In Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths, Mariana Valverde draws on examples from film, television, and newspapers to examine these questions and to demonstrate how popular culture is creating an unrealistic view of crime and crime control. Valverde argues that understanding the impact of media representations of courtrooms, police departments, prisons, and the people who populate them is essential to comprehending the reality of criminal justice.

Introduction
Social semiotics : the basics
Representations and their social effects : a template
Science and the semiotics of deviance
The authority of the detective and the birth of the forensic gaze
From the hard-boiled detective to the pre-crime unit : American representations of justice
The invention of the psycho killer and the rise and fall of the welfare state
Chronotopes of crime : perceptions of danger in urban space
"Gruesome" pictures : images and their effects in criminal justice practice

Mariana Valverde is a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto and author of Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge.