Pantomime justice: A cultural criminological analysis of 'life stage dissolution'

Adopting the perspective of cultural criminology, this paper asserts that the century-old opposition between the adolescent/youth stage and adulthood is now being challenged by a late-modern capitalist culture functioning artificially to extend the former. Using examples from across the cultural script, the paper introduces the concept of 'life stage dissolution' (and its attendant bi-directional processes of 'adultification' and 'infantilisation') to suggest it is becoming more difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The result is a sort of generational mulch where shared and interchangeable cultural experiences are now the norm. The second half of the paper provides some preliminary and deliberately provocative remarks about the implications of life stage dissolution for criminology and criminal justice. This will include an analysis of emerging processes that I have termed 'pantomime justice', a useful way of understanding how crime stories today often seem to unfold as a conjoined adult-child experience in contemporary society. © 2012 The Author(s).