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CRIMINALIZATION OF DEVIANCE

To be sure, from living in a society the individual has a pretty good idea what sorts of behavior will trigger indignant reactions, but not with great confidence. The issue is blurred by subgroup variation and because norms change with the passage of time. Bathing suits that were entirely proper in 1999 in the United States would have been scandalous in 1929. A survey might find that a large percentage of the population disapproves now of nudity on a public beach. The survey cannot reveal for how long the population will continue to disapprove of public nudity. Nor can the survey help much with the crucial problem of deciding how large a proportion of the population that disapproves strongly of a behavior is enough to justify categorizing public nudity as ‘‘deviant.’’

In short, the scientific observer can decide that a normative consensus has been violated only after first establishing that a consensus exists on that issue at this moment of time, and that is not easy. To determine this, individual normative judgments must somehow be aggregated, say, by conducting a survey that would enable a representative sample of the population to express reactions to various kinds of behavior. Ideally, these responses differ only by degree, but in a large society there are often qualitatively different conceptions of right and wrong in different subgroups.

In practice, then, in modern societies neither the potential perpetrator nor the onlooker can be certain what is deviant. Consequently the social response to an act that is on the borderline between deviance and acceptability is unpredictable. This unpredictability may tempt the individual to engage in behavior he would not engage in if he knew that the response would be widespread disapproval (Toby 1998a). It may also restrain onlookers from taking action against the behavior— or at least expressing disapproval—against persons violating the informal rules.

WHAT CRIME INVOLVES: A COLLECTIVE

RESPONSE

Crime is clearer. The ordinary citizen may not know precisely which acts are illegal in a particular jurisdiction. But a definite answer is possible. A lawyer familiar with the criminal code of the State of New Jersey can explain exactly what has to be

proved in order to convict a person of drunken driving in New Jersey. The codification of an act as criminal does not depend on its intrinsic danger to the society but on what societal leaders perceive as dangerous. For example, Cuba has the following provision in its criminal code:

Article 108. (1) There will be a sanction of deprivation of freedom of from one to eight years imposed on anyone who: (a) incites against the social order, international solidarity or the socialist State by means of oral or written propaganda, or in any other form; (b) makes, distributes or possesses propaganda of the character mentioned in the preceding clause. (2) Anyone who spreads false news or malicious predictions liable to cause alarm or discontent in the population, or public disorder, is subject to a sanction of from three to four years imprisonment. (3) If the mass media are used for the execution of the actions described in the previous paragraphs, the sanction will be a deprivation of freedom from seven to fifteen years (Ripoll 1985, p. 20).

In other words, mere possession of a mimeograph machine in Cuba is a very serious crime because Fidel Castro considers the dissemination of critical ideas a threat to his ‘‘socialist State,’’ and in Cuba Castro’s opinions are literally law. Hence, possession of a mimeograph machine is a punishable offense. Members of Jehovah’s Witnesses who used mimeograph machines to reproduce religious tracts have been given long prison sentences. On the other hand, reproducing religious tracts may not arouse indignation in the Cuban population. It is criminal but not necessarily deviant.

In California or New Jersey, as in Cuba, a crime is behavior punishable by the state. But the difference is that in the fifty states, as in all democratic societies, the legislators and judges who enact and interpret criminal laws do not simply codify their own moral sentiments; they criminalize behavior in response to influences brought to bear on them by members of their constituencies. True, women, children, members of ethnic and racial minorities, and the poorly educated may not have as much political input as affluent, middle-aged, white male professionals. But less influence does not mean they don’t count at all. In a dictatorship, on the other hand, the political process is closed;

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few people count when it comes to deciding what is a crime.

WHEN DEVIANCE IS CRIMINALIZED:

POLITICIZATION

As was mentioned earlier, what is deviant is intrinsically ambiguous in a complex society whose norms are changing and whose ethnic mix has varied values. Criminalization solves the problem of predictability of response by transferring the obligation to respond to deviance from the individual members of society to agents of the state (the police). But criminalization means that some members of society are better able than others to persuade the state to enforce their moral sentiments. Criminalization implies the politicization of the social control of deviance. In every society, a political process occurs in the course of which deviant acts get criminalized. Generally, the political leadership of a society criminalizes an act when it becomes persuaded that without criminalization the deviant ‘‘contagion’’ will spread, thereby undermining social order (Toby 1996). The leaders may be wrong. Fidel Castro might be able to retain control of Cuban society even if Cubans were allowed access to mimeograph machines and wordprocessors. Nevertheless, leaders decide on crimes based on their perception of what is a threat to the collectivity. According to legal scholars (Packer

1968), the tendency in politically organized societies is to overcriminalize, that is, to involve the state excessively in the response to deviance. Political authorities, even in democracies, find it difficult to resist the temptation to perceive threats in what may only be harmless diversity and to attempt to stamp it out by state punishment.

