Crime

THE LATE 19th and 20th centuries have been characterized by the tendency to study crime as well as its causes and effects. Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man (1876), which introduced the atavistic idea of the born criminal; Enrico Ferri's Criminal Sociology (1884); and Rafaele Garofalo's Criminology (1885) are some of the most popular early works on crime. In different time periods, a series of works have focused on crime, although not always with the same analytic tools and purposes. For instance, psychology and psychiatry focus mainly on the individual characteristics of deviants or criminals and examine the eventually problematic relationship between the criminal and the society, while sociology and criminology focus more on the social aspects of crime and on crime politics.

Edward Sutherland carried out the first important study of the relationship between crime and economic status in 1939. Sutherland described forms of nonviolent business crime that were committed by businessmen and members of the middle class in the course of their economic activity, or white-collar crime. The study [Page 217]managed to show how special forms of economic criminality of the middle class (fraud, embezzlement, bribery, forgery, tax evasion) remained—contrary to blue-collar crime—unpunished. Because business-class members had the means to hide their activity and avoid arrest, they were able to minimize the chances of being punished. This study also provoked the mainstream view that criminals were usually poor or economically marginal individuals.

The increasing interest in crime and its etiology has led since 1960 to the emergence of a series of subfields, like the sociology of deviance, sociology of social control, sociology of social exclusion, and criminology. These subfields addressed a number of important issues and problems related to the analysis of crime and crime politics as well as to the understanding of the political economy of crime and its interrelation with the economic structure. A heterogeneous ensemble of critical, radical, Marxist, deconstructionist, and feminist criminologies studied the mechanisms of marginalization, stigmatization, demonization, and social exclusion of deviants.

Contrary to the biological and psychological causations of crime, researchers were interested in the social processes with which individuals were being labeled, such as deviants, delinquents, and criminals. Crime was understood as a social and legal construction using the labeling approach. Critical criminologists in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s underlined that the term criminal was the act that violated the penal law and considered penal law as an instrument of state power that defines which behavior is criminal or not, and decides whether and how this act will be punished.

For those criminological schools, crime, both as a human behavior and as a legal category, does not exist before penal law. At the same time, the concept of social control became very influential and increasingly important for the understanding of crime, social reaction to crime, and the official and organized responses to it, for instance through the mechanisms of penal law.

Social control was initially introduced by Edward Ross, who described it as “the moulding of the individ-ual's feelings to suit the needs of the group.” Also, for the sociological approach of social consensus by Emile Durkheim and for the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons, social control was a social phenomenon that they considered a priori positive for the maintenance of social order.

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