Hello, in the final months of 2014, the most downloaded podcast on iTunes wasn't on politics or on current affairs, it was no grand historical narrative and it certainly wasn't a comedy. The podcast was called Serial by now downloaded over 80 million times, and it's sold over the course of 12 long episodes in intimate detail.
The investigations of reporter Sarah Koenig into the murder of a single teenage girl in Baltimore 15 years previously whodunnits have been a feature of popular fiction for over 150 years. Extremely popular fiction indeed, with Agatha Christie battling only William Shakespeare for the most numerously sold author of fiction of all time. Yet such a detailed serialisation of real life murder cases is a much newer phenomenon and from a certain perspective, at least a rather morbid one.
Why do we as human beings seem to find these distressing stories so fascinating? Could podcasts such as serial warped perception of the realities of criminal justice? What responsibilities should such documentary makers have when presenting these cases? And is even the very act, the act of making the lives of such vulnerable people primetime entertainment cannot ever be ethically justified. The success of programmes such as Serial and also Netflix is endlessly controversial.
Show Making a Murderer poses many questions to the professional scholar of the public's relationship with the criminal justice system, the criminologist. And today we are joined by three graduate students in criminology from Oxford University to discuss precisely these matters. Kate Evans from St Hilda's College, Liz Coleman from St Cross College, and just Joe from some Cats' College. Thank you very much for joining me.
I guess many of our listeners may not have met a criminologist before or necessarily know too much about what criminology entails as a discipline. Kate, I want to start us off by giving us some broad feel of what criminology involves. Yeah, of course. So I think one of the things we find as criminologists is that people have quite widespread misconceptions about what. And I just to say, a lot of misconceptions have been that we're forensic psychologist will pick apart the criminals brain.
That's not something that criminologists tend to do. We're much more focussed on the legal system, the prison system and how crimes are perceived. So, in short, I would say it's why laws are made, why they are broken and what we should do about it. And we are not sort of CSI investigators with microscope scopes and such things, if I understand correctly, more a study of a system than the individual psychologies of the agents involved in a particular individual crime.
Exactly. Exactly. Accurate. Just so what do you do on a day to day basis? Do you? I guess because we're doing a Masters at the moment, right? Yeah, well, I did an undergrad in criminology as well. And I think the difference between then and now is we're focussing a lot more on applied criminology. So what I did for three years before was a lot of theory building, so I felt like it was a lot to do with sociology.
So I was focussing on how societies function and why societies have crime, so how societies go bad or break down. But what I find fascinating now is we're applying everything that we've learnt, including theories that seem almost irrelevant sometimes unless you, like, pick really deep into it, too, like systems like he said, the prison, a society, institutions as well. We got our essay topics today and I'm mostly focussing on the prison one at the moment.
So we've been reading a lot about prisoners rights or lack thereof. And that deals with a lot of the legal side of criminology, which I find personally quite difficult. I'm more on the sociology side myself, but it's been some really good readings about prison abolition movement and how to raise awareness about rights fits in with a sort of post-colonial approach as well.
So post-colonial theory, which looks at the legacy of slavery and colonialism in the US and Europe and how that ties in with prisoners rights, because in America there's a great disproportionate imprisonment of young black men. As opposed to other businesses. And I think that really one of the things that maybe people don't understand as much as that criminology has a huge range, so you can go.
So I was hoping to specialise in intimate partner violence or domestic abuse, as it's more commonly known, especially in teenage relationships. And that can you know, you can do something like that or you can do something very high in, know, overarching looking at, you know, sentencing. You could look at prisons, you could look at individual roles within prison, say, for instance, prison guards.
There's whole realms of literature on the sort of unseen aspects of the criminal justice system that we tend not to think about. Too much criminology can take on stop and search to find cybercrime, kind of that sort of thing like we can do within that range. Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things I've come to realise about criminology is it's taking a lot of things that are usually taken for granted and then really picking it apart.
And so something very simple, for example, like prisons, obviously with actually with TV shows. Now, with all of this information, everyone can kind of learn a little bit more about it. And to know that it's a lot more nuanced than it appears like how it's fed to us. But with criminology, you can access it through the eyes of different people. So you can like for example, with prisons, the whole institution looks completely different when you look through the eyes of someone else.