Sociology’s labeling perspective on deviance (Becker 1963; Lemert 1983) goes further; it suggests that overcriminalization may increase deviance by changing the self-concept of the stigmatized individual. Pinning the official label of ‘‘criminal’’ on someone stigmatizes him and thereby amplifies his criminal tendencies. Furthermore, an advantage of ignoring the deviance is that it may be ephemeral and will disappear on its own; thus in 1974 American society virtually ignored ‘‘streaking’’ instead of imprisoning streakers in large numbers for indecent exposure (Toby 1980),

and by 1975 streaking had become a historical curiosity. But whether deviance is self-limiting is an empirical question. The labeling perspective ignores the logical possibility that stigmatizing the deviant may be necessary to deter future deviance by bringing home to the offender (as well as potential offenders) the danger of antagonizing the community. In point of fact, the empirical evidence supports the deterrence possibility more than it does the amplification assumption (Gove

1980; Gibbs 1975). At its most extreme, the labeling perspective denies the desirability of any kind of criminalization:

‘‘The task [of radical reform] is to create a society in which the facts of human diversity, whether personal, organic, or social, are not subject to the power to criminalize’’ (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973, p. 282).

Thus, the labeling perspective flirts with philosophical anarchism. More reasonably, the issue is: which forms of deviance can be regarded as harmless diversity and which threaten societal cohesiveness sufficiently that they require criminalization in order to be contained within tolerable limits?

Experience has taught us that the body odor of other people, though objectionable to most Americans, is tolerable. But what about consuming alcohol or cocaine to the point of chronic intoxication?

What about sexual practices that shock most people such as sado-masochism or intercourse with a sheep? One way to finesse these thorny questions is to define such acts as the product of mental illness and therefore beyond the control of the individual. Instead of regarding drug abuse or alcoholism or bestiality as deviant choices in the face of temptations, society may choose to regard them as ‘‘addictions,’’ that is to say, involuntary

(Toby 1998b). Since the ill person is by definition unenviable, he is not a role model, and therefore the deviant contagion does not spread (Toby 1964). But suppose consensus does not exist that these acts are compulsive; suppose that many people feel that the perpetrators are perversely choosing to engage in these behaviors. Average citizens may become demoralized when they see their norms

flouted or they may be tempted to engage in the deviant behavior themselves. This is why criminalization (and state-sponsored punishment) may be necessary. Punishment serves to deprive

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the deviant of the benefits of his nonconformity, and therefore he becomes unenviable in the eyes of conformists.

Yes, society may stigmatize and perhaps imprison perpetrators, amid hope that imitators will be rare. But criminalization arouses opposition.

Libertarians lean toward permitting almost any nonviolent behavior except the exploitation of children. Mental-health advocates perceive stealing to feed a passion for gambling as a symptom of illness; they may perceive even predatory violence as symptomatic of a sick personality for which the individual cannot be considered responsible. Pragmatists point out that when large numbers of people want to do something, such as gamble or use drugs, it is not practical to attempt to stop them by criminalizing the behavior. They argue that deviants cannot all be punished, certainly not by imprisonment; they corrupt police forces through bribes and deflect police efforts into tasks that cannot be accomplished instead of more feasible deviance-control activities; and the criminal organizations that emerge to cater to these forbidden pleasures promote crimes that would not have occurred in the absence of criminalization.

On the other side of the ledger is the tendency for the absence of criminalization to encourage individuals to engage in a behavior they would not have engaged in when faced with possible criminal sanctions. The Prohibition experiment of the 1920s, despite its perception as a failure, did succeed in reducing the incidence of alcoholism, as reflected in reduced incidence of alcoholic psychosis and of cirrhosis of the liver. But the social cost of criminalizing alcohol consumption was not only the proliferation of criminal enterprises to supply the demand of social drinkers; criminalization also prevented many people who wished to be social drinkers from having the freedom to do so. True, some of these would go on to become alcoholics, but most would not. Thus, the criminalization issue always involves a tradeoff between partially legitimating possibly harmful behavior, such as smoking cigarettes, or curtailing freedom by criminalizing the behavior. This judgment has to be made on a case by case basis. Most people who drink socially do not become alcoholics and most people who smoke do not get lung cancer; hence it is difficult to justify criminalizing drinking and

smoking despite the likelihood that more people become alcoholics and get lung cancer than would if smoking and drinking were criminalized. On the other hand, the tradeoff goes the other way with ‘‘hard’’ drugs; the main argument against decriminalizing the sale of heroin is that the health costs to the general population would be too great; decriminalization would inevitably increase experimentation with the drug and ultimately the number of addicts (Kaplan 1983).

