Introduction
You often confront crime as a daily headline, a personal fear, or a political crisis, yet standard explanations rarely reveal why laws change or how power shapes justice.
Crime is not a fixed biological entity but a socially constructed phenomenon shaped by historical contexts, power dynamics, institutional practices, and global inequalities.
Eamonn Carrabine examines how crime is defined, measured, and punished across different societies. You will explore the roots of criminal behavior, the evolution of policing, and the realities of modern punishment.
The book answers several vital questions:
- How do historical shifts and power structures define unlawful acts?
- What separates classical theories of free will from positivist explanations?
- How do sociological frameworks link personal actions to structural forces?
- How do contemporary justice systems manage punishment and social control?
1. Histories and Research Methods
Crime patterns and research methods have evolved through historical shifts in state control, class struggles, and methodological debates.
Historical studies show that past societies were significantly more violent than contemporary ones. Physical violence declined over the centuries due to rising self-control and state regulation.
Julius Ruff and Norbert Elias argue that everyday violence peaked in sixteenth-century Europe. Violence subsequently declined as elites and institutions abandoned acceptance of violence in favor of self-discipline, professional courts, and police systems. Eisner also demonstrates a long-term decline in homicide rates from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century.
Julius Ruff's study Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 details the widespread presence of everyday interpersonal, community, and military violence in past societies before elite standards shifted.
British prosecution rates followed a distinct long-term trajectory. Sharp rises occurred during industrialization and the late twentieth century, separated by a long nineteenth-century plateau.
Recorded crime rose sharply from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century due to urbanization, migration, and the creation of formal police forces and national statistics. A stable plateau followed from the 1850s to the 1910s driven by rising living standards and regulatory state control, before surging again post-World War II.
Home Office records show that recorded crimes in England and Wales rose steeply from about half a million in 1950 to 1.6 million in 1970 and reached 5.5 million in 1991.
In the 1960s and 1970s, radical social historians reframed nineteenth-century crime through class struggle. They interpreted prosecutions of the poor as a political response to the criminalization of traditional customs.
Marxist-influenced historians examined how industrialization and changing property definitions turned traditional subsistence activities into criminal acts. Activities like poaching and gleaning were reclassified as crimes to enforce new capitalist property relations, leading historians to view criminals as class rebels and courts as instruments of oppression.
E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Douglas Hay wrote influential studies detailing how agricultural and industrial workers were prosecuted for social crimes after old customary rights were stripped away.
Criminological research is exceptionally diverse, drawing on methodologies from psychology, genetics, urban ethnography, and cultural history. Sociologically, research combines qualitative and quantitative approaches.
While traditional sociological approaches split into qualitative methods like interviews and quantitative tools like statistical surveys, recent developments favor mixed methods for evaluation research and evidence-based policy making.
Official recorded crime statistics represent only a small fraction of unlawful activity. They are filtered through reporting behaviors, police discretion, and institutional recording practices.
Known as the crime funnel or the tip of the iceberg, official statistics depend on a victim recognizing an incident, reporting it, the police acknowledging it, and the police formally recording it as a crime.
In England and Wales, official statistics excluded data from forces like the British Transport Police, tax and benefit fraud handled by the Inland Revenue, and unrecorded racist incidents prior to 1979.
National crime victimization surveys provide an alternative data source by directly asking samples of people about their experiences. These surveys help to uncover the dark figure of unreported crime.
Unlike official police records, victimization surveys reveal significantly higher multiples for certain offenses such as vandalism and thefts from the person. They largely omit collective victims of corporate or state crime.
The British Crime Survey grew from interviewing close to 23,000 respondents in 2000 to moving to an annual cycle with 40,000 respondents per year from 2001.
2. Classical and Positivist Foundations
Classical criminology emphasizes rational choice and proportional punishment, while positivism seeks biological and environmental determinants of crime.
Cesare Beccaria founded the classical school of criminology by arguing that offenders are rational actors governed by free will. You face predictable, proportional punishments when you commit a crime.
Cesare Beccaria published 'Dei delitti e delle pene' in July 1764, advocating for the abolition of torture and capital punishment. Punishments must be public, prompt, necessary, and strictly proportional to the harm caused by the crime.
Jeremy Bentham applied utilitarian moral calculus to penology and introduced the architectural concept of total surveillance. Pain should be inflicted in direct proportion to public damage.
Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a circular prison with a central observation tower, though the specific building was never actually constructed.