So if you're doing research based on prisoners, there will be a hugely different to like comparing interviews with governors. So I think what I'm trying to say is just with these issues that we've been studying, it's a lot more complex than it seems. And I think Criminology's job is to critically approach it and then see how it see how systems like this could be changed for the greater good.
Yeah, and actually building on that Criminology's, like we said, that it's about studying legal systems and institutions and how it works and ties together. But I think also it's looking at why certain crimes are crimes and how that changes. And that's something that's quite interesting and pretty cool about our subject in light of the intersection of so many of the traditional humanities, but also the modern social studies and the law as well to your particular project.
Yeah, but going back to something you were saying earlier about how certain branches of criminology focus on aspects of criminal justice that many people don't see very often, I guess all of us think that we see certain aspects of criminal justice very often. Indeed, every time we watch a police officer drama say, which Turner doesn't, I write down on this for about 10 that are on the mind.
So I guess two questions. Do you feel that the perception, we guess, of the life of a police officer from these services is accurate? And do you feel that the possible misconceptions that we get affect our relationship with the police? Well, I think actually the sort of two to four question there. And I think one thing with with police dramas is that they are they are I mean, they are dramas. And so we you know, we love them as far as the general population does.
And it's just always good to remember, though, that it's very unrealistic representation of what a police officer does day to day. I mean, I've I've worked in the past with the Metropolitan Police and, you know, you really have to graft very hard to become a senior detective in the police force.
You have to do about five years on the beat specialising before you can really rise up through the ranks, which means doing often very anti-social hours, a lot of community work that, you know, it's just interesting to put into a drama. You're going to be you're going to be doing a lot of anti-social behaviour complaints, neighbour disputes, you know, community safety, community safety. Policing is not particularly glamorous, but it's the bedrock of what we expect from our police forces.
I think. So it can be difficult because I would hope it wouldn't change our relationship with an officer if we see them in the street. But perhaps it would change our view of these high powered and potentially maybe a bit, you know, messed up, aggressive, you know, overdramatic police officers when actually I think a lot of them and, you know, anyone can be here.
That's a lot of it's a lot of hard graft and community work and a lot more to do with relationships than it is and building them than it is actually to do with, you know, sort of running around, going in cahoots with God knows what according to our own this sort of thing. A rebus. No, Luther. Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. So is that a view that you. I very much agree. I think that these shows kind of mess out this whole idea of.
Being also very highly administrative, yeah, um, which of course, is not glamorous, but it's a very important part of the job that takes up a lot of the time. So you have this conflict between what would make a good drama and what is a realistic description of the realities of the job. Yeah, and I think they did it quite recently, a documentary on the Metropolitan Police where they followed them around.
And I could tell they had added to that, you know, fairly heavily, because it's not interesting watching, you know, a police officer book through 10 offenders that they've arrested that day. But like they said, it's hugely important to making sure the police are held accountable, that the paper trail is there. And actually that's where some of their most key aspects of their work comes from is equally with stop and search,
which I think is a very contentious. Yeah, it's a very contentious issue and it's very rarely put into television dramas or documentaries. It's not something the police feel particularly comfortable about broadcasting, and it's not something that people really know how to put into a drama because, yeah, it's one of the greatest parts that a police officer can have.
It's just to stop you and ask to Suchi. So I think that, you know, there's elements that just, you know, kind of make it into the domestic narrative and just do you feel good because these certain elements of policing are not in the narratives that people are seeing on a day to day basis. It affects people's perception of the police.
I think just building on what we've been talking a lot of these police dramas that the very much focussed on, like the lone wolf aspect and also what we kind of touched upon before as well about the the kind of crimes that are portrayed in these kind of dramas and the real official statistics of crime.
And I think it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of expectations on the police, too, especially individual officers, to kind of solve the problems as they appear, as opposed to like a lot of cases, they drag on for so long because of just the sheer amount of complexities are involved. It's not as simple as just the next day the D.A. wakes up and then just like all the clues are there and it's very rarely that. And we like, yeah, Liz was saying earlier, very administrative process as well.
So I think I'm not sure, though, about how much this really affects the general public as the whole population depends on the backgrounds as well of like individuals who are watching it. But then again, I'm not sure because I think each person has their own take on it. Um, I think also what the police dramas do is maybe, um, incite fear of crime. That's unrealistic by portraying these offences. So I'll I'll pick on Luther. Why not. Why not. Um, but those are some serious and very scary crimes.