OTHER CONSEQUENCES OF

CRIMINALIZATION

The absence of criminal law—and consequently of state-imposed sanctions for violations—is no threat to small primitive communities: Informal social controls can be counted on to prevent most deviance and to punish what deviance cannot be prevented. In heterogeneous modern societies, however, the lack of some criminalization would make moral unity difficult to achieve. When Emile Durkheim spoke of the collective conscience of a society, he was writing metaphorically; he knew that he was abstracting from the differing consciences of thousands of individuals. Nevertheless, the criminal law serves to resolve these differences and achieve a contrived—and indeed precarious— moral unity. In democratic societies, the unity is achieved by political compromise. In authoritarian or totalitarian societies the power wielders unify the society by imposing their own values on the population at large. In both cases law is a unifying force; large societies could not function without a legal system because universalistic rules, including the rules of the criminal law, meld in this way ethnic, regional, and class versions of what is deviant (Parsons 1977, pp. 138–139).

The unifying effect of the criminal law has unintended consequences. One major consequence is the development of a large bureaucracy devoted to enforcing criminal laws: police, judges, prosecutors, jailers, probation officers, parole officers, prison guards, and assorted professionals like psychologists and social workers who attempt to rehabilitate convicted offenders. Ideally, these employees of the state should perform their roles dispassionately, not favoring some accused persons or discriminating against others. In practice, however, members of the criminal justice bureaucracy bring to their jobs the parochial sentiments

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of their social groups as well as a personal interest in financial gain or professional advancement.

This helps to explain why police are often more enthusiastic about enforcing some criminal laws than they are about enforcing others.

Another consequence of criminalization is that the criminal law, being universal in its reach, cannot make allowances for subgroup variation in sentiments about what is right and what is wrong.

Thus, some people are imprisoned for behavior that neither they nor members of their social group regard as reprehensible, as in Northern Ireland where members of the Irish Republican Army convicted of assassinating British soldiers considered themselves political prisoners. They went on hunger strikes—in some cases to the point of death—rather than wear the prison uniform of ordinary criminals.

CONCLUSION

The more heterogeneous the culture and the more swiftly its norms are changing, the less consensus about right and wrong exists within the society. In the United States, moral values differ to some extent in various regions, occupations, religions, social classes, and ethnic groups. This sociocultural value pluralism means that it is difficult to identify behavior that everyone considers deviant. It is much easier to identify crime, which is codified in politically organized societies. The criminalization of deviance makes it clear when collective reprisals will be taken against those who violate rules.

Deviance exists in smaller social systems, too: in families, universities, and corporations. In addition to being subjected to the informal disapproval of other members of these collectivities, the deviant in the family, the university, or the work organization can be subjected to formally organized sanctioning procedures like a disciplinary hearing at a university. However, the worst sanction that these nonsocietal social systems can visit upon deviants is expulsion. A university cannot imprison a student who cheats on a final exam. Even in the larger society, however, not all deviance is criminalized, sometimes for cultural reasons as in the American refusal to criminalize the expression of political dissent, but also for pragmatic reasons as in the American failure to criminalize body odor, lying to one’s friends, or smoking in church.

REFERENCES

Asch, Solomon E. 1955 ‘‘Opinions and Social Pressure.’’

Scientific American 193, November.

Becker, Howard S. 1963 Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

Gibbs, Jack P. 1975 Crime, Punishment, and Deterrence. New York: Elsevier.

Gove, Walter R. 1980 The Labelling of Deviance: Evaluation of a Perspective, 2nd ed. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.

Kaplan, John 1983 The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lemert, Edwin M. 1983 ‘‘Deviance.’’ In Sanford H. Kadish, ed., Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. New York: Free Press.

