From the New York Times opinion section:
Is Our True-Crime Obsession Doing More Harm Than Good?
Oct. 28, 2021By Phoebe Lett
Ms. Lett is a podcast producer in Opinion. …
Critics of the genre also say it entrenches the flaws of America’s criminal justice system. Even though men of color are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, true crime retains an outsize focus on violence against white women. Lindsey Webb, a criminal defense lawyer and law professor, drew a line to that focus from older “danger narratives” that used white female victimhood to cast people of color as inherently criminal.
Today’s true-crime narratives have mostly white male perpetrators, but Webb still sees them as buttressing the prison system that expanded in the 1970s and has since made the United States the world leader in incarcerating its own population, with Black Americans imprisoned at nearly five times the rate of whites.
