Research has suggested that a majority of people in the United States receive much of their impressions and knowledge of the criminal justice system through the media, especially through entertainment television viewing. Drawing on this work, a programmatic research approach based on three primary strategies in selected substantive areas is developed for in depth inquiry and study of what people actually know, or think they know, about the criminal justice system. First, longitudinal content and discourse analyses of top-rated television programs, in which the main themes and protagonists are concerned with various dimensions of crime and law enforcement, are considered in order to obtain a general perspective on portrayals of the criminal justice system over time in the entertainment medium. The second line of inquiry involves national survey research on the viewing of related television programs, along several dimensions, with questions pertaining to perceptions of the legal system and an understanding of its operation. These strategies are then combined into a third for an interactive examination of the problem, proposing a somewhat different and compelling investigation of the relationship between law and society, with important theoretical and empirical implications for cultural, political, and criminal justice studies in general.
Our examinations within the sociology of law and related criminal justice studies tend to be concerned, to varying degrees, with the autonomy of the criminal justice system, or aspects of it, as socially determinant (or vice versa) and how it functions (or is supposed to function); we tend to primarily study the features that characterize law enforcement and the legal system. However, I would like to pose a slightly different issue than is usually addressed in this area of study. I suggest that we look more specifically at perceptions of criminal justice and law enforcement and the way in which it penetrates.......