Maguire, Kathleen, and Ann L. Pastore (eds.) Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1997. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U. S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Packer, Herbert L. 1968 The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Parsons, Talcott 1977 The Evolution of Societies. Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Ripoll, Carlos 1985 Harnessing the Intellectual: Censoring Writers and Artists in Today’s Cuba. Washington, D.C.: Cuban American National Foundation.

Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young 1973 The New Criminology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Toby, Jackson 1964 ‘‘Is Punishment Necessary?’’ Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 55, September.

———1980 ‘‘Where are the Streakers Now?’’ In Hubert M. Blalock, ed., Sociological Theory and Research, pp. 304–313. New York: Free Press.

———1996 ‘‘Reducing Crime: New York’s Example,’’

Washington Post, July 23.

———1998a ‘‘Getting Serious about School Discipline.’’

The Public Interest, 133, Fall.

———1998b ‘‘Medicalizing Temptation.’’ The Public Interest, 130, Fall.

JACKSON TOBY

CRIMINOLOGY

The roots of modern criminology can be found in the writings of social philosophers, who addressed

Hobbes’s question: ‘‘How is society possible?’’ Locke and Rousseau believed that humans are endowed with free will and are self-interested. If

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this is so, the very existence of society is problematic. If we are all free to maximize our own selfinterest we cannot live together. Those who want more and are powerful can simply take from the less powerful. The question then, as now, focuses on how is it possible for us to live together.

Criminologists are concerned with discovering answers to this basic question.

Locke and Rousseau, philosophers who are not considered criminologists, argued that society is possible because we all enter into a ‘‘social contract’’ in which we choose to give up some of our freedom to act in our own self-interest for the privilege of living in society. What happens though to those who do not make, or choose to break, this covenant? Societies enforce the contract by punishing those who violate it. Early societies punished violations of the social contract by removing the privilege of living in society through banishment or death. In the event of minor violations, sanctions such as ostracism or limited participation in the community for a time were administered. The history of sanctions clearly demonstrates the extreme and frequently arbitrary and capricious nature of sanctions (Foucault 1979).

The Classical School of criminology (Beccaria 1764; Bentham 1765) began as an attempt to bring order and reasonableness to the enforcement of the social contract. Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments (1768) made an appeal for a system of ‘‘justice’’ that would define the appropriate amount of punishment for a violation as just that much that was needed to counter the pleasure and benefit from the wrong. In contemporary terms, this would shift the balance in a cost/benefit calculation, and would perhaps deter some crime. Bentham’s writings (1765) provided the philosophical foundation for the penitentiary movement that introduced a new and divisible form of sanction: incarceration. With the capacity to finally decide which punishment fits which crime, classical school criminologists believed that deterrence could be maximized and the cost to societal legitimacy of harsh, capricious, and excessive punishment could be avoided. In their tracts calling for reforms in how society sanctions rule-violators, we see the earliest attempts to explain two focal questions of criminology: Why do people commit crimes? How do societies try to control crime? The ‘‘classical school’’ of criminology’s answer to the first question is that individuals act rationally, and when the

benefits to violating the laws outweigh the cost then they are likely to choose to violate those laws.

Their answer to the second question is deterrence.

The use of sanctions was meant to discourage criminals from committing future crimes and at the same time send the message to noncriminals that crime does not pay. Beccaria and Bentham believed that a ‘‘just desserts’’ model of criminal justice would fix specific punishments for specific crimes.

In the mid-nineteenth century the early ‘‘scientific study’’ of human behavior turned to the question of why some people violate the law. The positivists, those who believed that the scientific means was the preeminent method of answering this and other questions, also believed that human behavior was not a product of choice nor individual free will. Instead they argued that human behavior was ‘‘determined behavior,’’ that is, the product of forces simply not in the control of the individual. The earliest positivistic criminologists believed that much crime could be traced to biological sources. Gall (Leek 1970), referred to by some as the ‘‘father of the bumps and grunts school of criminology,’’ studied convicts and concluded that observable physical features, such as cranial deformities and protuberances, could be used to identify ‘‘born criminals.’’ Lombroso (1876) and his students, Ferri and Garofalo, also embraced the notion that some were born with criminal constitutions, but they also advanced the idea that social forces were an additional source of criminal causation. These early positivists were critics of the Classical School. They did not go so far as to argue that punishment should not be used to respond to crime, but they did advance the notion that punishment was insufficient to prevent crime. Simply raising the cost of crime will not prevent violations if individuals are not freely choosing their behavior. The early positivists believed that effective crime control would have to confront the root causes of violations, be they biological or social in nature.