Cesare Lombroso founded the positivist school by claiming that criminals represent atavistic biological throwbacks identifiable through specific physical stigmata.
Lombroso experienced an intellectual revelation during the post-mortem examination of an Italian brigand named Vilella, linking his skull anomalies to primitive evolutionary instincts. Born criminals possess ape-like physical anomalies that make their behavior determined rather than chosen.
Enrico Ferri expanded positivist criminology by arguing that every crime stems from a complex combination of factors. Criminal behavior is the joint result of:
- the offender's physical constitution;
- geographic or seasonal environment;
- socio-economic or religious surroundings.
Classical and positivist criminology offer fundamentally contradictory frameworks. The classical school views offenders as rational, morally responsible free-willed agents deserving determinate punishments through statutory law. The positivist school treats offenders as determined by environmental or biological pathologies requiring indeterminate scientific treatment.
3. Sociological Theories of Crime
Deviance is a normal and necessary component of all societies because it helps define moral boundaries, promote social unity, and encourage social change. Emile Durkheim argued from a functionalist perspective that crime performs four essential functions. It highlights moral choices by providing an opposing concept of bad. It clarifies social rules and generates collective outrage that unites society. It also pushes moral boundaries to facilitate progress.
Rock-and-roll music was denounced in the 1950s as a threat to youth morals before becoming a multi-billion-dollar mainstream industry. Between 1858 and 1917, Emile Durkheim developed his foundational functionalist framework.
Cities function as natural ecological habitats where distinct zones generate varying rates of crime and delinquency. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess conceptualized Chicago as an urban ecosystem divided into concentric zones. They demonstrated that the zone in transition experienced the highest rates of poverty, cultural conflict, and crime.
Frederic Thrasher studied 1,313 gangs comprising roughly 25,000 members in Chicago. He tracked their evolution from play groups into structured gangs.
Criminal behavior is learned through ordinary social interactions and communication within intimate personal groups.
Edwin Sutherland argued in 1939 that a person becomes delinquent due to an excess of definitions favorable to violating the law over definitions unfavorable to it. You acquire both technical skills and specific motives through everyday learning mechanisms. Edwin Sutherland wrote studies including Twenty Thousand Homeless Men and researched the life story of a thief named Chic Conwell in The Professional Thief.
You can observe the core principles of differential association in everyday interactions:
- Criminal behaviour is learned.
- Criminal behaviour is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication.
- The principal part of the learning of criminal behaviour occurs within intimate personal groups.
- When criminal behaviour is learned, the learning includes techniques of committing crime and specific direction of motives and drives.
- A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law.
Strain and Social Bonds
Crime and deviance emerge as structural adaptations when individuals experience a mismatch between culturally approved goals and socially structured means. Between 1910 and 2003, Robert K. Merton lived and developed his theories, publishing Social Structure and Anomie in 1938. He identified anomie as the strain caused by the inability to achieve culturally defined success through legitimate means.
You can categorize individual adaptations into five distinct types:
- conformity
- innovation
- ritualism
- retreatism
- rebellion
A person who accepts the cultural goal of wealth but rejects conventional means and turns to drug dealing is categorized as practicing innovation.
Delinquency occurs when an individual's bond to society is weakened or broken. In 1969, Travis Hirschi published Causes of Delinquency and shifted the criminological question from why people commit crimes to why they do not. He argued that conformity is maintained through four elements of the social bond:
- attachment
- commitment
- involvement
- belief
Individuals with extensive involvement in legitimate activities such as work, school, and homework have little time or energy left for deviant acts.
Subcultures and Labelling
Delinquents neutralize their moral bind to the law and justify deviant acts using specific cognitive rationalizations. David Matza and Gresham Sykes identified five techniques of neutralization that allow individuals to commit crimes without damaging their self-image. A delinquent youth justifies stabbing someone by claiming he was only defending his turf.
You rely on specific cognitive justifications to neutralize moral rules:
- Denial of personal responsibility by blaming background factors like a broken home.
- Denial of harm to anyone by viewing car theft as borrowing.
- Denial that the injured person is a victim by claiming the victim was unfair or deserved it.
- Condemnation of the condemners by asserting that society is more corrupt.
- Prioritizing gang loyalties and turf defense over impersonal societal norms.
Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young formulated The New Criminology. They called for a fully social theory of crime that integrates wider structural origins, immediate acts, social reactions, and outcomes. They criticized existing theories for ignoring wider material conflicts, relying on reductionist determinism, and failing to provide adequate epistemologies.
