigmatise members. In other collective situations such as with American gangs, even dedicated members will deny their gang affiliation if it is advantageous to do so (Lauger Real Gangstas). While in uniform, individuals cannot hide their membership, making the sacrifice more costly. Members are forced to take one hundred percent of the ownership and participate wholly, or not at all. Through this mechanism, cults demonstrate the medicalisation of the members. Leaders may want their members to be unable to escape or deny affiliation. Similarly, their external appearances might invite persecution and therefore breed resilience, courage, and solidarity. It is, in essence, a form of manipulation (see for instance Iannaccone). Alternatively, as Melton argues, members may want to be open and proud of their organisation, as displayed through them adopting their uniforms (15). The uniform of cults in popular media is a principal component of medicalisation, deviance amplification, and convergence. The uniform, often robes, offers credence to the medicalisation aspect: members of cults are receiving ‘treatment’ — initially, negative treatment while being brainwashed, and then later helpful/saving treatment when being deprogrammed, providing they survive a mass suicide attempt and/or, criminal, sexual, or violent escapades. Through portraying cult members in a distinctive uniform, there is no doubt for the audience who is receiving or in need of treatment. Many of the cults portrayed on screen can easily communicate the joining of a cult by changing the characters' dress. Similarly, by simply re-dressing the character, it is communicated that the character has returned to normal, they have been saved, they are a survivor. In Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, while three of the four ‘Mole women’ integrate back into society, Gretchen Chalker continues to believe in their cult; as such she never takes of her cult uniform. In addition, the employment of uniforms for cult members in popular culture enables an instant visual recognition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and reinforces stereotypical notions of social order and marginalised, deviant (religious) groups (Neal 83). The clothing differences are obvious in The Simpsons season 9, episode 13, “Joy of Sect”: ‘Movementarian’ members, including the Simpsons, don long flowing robes. The use of cult uniform visualises their fanatical commitment to the group. It sets them apart from the rest of Springfield and society (Neal 88-89). The connection between uniforms and cults derives two seemingly paradoxical meanings. Firstly, it reduces the chances of the audience believing that the cult employed ‘deceptive recruiting’ techniques. As Melton argues, because of the association our society has with uniforms and cults, “it is very hard for someone to join most new religions, given their peculiar dress and worship practices, without knowing immediately its religious nature” (14). As such, within popular media, the presence of the uniform increases the culpability of those who join the cult. Contrarily, the character in uniform is a sign that the person has been manipulated and/or brainwashed. This reduces the culpability of the cult member. However, the two understandings are not necessarily exclusive. It is possible to view the cult member as a naïve victim, someone who approached the cult as an escape from their life but was subsequently manipulated into behaving criminally. This interpretation is particularly powerful because it indicates cults can prey on anyone, and that anyone could become a victim of a cult. This, in turn, heightens the moral panic surrounding cults and NRMs. The on-screen myth of the cult as represented by its uniform has a basis in the real-life history of NRMs. Heaven’s Gate members famously died after they imbibed fatal doses of alcohol and barbiturates to achieve their ‘final exit’. Most members were found laid out on beds covered in purple shrouds, all wearing matching black shirts, black pants, and black and white Nike shoes. The famous photos of Warren Jeffs’s polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the subject of Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, depict multiple women in matching conservative dresses with matching hairstyles gathered around a photo of Jeffs. The image and uniform are a clear influence on the design of Unbreakable’s ‘Mole women’. A prime example of the stereotype of cult uniforms is provided by the Canadian comedy program The Red Green Show when the character Red tells Harold “cults are full of followers, they have no independent thought, they go to these pointless meetings ... they all dress the same” (episode 165). The statement is made while the two main characters Red and Harold are standing in matching outfits. Blurring Nature and Myth Importantly, the success of these shows very much relies on audiences having a shared conception of NRMs and the myth of the cult. This is a curious combination of real and fictional knowledge of the well-publicised controversial events in history. Fictional cults frequently take widely held perspectives of actual religious movements and render them either more absurd or more frightening (Laycock 81). Moreover, the blurring of fictional and non-fictional groups serves to reinforce the