Conclusion: True Crime's Ethical Dilemmas

The arguments in this book appear to contradict one another. On the one hand, I highlight the political value of true crime in bringing victims to the foreground, exposing injustice, offering alternative perspectives on justice and challenging how we view victims. This fits with the optimistic view that ‘popular criminology’ offers academic criminology a further lens on understanding crime, which gets at emotional and ethical complexities often beyond the reach of academic research and theory. A number of criminologists have embraced the term popular criminology to articulate how studying culture as crime benefits criminology. Criminologists interested in popular criminology approach it as a complementary discourse with the potential to steer the criminological imagination in new directions (Rafter, 2007; Rafter & Brown, 2012; Rawlings, 1998; Raymen, 2018; Wakeman, 2014; Wattis, 2018). For example, popular criminology can illuminate theory and highlight its presence in everyday experiences (Rafter & Brown, 2012; Ruggiero, 2003; Wakeman, 2014), with certain texts supporting ‘a particular criminological explanation of crime’ (Carrabine, 2008, p. 138). Cultural texts also engage with crime in more creative and emotional ways that inspire us to think differently about crime and justice (Jacobsen, 2014; Rafter, 2007; Rafter & Brown, 2012; Raymen, 2018; Wakeman, 2014; Wattis, 2018). This is reflected by Ruggiero's (2003) study of how the novel brings criminological theory to life or shows us experiences of punishment and the mechanics of the law. As he puts it, ‘sociological and criminological theories’ arise ‘while telling stories’ (Ruggiero, 2003, p. 3). For Ruggiero, this relates to the power of the novel to generate ‘concepts which are always debatable and revisable because their “in-between spaces” offer infinite possibilities to readers’ (Ruggiero, 2003, p. 5). Moreover, like crime fiction, true crime texts require us to use our imagination, inspiring readers to empathise and identify with complex characters and experiences (Rossmanith, 2014) that move beyond the binary representations of crime and justice found in much news media.