The first time your humble servant ever paid $1 for a weekly newspaper, I asked the store clerk, "Is this paper worth a dollar?" She thought for a couple of seconds and replied, "Yeah, for the court news."
Print readers' taste for crime news is now being fed by a new kind of $1 weekly paper "popping up in convenience stores around the country. The papers are nothing more than a compendium of mug shots letting readers keep up with who's been arrested every week," Debbie Elliott reports for NPR and Southword, a project of The Oxford American.
Daniel Schroeder, publisher of The Slammer, which covers central Arkansas, said the mug-shot tabloids are "modern-day stockades or stocks," medieval-to-colonial devices that held offenders' necks and wrists and subjected them to public humiliation. "The crazier the mug shot, or the meaner looking the people are, the more likely they are to end up on the cover."
The Slammer bears a disclaimer: ""Not every arrest leads to a conviction. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law." Just Jailed, a colorful tabloid in southeastern Kentucky, says "All pictured are presumed innocent until proven guilty." It puts pages of sex offenders and missing children on its center spread.
Still, the papers raise issues. Schroeder admitted that The Slammer appeals to voyeurism, and Russell Carpenter of Little Rock told Elliott, "It's just someone exploiting, making a buck off of other people's miseries." The notion of stocks suggests the papers are a disincentive to crime, but Pulaski County Sheriff Doc Holladay (no kidding) said he sees no upside to The Slammer. Holladay said he resisted providing mug shots, but had to because they are open records. And there could be a question of racism, because the papers appear to be most popular in the South and African Americans may be disproportionately represented among offenders. (Read more)
Print readers' taste for crime news is now being fed by a new kind of $1 weekly paper "popping up in convenience stores around the country. The papers are nothing more than a compendium of mug shots letting readers keep up with who's been arrested every week," Debbie Elliott reports for NPR and Southword, a project of The Oxford American.
The Slammer bears a disclaimer: ""Not every arrest leads to a conviction. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law." Just Jailed, a colorful tabloid in southeastern Kentucky, says "All pictured are presumed innocent until proven guilty." It puts pages of sex offenders and missing children on its center spread.
Still, the papers raise issues. Schroeder admitted that The Slammer appeals to voyeurism, and Russell Carpenter of Little Rock told Elliott, "It's just someone exploiting, making a buck off of other people's miseries." The notion of stocks suggests the papers are a disincentive to crime, but Pulaski County Sheriff Doc Holladay (no kidding) said he sees no upside to The Slammer. Holladay said he resisted providing mug shots, but had to because they are open records. And there could be a question of racism, because the papers appear to be most popular in the South and African Americans may be disproportionately represented among offenders. (Read more)
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