sense that all popular culture cults and their real-world counterparts are the same; that they all follow a common script. In this, there is convergence between the fictional and the real. The myth of the cult bleeds from the screen into real life. The Simpsons’ “The Joy of Sect” was televised in the year following the suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate group, and the storyline in part was influenced by it. Importantly, as a piercing, satirical critique of middle-class America, the “Joy of Sect” not only parodied traditional and non-traditional religion generally (as well as the ‘cult-like’ following of mass media such as Fox); scholars have shown that it also parodied the ‘cult’ stereotype itself (Feltmate). While Heaven’s Gate influenced to a greater or lesser extent each of the TV shows highlighted thus far, it was also the case that the group incorporated into its eschatology aspects of popular culture linked primarily to science fiction. For example, group members were known to have regularly watched and discussed episodes of Star Trek (Hoffmann and Burke; Sconce), adopting aspects of the show’s vernacular in “attempts to relate to the public” (Gate 163). Words such as ‘away-team’, ‘prime-directive’, ‘hologram’, ‘Captain’, ‘Admiral’, and importantly ‘Red-Alert’ were adopted; the latter, often signalling code-red situations in Star Trek episodes, appeared on the Heaven’s Gate Website in the days just prior to their demise. Importantly, allusions to science fiction and Star Trek were incorporated into the group’s self-styled ‘uniform’ worn during their tragic ritual-suicide. Stitched into the shoulders of each of their uniforms were triangular, Star Trek-inspired patches featuring various celestial bodies along with a tagline signalling the common bond uniting each member: “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” (Sconce). Ironically, with replica patches readily for sale online, and T-shirts and hoodies featuring modified though similar Heaven’s Gate symbolism, this ‘common bond’ has been commodified in such a way as to subvert its original meaning – at least as it concerned ‘cult’ membership in the religious context. The re-integration of cult symbols into popular culture typifies the way we as a society detachedly view the behaviours of cults. The behaviour of cults is anecdotally viewed through a voyeuristic lens, potentially exacerbated by the regular portrayals of cults through parody. Scholars have demonstrated how popular culture has internationally impacted on criminological aspects of society. For instance, there was a noted, international increase in unrealistic expectations of jurors wanting forensic evidence during court cases after the popularity of forensic science in crime dramas (Franzen; Wise). After the arrest of James Davis in Armidale, NSW, Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Davis was the patriarch of the “House of Cadifor” and he was part of a “cult” (both reported in inverted commas). The article also includes an assumption from Davis's lawyer that, in discussing the women of the group, “the Crown might say ‘they’ve been brainwashed’”. Similarly, the article references the use of matching collars by the women (Mitchell). Nine News reported that the “ex-soldier allegedly forced tattooed, collared sex slave into prostitution”, bringing attention to the clothing as part of the coercive techniques of Davis. While the article does not designate the House of Cadifor as a cult, they include a quote from the Assistant Commissioner Justine Gough, “Mr Davis' group has cult-like qualities”, and included the keyword ‘cults’ for the article. Regrettably, the myth of cults and real-world behaviours of NRMs do not always align, and a false convergence is drawn between the two. Furthermore, the consistent parodying and voyeuristic nature of on-screen cults means we might be at fault of euphemising the crimes and behaviours of those deemed to be part of a ‘cult’. Anecdotally, the way Armidale locals discussed Davis was through a lens of excitement and titillation, as if watching a fictional story unfold in their own backyard. The conversations and news reporting focussed on the cult-like aspects of Davis and not the abhorrence of the alleged crimes. We must remain mindful that the cinematic semiology of cults and the myth as represented by their uniform dress and behaviours is incongruent with the nature of NRMs. However, more work needs to be done to better understand the impact of on-screen cults on real-world attitudes and beliefs. Conclusion The myth of the cult has entered a shared understanding within today’s zeitgeist, and the uniform of the cult stands at its heart as a key sign of the myth. Popular culture plays a key role in shaping this shared understanding by following the cultural script, slowly layering fact with fiction, just as fact begins to incorporate the fiction. The language of the cult as communicated through their uniforms is, we would argue, universally understood and purposeful. The ubiquitous representation of cults portrays a deviant group, often medicalised, and subject to deviance amplification and convergence. When a group of characters is presented to the audience in the same cult dress, we know what is being communicated to us. Fictional cults in popular culture continue to