4. Punishment and Justice Systems
Modern justice systems operate through state-owned conflicts, administrative attrition, and disciplinary power.
Punishment requires explicit moral justification because state-inflicted pain is otherwise prima facie morally wrongful. Nicola Lacey noted in 1988 that the power to punish derives from legal authority to do things that would ordinarily be considered morally wrong. Leo Tolstoy explored this ethical dilemma in his 1899 novel Resurrection.
Philosophical Justifications
Reductivist principles justify punishment on utilitarian grounds by looking to future consequences and crime prevention. Jeremy Bentham, who lived from 1748 to 1832, argued that the pain caused to an offender must be outweighed by the future avoidance of unpleasantness. Utilitarian thinking originates in Plato's dialogues from the fifth century BC.
You can categorize these utilitarian strategies into specific practices:
- detering potential criminals;
- reforming actual criminals;
- keeping actual or potential offenders out of circulation.
Retributivism and the just deserts model dictate that wrongdoers should be punished proportionally based on desert rather than future outcomes. Immanuel Kant, whose lifetime spanned from 1724 to 1804, influenced this view through his categorical imperative. The Code of Hammurabi enshrined the phrase 'an eye for an eye' in 1750 BC under the concept of lex talionis in Babylon.
When you evaluate retributivist justice, the system follows these operational rules:
- sentence the offender according to what the act deserves based on proportionality;
- condemn the offence through denunciation to restore the moral equilibrium.
Criminal Justice Process
The police serve as the primary gatekeepers of the criminal justice system, and most crimes are filtered out before ever reaching a trial. According to British Crime Survey figures, only 32 per cent of all offences are reported and recorded by the police. Other police recording rates include 92 per cent for thefts of vehicles, 63 per cent for thefts from the person, and 53 per cent for robbery.
Procedural justice demands that state interference respects the rule of law, yet systemic failures frequently produce miscarriages of justice. Maurice Punch noted that these errors involve the systemic collusion of multiple actors across the criminal justice apparatus. The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, and Maguire Seven were wrongfully convicted of IRA terrorist acts and served up to 16 years in prison before their convictions were quashed in the early 1970s.
The Crown Prosecution Service evaluates cases based on specific legal tests, but prosecution decisions are shaped by a social process of case construction rather than absolute objectivity. Created by the Prosecution of Offenders Act 1985, the Crown Prosecution Service uses the Code for Crown Prosecutors to guide its decisions.
The evaluation process relies on these formal duties:
- Assess evidential sufficiency to determine if there is a realistic prospect of conviction.
- Consider public interest factors that mitigate against prosecution or favour prosecution.
Long firm fraud is a deliberate commercial scam where a fraudster establishes a credible wholesale business, builds trust with suppliers through prompt initial payments, and then orders massive quantities of goods on credit before disappearing. The Richardson gang in South London combined legitimate scrap metal business dealings with illicit expertise in long firm fraud.
This illicit enterprise follows a strict sequence:
- Establish credibility with manufacturers and suppliers.
- To obtain as many goods as possible over a credit period extended as long as possible.
- To make little or no payment to suppliers and creditors.
- To dispose of goods obtained with the minimum of delay.
- Abscond with the proceeds.
- Avoid identification and prosecution.
10 Key Ideas
- Crime is not a fixed biological entity but a socially constructed phenomenon shaped by historical contexts, power dynamics, institutional practices, and global inequalities.
- Physical violence declined over centuries due to rising self-control and state regulation, though recorded crime rose sharply during industrialization and the late twentieth century.
- Official recorded crime statistics represent only a small fraction of unlawful activity because they are filtered through reporting behaviors, police discretion, and institutional recording practices.
- Cesare Beccaria founded the classical school of criminology by arguing that offenders are rational actors governed by free will who face predictable, proportional punishments.
- Cesare Lombroso founded the positivist school by claiming that criminals represent atavistic biological throwbacks identifiable through specific physical stigmata.
- Deviance is a normal and necessary component of all societies because it helps define moral boundaries, promote social unity, and encourage social change.
- Criminal behavior is learned through ordinary social interactions and communication within intimate personal groups.
- Crime and deviance emerge as structural adaptations when individuals experience a mismatch between culturally approved goals and socially structured means.
- Delinquents neutralize their moral bind to the law and justify deviant acts using specific cognitive rationalizations.
- Punishment requires explicit moral justification because state-inflicted pain is otherwise prima facie morally wrongful.