A young woman hailing a cab and ending up being sexually assaulted and murdered. That's one of the stories in season two. I believe if that's not something that people should be afraid of because it's not going to happen or most likely not going to happen. However, people that watch it might be a bit more afraid of offences like that. Having seen it so, I personally have been because I scare very easily. Um, but yeah, watching that makes you fear crime isn't a realistic threat.
So the statistical proportion of numbers of very violent, very serious, very scary crimes that appear in these TV shows is very, very different from the actual percentage that appear. Oh, yeah. And I think, um, yeah. Just just touching on actually both the points that you made the so first of all, with the police, I think that idea that, you know, we should have something linnear that's solved and done and dusted and erm, you know, as quick as you like.
And it's, it's, it's unfair really to the way that they project it, because it puts a huge amount of pressure on quite a struggling public service that has a lot of pressures on them. And also I do think it's this expectation that society has of like, oh, how dare you not, you know, do this thing. As soon as I thought you would, I thought I trusted you as the police. So that is that I think it comes back to that thing you're saying is the viewpoint of police.
It may not affect your relationship, but it may give you unrealistic expectations of what a police officer can actually do. You know, in most cases, witnesses will drop out, people will disappear, people change addresses, they lose evidence, and that is everyday human behaviour. But once you put it in the context of highly public, you know, highly criticised police force.
Also, just touching on the other thing, at a time when we have quite they they really demonise offenders as well as offenders. There was no sympathy. And I mean, maybe you don't want to feel sympathy.
And that's why you don't have the sympathetic element that we know from criminology and the studies that we read every day, offenders, prisons, police stations are filled with quite unhappy, quite ill and quite, you know, people with very, very difficult lives who experience high levels of victimisation in their own lives.
And if you have this sort of I only watch season one of Lutherville that like evil woman with the red hair and see, you know, it's just so binary and doesn't really get to the heart of what actually drives people to offend. Well, this is quite nicely onto this new phenomenon of these real life documentaries, serials in which some of these rules of dramatisation, the most successful fictional shows, are applied to real life dramas.
But with this this thing switched off where much of a focus is on the offender, the background and the vulnerability which to turn certain things on its head so that when I mention introduction to Serial and I give a very short preview of what goes on, but perhaps adjust, would you like to summarise for us what, say, the first series of articles about it?
I was one of probably one of the first people to listen to it because I remember getting the information from a different podcast that I listened to. And then because I was doing criminology as an undergrad, then I was very interested in all of this kind of crime drama. So I thought I would just give it a listen. And I just remember how immediately hooked I was after the first, like 20 minutes.
It was the reporter, Sarah Koenig, who worked in the Baltimore Sun, and she got a letter about a news story that she covered in the newspaper a while ago. So initially they introduced the case of Adnan Syed and how he was he's currently convicted in prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend. What stuck out to me, though, if I'm just going to go into, like, personal details now, right about why I thought this was very interesting was they introduced the characters.
I'm going to say, even though this is real life, I feel strange to say that in a in a very profound way. So Sarah introduced an ad by his his religion and his height. I remember hearing about how he looked and what his image was like to his classmates. And then the girl I just met, she was Korean and they described her as like the girl next door. And it was just there was kind of this background story being introduced in the first like 20 minutes.
And I just remember being so hooked into this and being so shocked to find out that he like well, he's convicted for murdering her, might have been in prison for about 15 years. Yes, exactly. So it was very shocking to hear. So I definitely wanted to hear more about it. Yeah.
So that episode was just introducing. But how it ended was it was on a cliff-hanger, so you kind of had to keep listening to find out a little bit more about these these two young people's lives who were both essentially run away when they go into all the details of the family and the friends of a classmates or the interrelationships between all these people. You know, it was like the what you were saying about the whodunit. But the first episode I remember raised a lot of questions.
So it brought up this case, introduce the basic facts, but then started presenting these snippets of these two people's lives, how complicated it was for both Anad and the girl. And it was kind of already kind of poking, poking the bear, if I if I may say, because I remember she interviewed some of the classmates and they were all saying, know it was so great. Like he was a great student. He was a model son. He participated in community activities.
And he was just so like he was very shocking that he would do something like this. And then as an audience, you feel very, very sympathetic already in a way to hear, but also very cautious because from previous experience, listening to like watching this kind of drama, you know, that the good person is usually the one who did it. And so this isn't a drama. This is a real exactly. But the subtext is, is this a miscarriage of justice?