mirror the common list of negative features attributed to many new religious movements. Such fictional framing has come to inform media-consumer attitudes in much the same way as news media, reflecting as they do the cultural stock of knowledge from which our understandings are drawn, and which has little grounding in the direct or immediate experience of the phenomena in question. In short, the nature of NRMs has become confused with the myth of the cult. More research is needed to understand the impact of the myth of the cult. However, it is important to ensure “what-goes-without-saying” is not obfuscating, euphemising, or otherwise misrepresenting nature. References Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. London: Jonathon Cape, 1967. ———. The Fashion System. U of California P, 1990. ———. Mythologies. Trans. 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Introduction The social roles of alcohol consumption are rich and varied, with different types of alcoholic beverages reflecting important symbolic and cultural meanings. Sparkling wine is especially notable for its association with secular and sacred celebrations. Indeed, sparkling wine is rarely drunk as a matter of routine; bottles of such wine signal special occasions, heightened by the formality and excitement associated with opening the bottle and controlling (or not!) the resultant fizz (Faith). Originating in England and France in the late 1600s, sparkling wine marked a dramatic shift in winemaking techniques, with winemakers deliberately adding “fizz” or bubbles to their product (Faith). The resulting effervescent wines were first enjoyed by the social elite of European society, signifying privilege, wealth, luxury and nobility; however, new techniques for producing, selling and distributing the wines created a mass consumer culture (Guy). Production of Australian sparkling wines began in the late nineteenth century and consumption remains popular. As a “new world” country – that is, one not located in the wine producing areas of Europe – Australian sparkling wines cannot directly draw on the same marketing traditions as those of the “old world”. One enterprising company, Treasury Wine Estates, markets a range of wines, including a sparkling variety, called 19 Crimes, that draws, not on European traditions tied to luxury, wealth and prestige, but Australia’s colonial history. Using Augmented Reality and interactive story-telling, 19 Crimes wine labels feature convicts who had committed one or more of 19 crimes punishable by transportation to Australia from Britain. The marketing of sparkling wine using convict images and convict stories of transportation have not diminished the celebratory role of consuming “bubbly”. Rather, in exploring the marketing techniques employed by the company, particularly when linked to the traditional drink of celebration, we argue that 19 Crimes, while fun and informative, nevertheless romanticises convict experiences and Australia’s convict past. Convict Heritage and Re-Appropriating the Convict Image Australia’s cultural heritage is undeniably linked to its convict past. Convicts were transported to Australia from England and Ireland over an 80-year period between 1788-1868. While the convict system in Australia was not predominantly characterised by incarceration and institutionalisation (Jones 18) the work they performed was often forced and physically taxing, and food and clothing shortages were common. Transportation meant exile, and “it was a fierce punishment that ejected men, women and children from their homelands into distant and unknown territories” (Bogle 23). Convict experiences of transportation often varied and were dependent not just on the offender themselves (for example their original crime, how willing they were to work and their behaviour), but also upon the location they were sent to. “Normal” punishment could include solitary confinement, physical reprimands (flogging) or hard labour in chain gangs. From the time that transportation ceased in the mid 1800s, efforts were made to distance Australia’s future from the “convict stain” of its past (Jones). Many convict establishments were dismantled or repurposed with the intent of forgetting the past, although some became sites of tourist visitation from the time of closure. Importantly, however, the wider political and social reluctance to engage in discourse regarding Australia’s “unsavoury historical incident” of its convict past continued up until the 1970s (Jones 26). During the 1970s Australia’s convict heritage began to be discussed more openly, and indeed, more favourably (Welch 597). Many today now view Australia’s convicts as “reluctant pioneers” (Barnard 7), and as such they are celebrated within our history. In short, the convict heritage is now something to be celebrated rather than shunned. This celebration has been capitalised upon by tourist industries and more recently by wine label 19 Crimes. “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” The Treasury Wine Estates brand launched 19 Crimes in 2011 to a target population of young men aged between 18 and 34 (Lyons). Two limited edition vintages sold out in 2011 with “virtually no promotion” (19 Crimes, “Canadians”). In 2017, 19 Crimes became the first wine to use an Augmented Reality (AR) app (the app was later renamed