Critical Criminology - Socially Contingent Definitions of Crime

Socially Contingent Definitions of Crime

It can also rest upon the fundamental assertion that definitions of what constitute crimes are socially and historically contingent, that is, what constitutes a crime varies in different social situations and different periods of history.

For example, homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom up to 1967 when it was legalized for men over 21. If the act itself remained the same, how could its ‘criminal qualities’ change such that it became legal? What this question points out to us is that acts do not, in themselves, possess ‘criminal qualities’, that is, there is nothing inherent that makes any act a crime other than that it has been designated a crime in the law that has jurisdiction in that time and place.

Whilst there are many variations on the critical theme in criminology, the term critical criminology has become a cynosure for perspectives that take to be fundamental the understanding that certain acts are crimes because certain people have the power to make them so. The reliance on what has been seen as the oppositional paradigm, administrational criminology, which tends to focus on the criminological categories that governments wish to highlight (mugging and other street crime, violence, burglary, and, as many critical criminologists would contend, predominantly the crimes of the poor) can be questioned.

The gap between what these two paradigms suggest is of legitimate criminological interest, is shown admirably by Stephen Box in his book Power, crime, and Mystification where he asserts that one is seven times more likely (or was in 1983) to be killed as a result of negligence by one’s employer, than one was to be murdered in the conventional sense (when all demographic weighting had been taken into account).

Yet, to this day, no one has ever been prosecuted for corporate manslaughter in the UK. The effect of this, critical criminologists tend to claim, is that conventional criminologies fail to ‘lay bare the structural inequalities which underpin the processes through which laws are created and enforced’ (Taylor Walton and Young 1973) and that ‘deviancy and criminality’ are ‘shaped by society’s larger structure of power and institutions’ (ibid). Further failing to note that power represents the capacity ‘to enforce one’s moral claims’ permitting the powerful to ‘conventionalize their moral defaults’ legitimizing the processes of ‘normalized repression’ (Gouldner 1971). Thus, fundamentally, critical criminologists are critical of state definitions of crime, choosing instead to focus upon notions of social harm or human rights.