Journal Article — Five Doors, Three Cameras, and A Dead Bolt: How Fear of Crime is Filling Our Prisons and Consuming Personal Liberty — by Alison Michelle Ireland

In this paper, Ireland applies her sociological imagination to the examination of a personal problem in relation to a broader social issue that affects society at large. After careful introspection and self-monitoring, she finds that her own “fear of crime,” and resulting loss of privacy, has much to do with racial profiling and mass imprisonment. This conclusion is supported throughout with scientific literature, and theories such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, exchange theory, structural functionalism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. Future research into linking these two concepts empirically would further shed light on the hypotheses presented.