Around 1900, Ferri gave a series of lectures critiquing social control policies derived from classical and neo-classical theory. What is most remarkable about those lectures is that, considered from the vantage point of scholars at the end of the twentieth century, the arguments then were little different from public debates today about what are the most effective means of controlling crime.

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Then, as now, the main alternatives were ‘‘get tough’’ deterrence strategies that assumed that potential criminals could be frightened into compliance with the law, versus strategies that would reduce the number of offenses by addressing the root causes of crime. We know far more about crime and criminals today than criminologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century knew, yet we continue the same debate, little changed from the one in which Ferri participated in.

The debates today pit those espousing rational choice theories of crime (control and deterrence theories being the most popular versions) against what still might best be called positivistic theories. To be sure, contemporary positivistic criminology is considerably different from the theories of Gall and Lombroso. Modern criminologists do not explain law-violating behavior using the shapes of heads and body forms. Yet there are still those who argue that biological traits can explain criminal behavior (Wilson and Herrenstein 1985; Mednick 1977), and still others who focus on psychological characteristics. But most modern criminologists are sociologists who focus on how social structures and culture explain criminal behavior. What all of these modern positivists have in common with their predecessors Gall, Lombroso, and company, is that they share a belief that human behavior, including crime, is not simply a consequence of individual choices. Behavior, they argue, is ‘‘determined’’ at least in part by biological, psychological, or social forces. The goal of modern positivist criminologists is to unravel the combination of forces that make some people more likely than others to commit crimes.

Today the research of sociological criminologists focuses on three questions: What is the nature of crime? How do we explain crime? What are the effects of societies’ attempts to control crime? Approaches to answering these questions vary greatly, as do the answers offered by criminologists. For example the first question, what is the nature of crime, can be answered by detailing the characteristics of people who commit crimes. Alternatively, one can challenge the very definition of what crime, and consequently criminals, are. In an attempt to answer this question, some criminologists focus on how much crime there is. But of course, even this is a difficult question to answer because there are many ways to count crime, with each type

offering different and sometimes seemingly conflicting answers.

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF CRIME?

Simply defining crime can be problematic. We can easily define crime legally: Crime is a violation of the criminal law. The simplicity of this definition is its virtue, but also its weakness. On the positive side, a legalistic definition clearly demarcates what will be counted as crime—those actions defined by the state as a violation. However, it is not as clear as to whom will be defined as criminals. Do we count as criminals those who violate the law and are not arrested? What about those who are arrested and not convicted? Some criminologists would argue that even an act that may appear to be criminal cannot be called ‘‘crime’’ until a response or evaluation has been made of that act. For example, how can we know if an offensive act is a crime if there has been no evaluation of the intent of the perpetrator? In Anglo-American law, without criminal intent, an offensive action is not considered a criminal action. Other critics of a legalistic definition of crime argue that it is an overly limited conception that too narrowly truncates criminological inquiry; a legalistic definition of crime accepts the state’s definition of ‘‘legal’’ and equates that with ‘‘legitimate.’’ Critical criminologists (Quinney 1974;

Chambliss 1975; Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973) argue that we should ask questions about the creation of law such as whose interests are being served by classifying a particular behavior as ‘‘illegal.’’ Questions such as these tend to be ignored if we simply accept a legalistic definition. Indeed, the particular definition used influences the kind of questions criminologists ask. When a legalistic definition is used, criminologists tend to ask questions such as: ‘‘How much crime occurs?’’ ‘‘Who commits rime?’’ ‘‘Why are some people criminal?’’

If a broader conception of crime is the focus (i.e., one that addresses the rule-makers as well as the rule-breakers), then one might ask these same questions, but add others: ‘‘Where does the law come from?’’ ‘‘Why are some offensive acts considered crimes while others are not?’’ ‘‘Whose interests do the laws serve?’’ This is not a debate that will ever be resolved. Students of criminology should understand however, that the definition of crime they employ will have important implications for the kinds of questions they will ask, the

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kinds of data they will use to study crime, and the kinds of explanations and theories they will apply to understand crime and criminal behavior.

HOW IS CRIME STUDIED?

