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292rent psychological and sociological research, she deconstructs the rhetoric at
its roots in law, public commentary and the media. Many of the chapters take
the stance of providing a reading, but with little recommendation or practical
potential for reaction. The reading is interesting, but after five chapters, more
than sufficient.In the seventh and final chapter she does take on AIDS and the ways
that the culture has criminalized the sufferers of the disease as well as those
merely diagnosed as HIV positive. But, by that point of the book, her reading offered no surprises. I do not mean to take away from the work done
early on in the book; the initial chapters offered a close and well-rendered,
well-documented and drawn out reading of the crimino-legal complex. Its
applications made sense, and by chapter 5, I started seeing relations everywhere television programs, newspaper articles, social discussions and her
theories worked.The one salient metaphor that closed the chapter on AIDS as well as
the book was the close relation between disease and crime, a metaphor to
which Young returns at several points in the book. AIDS is a disease we only
know by its symptoms, just like crime is a social disease we can only see
manifest in its effects. The crimino-legal complex predicates the outcome
of symptoms of crime rather than examining its causes and ways to prevent
them. AIDS and, for that matter, cancer the two meta-diseases of the twentieth century are perfect metaphors for crime: society is more interested
in obliteration, cure and punitive measures than in methods of prevention or
education. Young points out that approaches to disease and crime boil down to
one basic urge: quarantine. To imagine crime, then, is to create the spectacle.
Young says, Crimes spectacle is a failure of quarantine. Imagining Crime
documents that failure and its social implications, providing a powerful if
finally lengthy reading of why crime seems to evade our understanding, our
control, our punishments and, eventually, our righteousness.The Pennsylvania State University Gabriel Welsch
Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T. Holmes, Serial Murder, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publication, 1998), pp. xi + 187. ISBN 0-7619-
1366-1 (hardcover), ISBN 0-7619-1367-X (paperback).During the last two or three decades, the phenomenon of the serial killer