Abstract

The article focuses on the role of the media in aggravating institutional actions that yield to stereotypes that “naturalize” a criminal profile. The study problem refers to the role of the media in aggravating institutional actions that yield to these stereotypes and which conform to the “stigmatizing criminal intervention”? The main hypothesis is that the ways in which stereotypes condition the definition of what are the “characteristic types” of criminals, also dictate the definition of what are the threats to social security, in what they consist and, mainly, how they should be interpreted. To this end, it presents considerations on the theoretical basis of critical criminology and the idea of the body and soul as objects of punishment, the social construction of the phenomenon of criminality through the media and the implications of media criminology. Through conducting exploratory and qualitative bibliographic research, he concludes conclusively that symbolically and materially segregated, “they”, the poor transit in the social territory along their banks, stripped of any and all possibility of accessing true security, understood as the full exercise of rights, which does not even appear in political-media debates.