Living Wines Labels in 2018) that allowed customers to hover their [smart] phone in front of a bottle of the wine and [watch] mugshots of infamous 18th century British criminals come to life as 3D characters who recount their side of the story. Having committed at least one of the 19 crimes punishable by exile to Australia, these convicts now humor and delight wine drinkers across the globe. (Lirie) Given the target audience of the 19 Crimes wine was already 18-34 year old males, AR made sense as a marketing technique. Advertisers are well aware the millennial generation is “digitally empowered” and the AR experience was created to not only allow “consumers to engage with 19 Crimes wines but also explore some of the stories of Australia’s convict past … [as] told by the convicts-turned-colonists themselves!” (Lilley cited in Szentpeteri 1-2). The strategy encourages people to collect convicts by purchasing other 19 Crimes alcohol to experience a wider range of stories. The AR has been highly praised: they [the labels] animate, explaining just what went down and giving a richer experience to your beverage; engaging both the mind and the taste buds simultaneously … . ‘A fantastic app that brings a little piece of history to life’, writes one user on the Apple app store. ‘I jumped out of my skin when the mugshot spoke to me’. (Stone) From here, the success of 19 Crimes has been widespread. For example, in November 2020, media reports indicated that 19 Crimes red wine was the most popular supermarket wine in the UK (Lyons; Pearson-Jones). During the UK COVID lockdown in 2020, 19 Crimes sales increased by 148 per cent in volume (Pearson-Jones). This success is in no small part to its innovative marketing techniques, which of course includes the AR technology heralded as a way to enhance the customer experience (Lirie). The 19 Crimes wine label explicitly celebrates infamous convicts turned settlers. The website “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” incorporates ideas of celebration, champagne and bubbles by encouraging people to toast their mates: the convicts on our wines are not fiction. They were of flesh and blood, criminals and scholars. Their punishment of transportation should have shattered their spirits. Instead, it forged a bond stronger than steel. Raise a glass to our convict past and the principles these brave men and women lived by. (19 Crimes, “Cheers”) While using alcohol, and in particular sparkling wine, to participate in a toasting ritual is the “norm” for many social situations, what is distinctive about the 19 Crimes label is that they have chosen to merchandise and market known offenders for individuals to encounter and collect as part of their drinking entertainment. This is an innovative and highly popular concept. According to one marketing company: “19 Crimes Wines celebrate the rebellious spirit of the more than 160,000 exiled men and women, the rule breakers and law defying citizens that forged a new culture and national spirit in Australia” (Social Playground). The implication is that by drinking this brand of [sparkling] wine, consumers are also partaking in celebrating those convicts who “forged” Australian culture and national spirit. In many ways, this is not a “bad thing”. 19 Crimes are promoting Australian cultural history in unique ways and on a very public and international scale. The wine also recognises the hard work and success stories of the many convicts that did indeed build Australia. Further, 19 Crimes are not intentionally minimising the experiences of convicts. They implicitly acknowledge the distress felt by convicts noting that it “should have shattered their spirits”. However, at times, the narratives and marketing tools romanticise the convict experience and culturally reinterpret a difficult experience into one of novelty. They also tap into Australia’s embracement of larrikinism. In many ways, 19 Crimes are encouraging consumers to participate in larrikin behaviour, which Bellanta identifies as being irreverent, mocking authority, showing a disrespect for social subtleties and engaging in boisterous drunkenness with mates. Celebrating convict history with a glass of bubbly certainly mocks authority, as does participating in cultural practices that subvert original intentions. Several companies in the US and Europe are now reportedly offering the service of selling wine bottle labels with customisable mugshots. Journalist Legaspi suggests that the perfect gift for anyone who wants a sparkling wine or cider to toast with during the Yuletide season would be having a customisable mugshot as a wine bottle label. The label comes with the person’s mugshot along with a “goofy ‘crime’ that fits the person-appealing” (Sotelo cited in Legaspi). In 2019, Social Playground partnered with MAAKE and Dan Murphy's stores around Australia to offer customers their own personalised sticker mugshots that could be added to the wine bottles. The campaign was intended to drive awareness of 19 Crimes, and mugshot photo areas were set up in each store. Customers could then pose for a photo against the “mug shot style backdrop. Each photo was treated with custom filters to match the wine labels actual packaging” and then printed on a sticker (Social Playground). The result was a fun photo moment, delivered as a personalised experience. Shoppers