The author explores the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality; exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices; and analyzes the effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community, and everyday life. Among the events and issues which the author presents are: (1) criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; (2) the pleasures of reading detective fiction; (3) ambiguities of victimization and social justice in the city; (4) sacrificial structures in the law's response to conjugal homicide; (5) policing the ethnicity of the illegal immigrant; (6) the governmental strategies of campaigns against single mothers; and (7) the fatalism of the spectacle of HIV/AIDS in criminal justice policy. Footnotes, figures, references, index