Concerns with the Explanation of Crime

Abstract

With Crime Definition 1.0 explained and defended, we now return our attention to an issue raised earlier in this work: the assessment of explanations of crime. We outline what we see as major problems in criminology that are a result of when crimi-nologists simply accept the criminal- law definition of crime. First, as we have argued, criminologists tend to assess hypotheses in ways where they are not likely to be rejected, and instead of rejecting weak results, they argue for retaining an explanation due to measurement issues. Thus nearly all explanations of crime persist over time. Second, most empirical tests do not assess criminal behavior but rather the behavior of lawmakers. Third, the convenience of crime data promotes the reification of the concept of crime— that is, crime statistics are studied as if they were objective measures of crime.