We must investigate to decide if this is a miscarriage of justice. Right. And I think so. Some of the things you picked up on it, certainly she structured it as a story because that's how you get someone to listen.
And it's really interesting to see that structured around the miscarriage of justice, because I think while Serial did a fantastic job of deconstructing how he was taken into custody and then eventually claim to her murder and whether or not he did it, she took on this role of a sleuth sort of detective and really harassed the people involved in the case that were not atonce.
Family who obviously was supportive of her investigation into the case, so Hayman, who is the victim, her family, she said, I've never tried so hard to contact a family to get them to speak on the radio. Now, for them, their daughter was murdered 15 years ago. And suddenly this woman who's taken an interest in the case, has pulled up a very traumatic time from this. And I don't I'm not sure to what extent Sarah told the family how she was going to present the story.
But I remember a couple episodes in when she was doing her monologue, which she was saying how she personally felt confused. I feel like she started this whole investigation from the standpoint of that. It was a miscarriage of justice. So I like that. That just makes it even more frustrating for the family because they feel like their daughter was taken from them, this person's, and they feels like there should have been a closure.
And then for someone to come to try and dig it up and almost made it make it seem like you put this person in prison for no reason. That must be so heartbreaking. But, yeah, it kind of serves to really victimise the family. And I think that, like, raising miscarriages of justice is very important and should be done when there's been a miscarriage of justice. However, you do need to think about the appropriate approaches to doing that.
And maybe something like Serial wasn't. Yeah, just coming back to that point, there are methods and I think they believe that the Saudi family and the people who supported him believe they had tried lots of different methods. And so there is room for journalism to do this, but it has to be responsibly done. What do you feel the ethical demands on, for instance, are journalists making these investigations?
Well, I think that the ethical underpinnings of journalism are very different to that of criminology. So there's a lot more scope for them to be a bit more Snoopy and cross lines that perhaps they shouldn't in the name of journalism. And we must remember that journalism is sort of like a service. So people people consume what they create. You want people to take interest. So, yeah, they might push some boundaries that they shouldn't.
But then in a way, I do understand how, because I think breakthroughs in either policy or even in law sometimes is through the laymen taking on this interest and then gaining this widespread support for change. And I think you were saying earlier, Kate, about how the family did when they when she was interviewing the family, told her about how exasperated they felt when they they couldn't really get the criminal justice system to, like, listen.
And then the protesters went on so smoothly, all of the witnesses against it was very it just seemed very one sided. And the I don't know if this will be spoiling it for anyone who's still listening to Serial, but so there was just a lot of evidence that wasn't used as well. So, of course, because we are criminologists, we do study a lot about the problems that are within these institutions that support our everyday life.
So I think in a way, if we didn't have these like wider scope for snooping or like just revisiting old cases, then we wouldn't really be able to progress. But definitely I think there was a line crossed in this case here with the victim family. So I think ethics definitely needs to be applied. But in a way, I encouraged this. I encourage journalism to do it within proportion. So unclear how it should be done because the need for journalists to be journalists.
Yes, exactly. Why do you think we as a public seem to be so fascinated with these rather grim and gruesome stories? It's not Lloyd's listening. I think there's a certain curiosity in things that we don't understand we don't know that much about. Crime definitely is one particularly crimes like murder or sexual assault is dramatic. People are I mean, we certainly are. I think that's kind of how you stumble upon criminology a subject.
And then you realise that, like, whoa, everything I believed was maybe not quite as I says, but yeah, it's quite enticing, like a morbid curiosity. Yeah. And and I think there is some danger to it in the way. I don't know exactly what sort of research is going into this been replication of attacks or violence that is then repeated throughout. I think you see that a lot with them in states with school shootings.
And they are copycat. Yeah, they're copycats. Um, I'm not sure how much this is either informed from what we've learnt or from my original cynicism, but I think why we're interested in things that seem to shock us or repulse us in a way, is it might be something to do with reassurance of ourselves. So I think when we watch dramas like this or we hear about real life cases where someone has done. Something terrible, it reinforces this kind of like standard of values within us and how.
Oh, it's shocking because I would never do that and I know people around me would never do that, but people still do. So then you wonder why I like it very much. Are you suggesting that this morbid curiosity is an example of fascination with the other, gaining some personal strength from in a very enclosed environment, or just listening to a podcast on the radio contact with something that's very fun, very foreign.