Having made choices about definitions, criminologists are then faced with an array of data and methodologies that can be brought to bear on criminological questions. The data and methodological approach used should be dictated by the definition of crime and the research question being asked. Some very interesting research problems require analysis of quantitative data while others require that the researcher use qualitative approaches to study crime or a criminal justice process. For example, if one is trying to describe the socio-demographic characteristics of criminals then one of several means of counting crimes and people who engage in them might be used. On the other hand, in his book On The Take (1978), because Chambliss was interested in the source and nature of organized crime, it was clearly more appropriate for him to spend time in the field observing and interviewing, rather than simply counting.

Methods of Criminological Research. For the most part, criminologists use the same types of research methods as do other sociologists. But a unique quality of crime is its ‘‘hiddenness.’’ The character of crime means that those who do it hide it. As a result, the criminologist must be a bit of a detective even while engaged in social science research. To do this criminologists use observational studies such as those conducted by Chambliss (1978) in studying organized crime, or Fisse and Braithwaite (1987) in studies of white-collar crime, or Sanchez-Jankowski (1992) in his studies of gang crime.

Those who use quantitative methods frequently use data generated by the criminal justice system, victimization surveys, or self-reports. All of these data collection procedures have strengths and weaknesses, and they are best used by criminologists who have an appreciation of both. The most widely used criminal justice data are produced by police departments and published by the Federal Bureau Investigation each year in their Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The UCR contains counts of the crimes reported to police, arrest data (including some characteristics of those arrested), police

manpower statistics, and other data potentially of interest to researchers. Victimization surveys may be conducted by individuals or teams of researchers. The National Crime Victimization Survey

(NCVS) is conducted annually by the federal government and, as a consequence, is widely used. The virtue of victimization surveys is that they include criminal acts that are never reported to the police. As their name indicates, self-report studies simply ask a sample of people about their involvement in criminal activity. If done correctly, it is quite surprising what people will report to researchers.

Characteristics of criminals. It is always risky to speak of the characteristics of criminals because of the problems with crime data mentioned above. Also, one must take care to specify the types of crimes included in any description of those characteristics correlated with criminal involvement. For example, those engaging in white-collar crime have very different characteristics than perpetrators of what might be called ‘‘common crimes’’ or ‘‘street crime.’’ In order to engage in white-collar crime, one has to be old enough to have a white-collar job, and possess those characteristics (such as education) requisite for those jobs. Without these same requirements, the perpetrators of street crime can reasonably be expected to look different from white-collar criminals.

Criminologists frequently speak of ‘‘the big four correlates of crime’’: age, sex, race, and social class. The first two are rather uncomplicated. Crime is, for the most part, a young person’s activity

(Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983). Probable involvement escalates in the teen years reaching a peak at between ages 15 and 17 and then drops. Most people stop participating in criminal activity by their mid to late twenties, even if they have not been arrested, punished, or rehabilitated. The correlation between sex and crime is also quite straightforward. Males are more likely to engage in crime than females. Criminologists have not found a society where this pattern does not hold.

The correlation between race, or ethnicity, and crime is complex. Most Americans when asked state that they believe that minorities commit more crimes than whites. This oversimplification is not only inaccurate, but it obscures important patterns. First, some nonwhites in the United States are from groups with lower crime rates than whites

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(e.g. Chinese and Japanese Americans), but even this pattern is more complex. Chinese Americans whose families have been in the United States for generations seem to have lower crime rates than white Americans, but more recent Chinese immigrants have higher rates than white Americans. The category ‘‘Asian Americans’’ is too diverse to make generalizations about the larger group’s perpetration of crime. The same is true of Latinos and Latinas. African Americans have disproportionately high crime rates, but Africans and people of Caribbean island descent have lower crime rates than black Americans. To simply describe the correlations between broad racial categories and crime misses an important sociological point: The criminality associated with each group appears to be more a product of their experience in America than simply their membership in that racial/ethnic category. This point is buttressed by patterns of race, ethnicity, and crime in other countries.

Visible minorities and immigrants are more likely to have higher crime rates and to be more frequently arrested in countries where they are subordinated (see Tonry 1997 for a collection of studies of race, ethnicity, crime, and criminal justice in several countries).

For decades, in fact probably for centuries, researchers assumed that people from the lower classes committed more crime than those of higher status. In fact, most sociological theories used to explain common crime are based on this assumption. In the mid-1970s several criminologists argued that there really is not a substantial correlation between social class and crime (Tittle, Villemez, and Smith 1978). Many criminologists today believe that if we are simply considering the likelihood of breaking the law then there probably is not much difference by social class. But if the criminal domain being studied is serious violent offenses, then there probably is a negative association between social class and crime. Still, the correlation between social class and violent crime is not as strong as most people would assume (Hindelang,

Hirschi, and Weis 1981).