were encouraged to purchase the product to personalise their bottle, with hundreds of consumers taking up the offer. With instant SMS delivery, consumers also received a branded print that could be shared so [sic] social media, driving increased brand awareness for 19 Crimes. (Social Playground) While these customised labels were not interactive, they lent a unique and memorable spin to the wine. In many circumstances, adding personalised photographs to wine bottles provides a perfect and unique gift; yet, could be interpreted as making light of the conditions experienced by convicts. However, within our current culture, which celebrates our convict heritage and embraces crime consumerism, the reframing of a mugshot from a tool used by the State to control into a novelty gift or memento becomes culturally acceptable and desirable. Indeed, taking a larrikin stance, the reframing of the mugshot is to be encouraged. It should be noted that while some prisons were photographing criminals as early as the 1840s, it was not common practice before the 1870s in England. The Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 has been attributed with accelerating the use of criminal photographs, and in 1871 the Crimes Prevention Act mandated the photographing of criminals (Clark). Further, in Australia, convicts only began to be photographed in the early 1870s (Barnard) and only in Western Australia and Port Arthur (Convict Records, “Resources”), restricting the availability of images which 19 Crimes can utilise. The marketing techniques behind 19 Crimes and the Augmented app offered by Living Wines Labels ensure that a very particular picture of the convicts is conveyed to its customers. As seen above, convicts are labelled in jovial terms such as “rule breakers”, having a “rebellious spirit” or “law defying citizens”, again linking to notions of larrikinism and its celebration. 19 Crimes have been careful to select convicts that have a story linked to “rule breaking, culture creating and overcoming adversity” (19 Crimes, “Snoop”) as well as convicts who have become settlers, or in other words, the “success stories”. This is an ingenious marketing strategy. Through selecting success stories, 19 Crimes are able to create an environment where consumers can enjoy their bubbly while learning about a dark period of Australia’s heritage. Yet, there is a distancing within the narratives that these convicts are actually “criminals”, or where their criminal behaviour is acknowledged, it is presented in a way that celebrates it. Words such as criminals, thieves, assault, manslaughter and repeat offenders are foregone to ensure that consumers are never really reminded that they may be celebrating “bad” people. The crimes that make up 19 Crimes include: Grand Larceny, theft above the value of one shilling. Petty Larceny, theft under one shilling. Buying or receiving stolen goods, jewels, and plate... Stealing lead, iron, or copper, or buying or receiving. Impersonating an Egyptian. Stealing from furnished lodgings. Setting fire to underwood. Stealing letters, advancing the postage, and secreting the money. Assault with an intent to rob. Stealing fish from a pond or river. Stealing roots, trees, or plants, or destroying them. Bigamy. Assaulting, cutting, or burning clothes. Counterfeiting the copper coin... Clandestine marriage. Stealing a shroud out of a grave. Watermen carrying too many passengers on the Thames, if any drowned. Incorrigible rogues who broke out of Prison and persons reprieved from capital punishment. Embeuling Naval Stores, in certain cases. (19 Crimes, “Crimes”) This list has been carefully chosen to fit the narrative that convicts were transported in the main for what now appear to be minimal offences, rather than for serious crimes which would otherwise have been punished by death, allowing the consumer to enjoy their bubbly without engaging too closely with the convict story they are experiencing. The AR experience offered by these labels provides consumers with a glimpse of the convicts’ stories. Generally, viewers are told what crime the convict committed, a little of the hardships they encountered and the success of their outcome. Take for example the transcript of the Blanc de Blancs label: as a soldier I fought for country. As a rebel I fought for cause. As a man I fought for freedom. My name is James Wilson and I fight to the end. I am not ashamed to speak the truth. I was tried for treason. Banished to Australia. Yet I challenged my fate and brought six of my brothers to freedom. