This text explores the inability of the "crimino-legal complex" - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and ordinary, individual everyday experiences - to solve the problem of crime and criminality. It examines a number of events which have been taken to represent something definitive about crime. Each event is seen as representing the crisis within the crimino-legal tradition in different ways. Topics discussed include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the ambiguities of victimization in relation to social justice in the city; conjugal homicide and illegal immigration; the pleasures of reading about crime in detective fiction; the discovery of the limits in the representation of crime when two children killed another child (the Bulger case); the governmental campaigns against single motherhood as a challenge to the heterosexual norm; and HIV/AIDS as spectacle in criminal justive policies.