Where crime occurs. A very sociological way of describing crime is to examine the crime patterns that exist for different types of areas. The social ‘‘ecological’’ literature that does this usually focuses on states, metropolitan areas, cities, and

neighborhoods. When this occurs, we find that those areas with relatively large numbers of residents who are poor, African American, immigrants, young, and living in crowded conditions have higher crime rates. One must be very careful when interpreting these patterns. Because an area with relatively large numbers of people with these characteristics has a high crime rate, we cannot conclude that they are necessarily the people committing the crimes. For example, high poverty areas have high crime rates. The high crime rates found in poor neighborhoods however, could be produced by their victimization by the nonpoor.

The interesting thing about these correlations, as well as patterns of individual crime correlations, are not the observed patterns themselves but rather the questions that arise from these observations.

Victims of crime. One of the more interesting things that we have learned from victimization studies is how similar the victims of crimes are to the offenders. Victims of crime tend to be young, male, and minority group members. In fact, the prototypical victim of violent crime in America is a young, African-American male. The poor and those with limited education are disproportionately the victims of crime as well. These patterns are obviously inconsistent with popular images of crime and victimization, but they are quite predictable when we examine what we know about crime.

CRIMINOLOGY THEORIES

Three theoretical traditions in sociology dominated the study of crime from the early and midtwentieth century. Contemporary versions of these theories continue to be used today. The ‘‘Chicago School’’ tradition, or social disorganization theory, was the earliest of the three. The other two are differential association strain theories or anomie theory

(including subculture theories).

Sociologists working in the Chicago School tradition have focused on how rapid or dramatic social change causes increases in crime. Just as Durkheim, Marx, Toennies, and other European sociologists thought that the rapid changes produced by industrialization and urbanization produced crime and disorder, so too did the Chicago

School theorists. The location of the University of Chicago provided an excellent opportunity for

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Park, Burgess, and McKenzie to study the social ecology of the city. Shaw and McKay found (1931) that areas of the city characterized by high levels of social disorganization had higher rates of crime and delinquency.

In the 1920s and 1930s Chicago, like many

American cities, experienced considerable immigration. Rapid population growth is a disorganizing influence, but growth resulting from in-migra- tion of very different people is particularly disruptive. Chicago’s in-migrants were both native-born whites and blacks from rural areas and small towns, and foreign immigrants. The heavy industry of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh drew those seeking opportunities and new lives. Farmers and villagers from America’s hinterland, like their European cousins of whom Durkheim wrote, moved in large numbers into cities. At the start of the twentieth century Americans were predominately a rural population, but by the century’s mid-point most lived in urban areas. The social lives of these migrants, as well as those already living in the cities they moved to, were disrupted by the differences between urban and rural life. According to social disorganization theory, until the social ecology of the ‘‘new place’’ can adapt, this rapid change is a criminogenic influence. But most rural migrants, and even many of the foreign immigrants to the city, looked like and eventually spoke the same language as the natives of the cities into which they moved. These similarities allowed for more rapid social integration for these migrants than was the case for African Americans and most foreign immigrants.

In these same decades America experienced what has been called ‘‘the great migration’’: the massive movement of African Americans out of the rural South and into northern (and some southern) cities. The scale of this migration is one of the most dramatic in human history. These migrants, unlike their white counterparts, were not integrated into the cities they now called home. In fact, most American cities at the end of the twentieth century were characterized by high levels of racial residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993). Failure to integrate these migrants, coupled with other forces of social disorganization such as crowding, poverty, and illness, caused crime rates to climb in the cities, particularly in the

segregated wards and neighborhoods where the migrants were forced to live.

Foreign immigrants during this period did not look as dramatically different from the rest of the population as blacks did, but the migrants from eastern and southern Europe who came to American cities did not speak English, and were frequently Catholic, while the native born were mostly Protestant. The combination of rapid population growth with the diversity of those moving into the cities created what the Chicago School sociologists called social disorganization. More specifically, the disorganized areas and neighborhoods where the unintegrated migrants lived were unable to exercise the social control that characterized organized, integrated communities. Here crime could

flourish. Crime was not a consequence of who happened to live in a particular neighborhood, but rather of the character of the social ecology in which they lived. That is, the crime rate was a function of the area itself and not of the people who lived there. When members of an immigrant or ethnic group moved out of that area (usually in succeeding generations), that group’s crime rate would go down. But, the old neighborhood, with its cheaper housing and disorganized conditions, would attract another, more recent group migrating to the city. Those groups settled there because that is where they could afford to live. When they became more integrated in American urban life, like those who came before them, they would move to better neighborhoods and as a result have lower crime rates. Chicago School sociologists called the process of one ethnic group moving out to be replaced by a newly arriving group (with the first group passing on to newcomers both the neighborhood and its high crime) ‘‘ethnic succession.’’ This pattern seems to have worked for most ethnic groups except African Americans. For African Americans, residential segregation and racial discrimination prohibited the move to better, more organized neighborhoods.