But then at the same time, with cases like making a murderer and serial, you get to know these people so it becomes foreign and then you meet them and. Well, let's move on to my. I was going to move on that next. So making a murderer, is that even more controversial television version of what's made so popular? And indeed, for listeners who aren't so aware of what making murder was about? Kate, would you want to give us a short break here on that series? Yes, I came out.
It was based on the case of Steven Avery, who was acquitted or a quite violent sexual assault on a woman in his 20s and on his release roughly, I think two years later, he was found guilty of murdering and raping another woman called Teresa Halbach and making a murder with a documentary made by two women who followed Steven Avery and his family for about 10 years. During this time in their lives where the whole family was implicated in this murder, it happened on their property.
And they sort of pick apart the police actions in that town and strategically place Steven Avery as perhaps wrongfully convicted once more. And since then, his nephew, who was also convicted of conspiracy to murder alongside him, has actually been released from prison as a result of the documentary and the sort of widespread outrage it caused. I think that happened even once the documentary was being aired on Netflix. So he I think he is officially now free.
But yeah, while it was airing, they started the process of releasing him because he had a very low IQ and was effectively very manipulated by police. And it's a horrible, horrible documentary to watch anyway because of that very reason. But again, it's the you know, the kind of moral question, whose case do you pick to go for these documentaries? Who gets chosen and who doesn't? Steven Avery, that case is so unique and that's why it makes a great documentary.
But your average mentally ill, highly victimised, as we were saying before, serious criminal, maybe would not make such a great documentary. And that's why you don't choose them. There are certain issues to do with this case that play into the wider aspects in US justice to do with race and education, as I gather.
Exactly like what cases? It's a bit depressing to think about, actually, if you think about it this way, as much as people in society, when we hear about an injustice, we all kind of feel compelled to act for it. But then what? What degree of that is based on the entertainment factor of it and how much it reflects us?
So I feel like what we were discussing earlier about how disproportionate and out of sync the reflection is with these crime dramas and also making a murderer, the person who was the main story focussed, Steven Avery. He was a white man, but also from a working, quietly working class background, working class background and quite disadvantaged families as well. But the proportion of young black men in prison is is so much greater.
And to what extent would that make an interesting story and to what extent? If Steven Avery was a young black man, would there be any reaction? Even greater reaction, I feel, because one of my questions now for me, like things like that will follow making a murderer's will there be another case like this to be dragged into and then to, like, uncover more things like what do they do after this?
What happens when the cameras leave? I think you've raised a really interesting point, what both of you in sort of who was picked and then situate that within the reality of the American prison system and how it's extremely disproportionate. Let me just run of the section by asking what is no doubt and answer your question, but I'll ask anyway.
There was a petition of 500000 signatures that was sent to the White House that from people who watched making a murderer calling for Steven Avery to be acquitted. Do you think there would have been such an outcry by the viewing public had the figure of the accused been a more typical figure of the prison population in America have been a young black man?
Absolutely not. I think the I think the level of sympathy towards him was not just because he was white, I'm not saying that at all, but the level of sympathy towards him was because of his previous injustices, because of the way the show was presented and the fact that there was this question of did he do it and did he know where was your typical offender who had committed such a violent act?
I mean, you may feel sympathy to a certain extent, but that would be a lot more factors at play that would actually make it very complicated to pick apart whether or not it was his fault. And without that level of entertainment. Did he do it? Did he not? Like you said, if it's not entertaining, are we even going to engage with it? And maybe that's why it did get such a wide audience as well, is because it was such a unique case. It was a violent crime. It was a miscarriage of justice.
But then at the at a similar time that the making a murderer sort of came out and got all the hype and excitement. That was another Netflix documentary called The House We Live In, which approached the subject of hyper incarceration of the black male community in America. And strangely, that did it well, perhaps not strangely at all. That didn't get as big a response, if any, really in comparison.
And that's quite interesting because in my opinion, that deals with the reality of crime in America and the outfall from that and talks about, you know, a genocide of the black population in America. But I think perhaps that's too uncomfortable and too big of a subject for people to approach.
This leads into larger questions about what difficulties you as criminologists face in justifying your discipline, in making people understand these complexities, using the reality of most cases is very complex. Do you find it very difficult to get across? I think what Liz was saying earlier about how it's it's difficult to accept a lot of the realities of the societies we live in, that's true even for us, like every single day, every article, every book, journal, anything we read.
