An Iconic Theory of Criminal Justice

Abstract

Even mildly critical appraisals of American criminal justice around the turn of the twenty-first century mention Willie Horton. Horton, a convicted murderer serving time in Massachusetts, committed rape and armed robbery while out of prison on a state furlough. The advisers to George H. W. Bush’s 1988 run for the presidency created an advertising campaign based on Horton’s story. Far more important than the narrative was the image of Horton. It graced national television thousands of times and became one of the most important factors in Bush’s defeat of his rival, Michael Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts. The advertising campaign pinned Horton’s picture on Dukakis. It is not necessary to be one of the political cognoscenti to be unsurprised. By 1988 imagery had become politics, or as Murray Edelman put it, “most of the time politics is a series of pictures in the mind” (Edelman 1985:5). Willie Horton became an icon, or more precisely, his television visage did. Icons should not be confused with symbols, except in the most casual kind of meaning. Icons differ from symbols, and the distinction can provide the framework for a different kind of social theory, particularly, a different kind of theory about criminal justice.