Contemporary social disorganization theorists (Sampson and Groves 1989) are less concerned with the effects of ethnic migration. The disorganizing effects of urban poverty (Sampson and Wilson 1994), racial residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993), and the social isolation of the urban poor (Wilson 1987), and the consequent effect on

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crime is the focus of current research. This line of research has developed intriguing answers to the question of why some racial or ethnic groups have higher crime rates.

Both the anomie and differential association traditions grew out of critiques of the Chicago

School version of social disorganization theory. The latter was developed by Sutherland (1924), himself a member of the University of Chicago faculty. Sutherland believed that a theory of crime should explain not only how bad behavior is produced in bad living conditions, but also how bad behavior arises from good living circumstances. This theory should also explain why most residents of disorganized neighborhoods do not become criminals or delinquents. Sutherland explained this by arguing that crime is more likely to occur when a person has a greater number of deviant associations, relative to non-deviant associations.

Differential association occurs when a person has internalized an excess of definitions favorable to violations of the law. Sutherland believed that we all experience a variety of forms of exposure to definitions favorable to violation of the law—’’It is

OK to steal this because the insurance company will pay for it’’—and definitions unfavorable to violation of the law—’’It is not OK to steal from stores, because all of us are hurt when prices go up to pay the stores’ higher insurance premiums.’’ Sutherland was very careful to point out what differential association was not. It is not a simple count of favorable and unfavorable definitions. Differential association theory is not a theory that focuses on who a person associates with. Indeed Sutherland argued that it is possible to receive definitions favorable to violation from the lawabiding. Of course those spending time with delinquent peers will be exposed to more criminal definitions, but the theory should not be reduced to simply a peer group theory of crime and delinquency (Sutherland and Cressey 1974). As Cressey has pointed out, if crime were simply a consequence of prolonged proximity with criminals, then prison guards would be the most criminal group in the population. Differential association theory continues to be of influence in contemporary sociology, but it does not occupy as central a role as it did in the 1940s and 1950s. Matsueda

(1988), the theory’s major contemporary proponent, has emphasized the interactive quality (similar to labeling theory) of differential association theory. Matsueda has suggested new ways to operationalize the key concepts of differential association, and the theory is ‘‘evolving’’ in his writings to bring in aspects of both interactionist and rational choice theory.

Anomie theory’s roots are in the work of Durkheim, who used the concept anomie to describe the disruption of regulating norms resulting from rapid social change. Strain theories, including anomie theory, focus on social structural strains, inequalities, and dislocations, which cause crime and delinquency. Durkheim stressed that societal norms that restrained the aspirations of individuals were important for preventing deviance. However, unrealistically high aspirations would be frustrated by a harsh social reality, leading to adaptations such as suicide, crime, and addiction. Merton adapted Durkheim’s notion of anomie by combining this idea with the observation that not only do societal norms affect the likelihood of achieving aspirations, but they also determine to a large degree what we aspire to (1938). In other words, society helps determine the goals that we internalize by defining which of them are legitimate but it also defines the legitimate means of achieving these goals. American society, for example, defines material comfort as legitimate goals, and taking a well-paid job as a legitimate means of achieving them. Yet legitimate means such as these and economic success are not universally available. When a society is characterized by a disjunction between its legitimate goals and the legitimate means available to achieve them, crime is more likely.

This conceptualization led a number of criminologists to focus on these ‘‘opportunity structure’’ strains (Cloward and Ohlin 1960), as well as cultural strains (Cohen 1955), to explain why crime would be higher in lower social class neighborhoods. Contemporary strain theorists have moved in two directions. Some have proceeded in ways that are quite consistent with Merton’s original conceptualization, while others have set forward a more social psychological conception of strain (Agnew 1992). What ties these contemporary versions of anomie theory to the earlier tradition is the notion that there are individual adaptations to

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