Usually at the end, we just feel it's very depressing to know the reality, like income. There's things that you can hear and then there's things that the facts just plainly say and there's no reasoning that you can have that will make you feel better.
What can you give an example that comes to mind? Hyper incarceration, for example, and how essentially it is the like a genocide of the black community because we were talking about prisoners rights and also voting rights as well, because that's that's taken away when you're in prison and even when you're out of prison because of the disproportionate number of this population in prison, the amount of votes that are denied and the amount of political voices that are silenced,
it is a huge and it makes you wonder how is this any different from where we have been before with slavery and colonialism? It's just shifting things to a place where the public cannot see, cannot hear. And because of that, it's easier to accept because we cannot see it and kind of hear it's easier to accept things that feel very distant from you,
out of sight and out of mind. Exactly that. But I think even with us, I think every day I have to remind myself to just look at it again, because it's so much easier just to, like, skip past the hard things and just close the book and forget about it, you know, and. Yeah, and I think linking this back to the podcast's and the documentaries and we must remember that that's entertainment and of the reason why.
So the house we live in and 13th and get a bigger audience and interest is because they're not actually that entertaining at all, because it's it's reality. It's depressing. And how what do you do with that? Once you realise that, you feel very uncomfortable? It's quite scary. Whereas with this, like with them making a murderer, it's one person you can get involved, you can sort of thing.
You can sign the petition, you can sign a petition. I haven't seen a petition and hyper incarceration, certainly. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, criminologists we do. And I think particularly for our generation in general, we face a huge backlash against effective intellectuals. We're living in this bizarre post truth apocalypse. But, you know, it really is our responsibility to bring these arguments forward in a way that people can understand.
And that is not patronising and that really articulates, you know, these are people's lives. We have a prison system that is fundamentally not working. But The Daily Mail will kick right off if they see a prison sentence that's too low. And that's the kind of gap we're needing to bridge. And it's a real challenge.
But I do think one thing I would say the criminologist, as I just said, we do tend to go to places and people and situations that most people would rather not have to deal with because it is very hard. You know, we do study things like suicide in prisons. And so, you know, we are not quite in our ivory tower. We are you know, we are dealing with things and getting to grips with things that are very difficult social problems.
So I think there's that one misconception I would say is that, you know, especially with criminology we set up here, we're trying to get ourselves down just to maybe insert some examples of how it is very different from just theorising and then applying it from top down. It's very bottom up, I think, or at least that's what we try to do. So not prisons as prisoner suicides. It's definitely one of the hardest topics to do.
But it was also we learnt about maternal incarceration, adolescent to parent violence, kids who assault their parents essentially, and then how prison population of women and how this impacts the family. Because we really when we think about the criminal justice system, we think about crime and offences. We think definitely there's a victim, the offender. And then we got the court. But we don't think about how it dissipates around the family of the offender, of the victim.
And it's what that's what we do. We see how these influences go beyond the offender and go beyond the crime almost because every impulse on the part it is it is always a local unemployed. There's always influences that you feel shouldn't be there. But there are a lot of these serials and documentaries play into, it seems, this notion of what it's like for simplicity to go away from this reality is you're talking about a good guy of bad guy.
Do you feel that by desire for good guys and bad guys really gets in the way of the work? It's a very interesting question because I there is a civil rights lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, in the US, who said I had a question, asked him, have you? He specialises in death row. And he was asked, do you have you met anyone who is evil? And he said, no, I've met a lot of very ill, very sad and very troubled people, but I have yet to meet anyone who's evil.
And he'd been working on death row for 25 years. So I think that really speaks to the dichotomy that is created of good and evil and that's really instilled in us from a very young age and yet can be very challenging to try and represent someone, for instance, who's committed a sexual offence. That's something that I very personally, if you feel very affronted by, to then have to sit and be sympathetic and listen to that offender is is challenging.
But that is why we do what we do. And that's you know, if you don't if you put them in a box and leave them to rot for the rest of their lives, you will never know why that occurred in the first place. It's a challenge, but you take it on and you go forward and try and think of a better solution. Yeah, I mean, in criminology, it's better not to use these evil terms, of course. So, yes, I guess in the media is problematic because you might think that way because that's how it's presented.
