Speed Kills

Over the past two decades, a misguided, militaristic war on drugs has been waged through a variety of means, including drug interdiction programs on the streets and highways of the United States, and high-profile campaigns in the United States media designed to construct drug use as a dangerous social problem. Yet during this same period, a far more deadly social problem - the death of some 40,000 people a year in automobile accidents along these same streets and highways — has largely been excluded from public consciousness and public debate. Recently, a convergence of circumstances in New Mexico made visible this imbalance in public awareness and public policy, and perhaps even began to remedy it. The roadside shrines that decorate the highways of New Mexico and other states likewise serve this purpose, encoding the collective tragedy of automotive death in the cultural landscape. In their tragic beauty and ongoing accumulation, these shrines challenge critical criminologists to find a new focus, a new everyday criminology of the automobile that can expand the existing criminology of automotive corporate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.