"In this powerful and unsettling study, Liam Kennedy shows how children’s popular culture provides the foundational carceral scripts for our children, handcuffing their imaginations around harm, safety, and accountability. With clarity and rigor, Kennedy illustrates how even the most seemingly innocent stories—picture-book bears, heroic puppies, goofy villains—reproduce racialized ideas about 'bad guys' and render cops and cages normalized. Moving deftly from LEGO play to PAW Patrol, from Berenstain Bears to Dog Man, Cops and Robbers maps a dense landscape of copaganda and carceral common sense that is as intimate as the bedtime story. It offers scholars and caregivers concrete tools for asking better questions about what kids are being taught—and what else they might learn instead, revealing that alternatives to criminalization and incarceration are both thinkable and already in motion. This book should be required reading not only for criminologists, media scholars, and educators but for show runners, children’s book publishers, and, most importantly, parents."

"Making serious study of what some might errantly deride as 'just cartoons', Kennedy demonstrates with rigor and verve the myriad ways our punitive law and order ideology runs cradle to grave and is certainly no laughing matter."

"In this powerful and provocative dissection of children’s crime media, Kennedy has given us a book that does justice to this largely overlooked topic. He exposes the ideological work these representations perform, showing how they play a central role in the construction of carceral logics and punitive mindsets from an early age. Cops and Robbers is written with verve, wit and imagination. And, most importantly, it offers an urgent reminder of the importance of popular criminology in the contemporary media landscape."

Liam Kennedy is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at King’s University College at Western University Canada. He is the co-editor of Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport.