Do you want to acquire power through the image? Then you will perish by the return of the image (Jean Baudrillard, 2005). Five years ago now, in the edited collection Cultural Criminology Unleashed (Ferrell et al., 2004), we commented that the true meaning of crime and crime control was to be found not in the essential (and essentially false) factuality of crime rates, but in the contested processes of symbolic display, cultural interpre- tation, and representational negotiation. Images of crime, we claimed, were becoming ‘as “real” as crime and criminal justice itself ’, with mediated anticrime campaigns, visually constructed crime waves, and media fabrications of counter- cultural imagery all circulating in ‘an endless spiral of meaning, a Möbius strip of culture and everyday life’ (ibid: 3–4). At that time, our intention was to be controversial; the goal being to play with the parameters of the discipline and challenge the staid conventions of orthodox criminology. However, surveying the world five years on, such proclamations appear less irreverent flights of futuro- logical fancy and more commonsense observation. While the everyday experi- ence of life in contemporary Western society may or may not be suffused with crime, it is most certainly suffused with images and increasingly images of crime. However, it is not just a case of image proliferation – contemporary society’s keen sense of the visual demands that images also be both mutable and malleable. Here the ‘logic of speed’ (Virilio, 1986, 1991) meets liquidity of form, as images bleed from one medium to the next. Uploaded and downloaded, copied and cross- posted, Flickr-ed, Facebook-ed and PhotoShop-ped, the image today is as much about porosity and transmutation as it is about fixity and representation. This, of course, poses a question: what does the term ‘image’ actually mean under contemporary conditions? The word ‘image’ is utilized and etymologically defined in a number of ways. However, from a pictorial perspective, image traditionally refers to a representa- tion of the external form of an object. This remains the case, of course, but for the purposes of this collection, we have deliberately sought to expand and enhance Chapter 1 Opening the lens Cultural criminology and the image Keith Hayward 5378-Hayward-Ch-01.indd 1 5378-Hayward-Ch-01.indd 1 10/8/2009 3:45:53 PM 10/8/2009 3:45:53 PM