Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes

Normal Crimes in the Public Defender Office

In this study of meaning and practice in a public defender's office, Sudnow demonstrates how crimes and criminals become “normal” and how the designation of normal affects the way in which the various constituents of the court community act toward a given case. In this analysis, he engages in dialogue with two groups of criminologists and sociologists who critique the ways in which penal codes are analyzed in research. The first group, which he terms the revisionist perspective, seeks to create categories of crimes that are enriched by information about motive and background on the criminal. The second group, with which he initially aligns himself, seeks to understand penal codes as the way in which the workers of the criminal justice environment orient themselves toward their work. Critiquing this second perspective as “more promissory than productive,” Sudnow wants to expand on John Kitsuse and Aaron Cicourel's position regarding how to use official statistics and understand how legal officials use criminal codes in their daily work.

To understand the everyday meanings of the penal code, Sudnow analyzes the practices of the public defender's office. In his county of analysis, over 80 percent of cases are pled out, whereby defenders settled the case by pleading guilty instead of going to trial. The defenders usually plead guilty to charges that are lesser than the charges with which they were originally charged, lesser here implying a shorter or more lenient sentence. Often, however, these lesser charges are neither “necessarily included lesser offense” nor explicitly “situationally included lesser offense.” Necessarily included charges are those that are implicit in the greater charge; assault with a deadly weapon, for example, necessarily includes the lesser charges of weapons possession and simple assault. Situationally included charges are those that are committed by the way in which the greater charge occurred; Sudnow uses the example of a child molestation situationally being associated with an adult loitering in a school yard. It is not necessary to the crime of child molestation that an adult loiter in a school yard, but instead it is a common way in which child molesters find their victims.

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