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. While the contrived voice of James Wilson speaks about continual strain on the body and mind, and having to live in a “living tomb” [Australia] the actual difficulties experienced by convicts is not really engaged with. Upon further investigation, it is also evident that James Wilson was not an ordinary convict, nor was he strictly tried for treason. Information on Wilson is limited, however from what is known it is clear that he enlisted in the British Army at age 17 to avoid arrest when he assaulted a policeman (Snoots). In 1864 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became a Fenian; which led him to desert the British Army in 1865. The following year he was arrested for desertion and was convicted by the Dublin General Court Martial for the crime of being an “Irish rebel” (Convict Records, “Wilson”), desertion and mutinous conduct (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice). Prior to transportation, Wilson was photographed at Dublin Mountjoy Prison in 1866 (Manuscripts and Archives Division), and this is the photo that appears on the Blanc de Blancs label. He arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia on 9 January 1868. On 3 June 1869 Wilson “was sentenced to fourteen days solitary, confinement including ten days on bread and water” (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice) for an unknown offence or breach of conduct. A few years into his sentence he sent a letter to a fellow Fenian New York journalist John Devoy. Wilson wrote that his was a voice from the tomb. For is not this a living tomb? In the tomb it is only a man’s body is good for the worms but in this living tomb the canker worm of care enters the very soul. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. (Wilson, 1874, cited in FitzSimons; emphasis added) Note the last two lines of the extract of the letter have been used verbatim by 19 Crimes to create their interactive label. This letter sparked a rescue mission which saw James Wilson and five of his fellow prisoners being rescued and taken to America where Wilson lived out his life (Reid). This escape has been nicknamed “The Great Escape” and a memorial was been built in 2005 in Rockingham where the escape took place. While 19 Crimes have re-created many elements of Wilson’s story in the interactive label, they have romanticised some aspects while generalising the conditions endured by convicts. For example, citing treason as Wilson’s crime rather than desertion is perhaps meant to elicit more sympathy for his situation. Further, the selection of a Fenian convict (who were often viewed as political prisoners that were distinct from the “criminal convicts”; Amos) allows 19 Crimes to build upon narratives of rule breaking by focussing on a convict who was sent to Australia for fighting for what he believed in. In this way, Wilson may not be seen as a “real” criminal, but rather someone to be celebrated and admired. Conclusion As a “new world” producer of sparkling wine, it was important for 19 Crimes to differentiate itself from the traditionally more sophisticated market of sparkling-wine consumers. At a lower price range, 19 Crimes caters to a different, predominantly younger, less wealthy clientele, who nevertheless consume alcoholic drinks symbolic to the occasion. The introduction of an effervescent wine to their already extensive collection encourages consumers to buy their product to use in celebratory contexts where the consumption of bubbly defines the occasion. The marketing of Blanc de Blancs directly draws upon ideas of celebration whilst promoting an image and story of a convict whose situation is admired – not the usual narrative that one associates with celebration and bubbly. Blanc de Blancs, and other 19 Crimes wines, celebrate “the rules they [convicts] broke and the culture they built” (19 Crimes, “Crimes”). This is something that the company actively promotes through its website and elsewhere. Using AR, 19 Crimes are providing drinkers with selective vantage points that often sensationalise the reality of transportation and disengage the consumer from that reality (Wise and McLean 569). Yet, 19 Crimes are at least engaging with the convict narrative and stimulating interest in the convict past. Consumers are being informed, convicts are being named and their stories celebrated instead of shunned. Consumers are comfortable drinking bubbly from a bottle that features a convict because the crimes committed by the convict (and/or to the convict by the criminal justice system) occurred so long ago that they have now been romanticised as part of Australia’s colourful history. The mugshot has been re-appropriated within our culture to become a novelty or fun interactive experience in many social settings. For example, many dark tourist sites allow visitors to take home souvenir mugshots from decommissioned police and prison sites to act as a memento of their visit. The promotional campaign for people to have their own mugshot taken and added to a wine bottle, while now a cultural norm, may diminish the real intent behind a mugshot for some people. For example, while drinking your bubbly or posing for a fake mugshot, it may be hard to remember that at the time their photographs were taken, convicts and transportees were “ordered to sit for the camera” (Barnard 7), so as to facilitate State survelliance and control over these individuals (Wise and McLean 562). Sparkling wine, and the bubbles that it contains, are intended to increase fun and enjoyment. Yet, in the case of 19 Crimes, the application of a real-life convict to a sparkling wine label adds an element of levity, but so too novelty and romanticism to what are ultimately narratives of crime and criminal activity; thus potentially “making light” of the convict experience. 19 Crimes offers consumers a remarkable way to interact with our convict heritage. The labels and AR experience promote an excitement and interest in convict heritage with potential to spark discussion around transportation. 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