However, as Kate said, if you assign this evil label, it's impossible to deal with the offence. So with your example of sexual violence and the reality is that a lot of sexual offences occur within a family or with it's it's not a stranger rape. We fear sexual offences tend to be committed by people who, you know, and it's it's not conducive to call that person evil, put them away and not deal with it. It's better to actually unpack what is the dynamic within this family?
Why is this happening? And that just can't be done if you assign those labels. We're coming to the end of our time. But I thought that was obviously one time in all of our lives, most likely when we will be intimately involved with one particular corner of the justice system, which is as and when we are asked to do jury service, I don't know if any of us have yet been asked of jurors or as I think the rest of our lives.
But so this is a time when we are going to be asked of individuals to make these decisions and a court case. Do you feel that if we're being completely saturated in these fictional dramas, detective series, but maybe even more importantly, these real life serial making a murderer style documentaries for that could have a very negative impact on our judgement in such cases. I'll take on these things is very different from how perceptions will be in real life.
I think one of the main things to bear in mind, I think we said this at the beginning as well, is crime dramas are crime dramas. And I think to the credit of the producers and the screenwriters, I think they do try to not mimic real life as much as they can, even though I know the real life dramas are another issue. But I think once individuals become intimately involved physically with the criminal justice system during jury duty or in contact with the police.
Your situation changes your mindset a lot, and I think although your perceptions of such might be influenced, your decisions and your actions in that moment will not be affected. I think it will definitely be based on your values and then also your situation, your condition and your environment.
Would you agree? I agree. I think that whilst we all watched them and love them, these TV shows and documentaries, once you're actually in that reality, if you if you've been asked to do jury service, you go there. You know, you're not in a in a movie. And I think that all the processes and sort of walking into the court and being presented with the case, I reckon people would deal with it as as a reality rather than sort of basing it on their ideas and preconceptions that they've seen on TV.
But even if those preconceptions might have been based on these real life documentaries, say someone to introduce you might have had no experience, no never met someone from the kind of socioeconomic background I want to pass judgement upon. OK, well, have I heard about such a person? Oh, I remember making a murderer. Sometimes that's just just an argument.
But if that is your only source of reference, then surely that might out you quite strongly in the type of free concert you bring to the case. There is certainly, you know, sounds like a dissertation. Maybe you could do it. But I think I think there's two things here. First of all, if you have seen had any contact with any of this sort of content that we've been talking about in the media, you have quite a strong idea of what a courtroom will be like.
Courtrooms and time in court is incredibly lengthy. It's quite boring, often overruns. And I think that will if, you know, whatever preconceptions you have before you go in, you will leave probably quite bored, which is not to say that the case is boring, but because you are forced to basically sit in a room and listen to some very dry language.
And so the misconception that we have these kind of courtroom dramas that are very, you know, sassy and everyone's like getting each other down and this sort of stuff, you know, in the US, ninety seven percent of all cases plead out before they make it to court. So they take a deal given to them by the public prosecutor and they just go either pay a bail, get a warning or go to jail. So I think that would be one of the first misconceptions that goes as soon as you remember them.
But certainly I think, yeah, you're right. If you have an experience that, you know, had an experience with someone like Adnan Syed and that's the only reference point you have, you may be informed by that sort of, you know, is he a targeted minority or is he, you know, this evil person, that something is just a you fact or are you going to go, oh, I know I still have faith in us.
I know I can't really cite the study right now, but I know that we talked about a couple of cases where there was research done. There's this this idea that we all really, really like prisons in a way, as in we can't get rid of the prison because we feel like if there is a crime, this person needs to be punished. And so obviously we put them in prison. There's been a lot of debate on whether this is public opinion or this is like a manipulated public opinion.
But there's been studies done about this and they've asked so like random samples of people giving them the details of a case reallife or based on real life and ask them to read through it. And they've all found that the people's responses have always been less punitive than what the actual sentence was. If it was based on a real case, people will always be more lenient if they read through everything, if they get to grips with the real procedure. People are never as punitive as we think we are.
So I think definitely in the courtroom, I think maybe because it's so dry and so long and so like stretched out, you feel very obligated to put down your prejudices. Well, on that note, I think we'll close to this fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing your expertise on this subject, which I certainly knew nothing at all about before we organised the show. Thank you very much for listening to it in our spare time and join us again next time. Thank you.