Book Review: Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-Related Media and Support for Three Strikes

• Author: Robert Menzies
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806292922
• Published date: 01 September 2006
• Date: 01 September 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

essays. As is the case with some (if not many) edited books, this is not a book to be digested

from cover to cover. Although readers may, in light of personal interests, find particular chap-

ters to be readable and useful, it is unlikely that most criminologists will have a sufficiently

broad range of scholarly interests to derive value from all (or even most) of the chapters.

Christopher R. Williams

University of West Georgia, Carrollton

Callanan, V. J. (2005). Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-Related Media and Support for

Three Strikes. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806292922

In this contribution to LFB Scholarly Publishing’s Criminal Justice Recent Scholarship

series, Valerie J. Callanan recounts a survey of California residents aimed at measuring the

impact of crime-related news and entertainment on citizen attitudes toward criminality, law,

and social order. The study was inspired by that state’s experience with what has come to

be known globally as “three strikes” legislation. In the wake of a vigorous lobbying cam-

paign spearheaded by Californian Mike Reynolds (whose daughter Kimber was murdered

in 1992) and the subsequent, widely publicized kidnapping and slaying of 12-year-old

Polly Klaas in March 1994, the state legislature enacted a bill mandating life imprisonment

(with a minimum 25-year parole eligibility) against any convicted felony offender with a

history of two violent or “serious” felonies. Eight months later, armed with more than

800,000 signatures and a 78% majority at the polls, Reynolds shepherded Proposition 184

into law. Thereafter, the legislation could be overturned only through a two thirds majority

vote from the California state legislature or the public (p. 5). Within a single year, the U.S.

federal government and 24 states had passed comparable statutes amid a nationwide con-

vulsion of punitive lawmaking that was, arguably, unprecedented in criminological history.

Feeding the Fear of Crime enlists the Californian experience with this legislation as a

backdrop for probing the dynamics of public ideology, media (mis)representations of

crime, the politics of law formation, and the wider experience of punitiveness in fin-de-

siècle America. Callanan’s sample of 4,245 survey participants (winnowed down to 2,500

Whites, 777 Latinos, and 435 African Americans) delivered responses to a battery of

100 quantitatively framed questions presented telephonically. As a prelude to the study,

Callanan extracted 24 hypotheses (and several subhypotheses) from an exhaustive overview

of the extant literature on public opinion about crime, sentencing, and the impact of crime-

related media. The author choreographed these hypotheses to appraise the influence of

race/ethnicity, crime seriousness, support for rehabilitation, prior criminal victimization,

prior arrest, just world beliefs, political beliefs, crime salience, and electronic and print

media on citizen support for three strikes.

Although the statistical patterns of results are far too elaborate to review in their entirety,

four key findings merit highlighting. First, the sheer level of individual affirmation of three

strikes legislation is quite remarkable. When it came to “third time serious violent offend-

ers” (p.100), 93% of the sampled Californians fully endorsed a mandatory life term

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