This book examines the nature of collective morality as it materializes in public commentary about crime in the Americas and identifies the ways in which the moral community is talked into being and how the imagined moral universe is mapped.

1. Collective Moral Discourse 2. Making Crime "Our" Concern 3. "We the good" 4. The moral outlook 5. Moral agency 6. American melodramas 7. The artifacts of talk 8. Appendix.