Whither the Sociological Study of Crime?

Abstract

The study of and deviance has always been one of the most theoretically fertile areas in sociology. Fundamental questions on why individuals violate norms, the origins of social order, official reactions to deviance, and macro-level sources of violence-to name but a few-have attracted some of the best minds in the discipline. The result is a rich lineage of sociologically oriented criminological theory (e.g., control, subcultural, strain, differential association, labeling). It is perhaps axiomatic, however, that fundamental questions yield equally fundamental challenges. Criminology is no exception, and indeed the facts on continue to trouble extant theories. This is especially the case for theories that have hitched their wagon to the dominant strains of accepted sociological wisdom. Stratification is sociology to many, and in criminology it comes as no surprise that deprivation theories privileging materialism and economic motives are perennially popular. Everybody believes that causes crime it seems; in fact, I have heard many a senior sociologist express frustration as to why criminologists would waste time with theories outside the poverty paradigm. The reason we do, as Jack Katz brilliantly demonstrated in Seductions of Crime (1988), is that the facts demand it. Whether increases in during periods of economic growth, epidemics of violence in wealthy countries such as the United States, the weak correlation of social class with delinquency, or in the suites, materialist theory is clearly insufficient. But it is not just deprivation-based theory that has failed. Most criminological theory is static in logic and handicapped by a focus on (allegedly) fixed explanatory categories, thereby failing to address the processes and dynamics leading to criminal events. The most important thing about that we do not know, in other words, concerns its causal social processes.