Criminal Justice & Popular Culture

They Shot the Sheriff: Part Two

Social power, tyranny and the limits of justice

“I hear that train a comin’. It’s rollin’ ‘round the bend…” There are few things more quintessentially Southern than the sound of a distant locomotive or a song by Arkansas native, Johhny Cash. Photo: Author. Taken at the Arkansas Railroad Museum in Pine Bluff.

In the first part of this essay, we traced the development of the Southern sheriff archetype in popular culture. Just the term itself, ‘Southern sheriff’ conjures a very specific image. The image is often of a white, male, who’s a bit overweight, frumpy, sweaty, indolent, and quick to anger. He may be many other things and motivated by diverse interests, but his place in the narrative is usually as an oppressor. He is there to subjugate the people in service to either his own personal whims or those of power structure he serves.

Since the dawn of motion pictures, lawmen in the American South have been the subject of parody, criticism, and rebuke. Early twentieth century films often juxtapose the lawman as an agent of an arbitrary order against the rugged individualist in the form of a bootlegger. What started as short films in nickelodeons leapt to the big screen and then to television.

We see something very similar in the much older tale of Robin Hood versus the Sheriff of Nottingham. Whether Appalachia or the English countryside, it’s the story of hard-working, barely subsisting peasants under the boot of a cruel government. In these stories the vile sheriff usually faces his…