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A family rule that you have to do your chores before going outside to play.
A school rule that students have to wear a certain uniform.
A company policy that you need to ask your supervisor before scheduling a vacation.
A state law that you can’t exceed posted speed limits on the highway.
When formal norms are made by units of government and backed with the threat of force, they’re called laws. Breaking a law is deviant — and it’s also a crime.
Because crime is just a specific type of social deviance, everything that’s true of deviance is also true of crime. There may be benefits to crime (money, power, thrills), but there are also obviously costs — costs that may include fines, imprisonment, or even death. What’s important to understand is that crime is just one particular subset of deviance. What counts as “deviant” may vary from one social group to another, and within that general category of deviance, what counts as a “crime” is something that has to be sorted out by government agencies. Those decisions are what distinguishes deviance from crime, and deviants from criminals.
Criminals in Society
So who are these criminals? Why do people commit crimes? In his book Sociological Insight, Randall Collins looks at different reasons why a person might think criminals fall on the wrong side of the law; in this section, I discuss the two main theories Collins offers — they’re just bad people, and they’re driven to it — before explaining why sociologists think some crime is simply normal.
Some criminals are just bad people (but . . . )
When you see the word “criminal,” the images that may come to mind are pictures of brutal men and women: cold-blooded murderers, street thugs, and furtive child molesters. When these crimes come to light, the perpetrators don’t look good. In fact, they often look downright evil. Their grainy mug shots are put on TV next to the smiling faces of their innocent victims, and the news anchors somberly tell viewers about their horrible crimes. Are people like this just plain evil? Isn’t that why people are criminals — there’s just something wrong with them?
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There’s no doubt that in many cases, there’s something deeply wrong with people who commit serious crimes. They may have severe psychological disorders, or just a flat lack of regard for the feelings of others. It’s hard to explain their actions any other way.
But that can’t possibly work as a satisfactory explanation for all crimes. Of course people choose their actions freely and must be held accountable for their decisions, but it’s just too simple to say that all criminals are bad people — period, end of story.
For one thing, there is a wide range of crimes, from those that involve grievous harm to others (murder, rape, assault) to those that involve milder forms of harm (theft, libel, disturbing the peace) to “victimless crimes” that involve harm, if any, only to oneself — illegal drug use, or failing to fasten one’s own seatbelt. A murderer may be a “bad person,” but is someone who plays his stereo too loud also a “bad person”? Is someone who smokes marijuana in
a place where it’s illegal a “bad person”? There are many different kinds of crimes with many different consequences and motivations, and it’s clearly too simplistic to say that there is a single psychological or moral factor that binds all people defined as criminals.
Further, crimes are committed in different circumstances. Some people murder in self-defense whereas some murder in cold blood. Some people steal to feed their families whereas others steal to feed their taste for expensive clothes. In neighborhoods where government-appointed law enforcement officers are corrupt or unfair, can a person be blamed for throwing their lot in with a street gang? Social and political revolutionaries such as George Washington and Harriet Tubman were technically criminals in the eyes of the appointed authorities — were they fundamentally bad people?
Though it is certainly the case that many criminals can be fairly judged to be sick or immoral, sociologists don’t believe that black-and-white moral judgment is the best way to understand why and when people commit crimes. The world just isn’t that simple, and the law just isn’t that infallible.
Some criminals are “driven to it” (but . . . )
If it’s not adequate to understand crime simply in moral terms (criminals are bad, law-abiding citizens are good), then maybe it makes more sense to think about it in rational terms. That is, maybe the best way to think about crime is as something people are forced into. Setting aside the people who choose to commit crimes because they have a psychological disorder or have completely renounced any sense of obligation to others, maybe the rest of the criminals are reluctant ones. They don’t want to be criminals, but for some reason or other they’re forced to be.
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Certainly, this describes a large proportion of criminals. It would have been very convenient for George Washington if Britain had recognized America’s sovereignty and the American Revolution hadn’t had to be fought, and beyond question Harriet Tubman would have rejoiced if the government Washington helped to found had in turn outlawed slavery rather than forcing her to conspire with fellow abolitionists in the creation of an Underground Railroad. Kids who join gangs to get the protection law enforcement can’t offer them, or people who steal to feed their families when they can’t find work to earn a proper living are clearly reluctant criminals.
This is a rational choice view of crime (see Chapter 6): It assumes that people weigh the costs and benefits of every action they take, and if they make the choice to commit a crime it must be because they’ve decided that the benefits of crime outweigh the risks or consequences. Rational choice explanations are popular among economists, and in fact there have been many economic studies of crime demonstrating that “criminal” acts and transactions — from drug trafficking to prostitution — are an important part of the global economy.
Even people working at legal jobs are not infrequently on the wrong side of the law; millions of immigrants are working without legal permission in countries around the world, an arrangement that technically makes them criminals but in which they participate because the pay and employment prospects in their native countries are often very limited, and because jobs are available with employers who benefit from the relatively cheap labor. A
person who generally respects the rule of law may still choose to break specific laws because their circumstances otherwise would be dire.
This explanation, though helpful, is also incomplete. In most cases, committing a crime somehow makes sense to the criminal — that is, it’s not completely irrational or illogical — but it’s hard to understand why people feel “driven to” break the law in very different circumstances. Some people will die of starvation before they’ll steal, whereas other people are fabulously wealthy and still embezzle money from their companies. Other people commit crimes where they don’t stand to make any personal gain: vandalism or assault. To say that crime is something criminals are “forced into” is something that is accurate in many cases — and feels accurate to the criminals in many more cases — but leaves a lot of crimes unexplained.
Some crime is simply normal
Some criminals are just bad people . . . that’s hard to argue with. Many criminals feel driven to it . . . yes, absolutely. But neither of those explanations is really a satisfactory explanation for all the various crimes committed in every society, everywhere, since the beginning of history.
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Emile Durkheim, as I explain in Chapter 3, believed in the survival of the fittest societies; as among plants and animals, he said, if a given feature is observed in many societies across a range of situations, there must be a reason for it. It must serve some kind of function for society, or at least be a necessary byproduct of some other function.
Crime occurs, without exception, in every society. Hence, Durkheim argued, it makes sense to see crime as normal. It’s just going to be there, whether you like it or not. Further, crime may actually be useful to a society. In this section, I first explain why crime is virtually inevitable, and possibly even useful.
Crime is inevitable
To call something “normal” isn’t necessarily to call it good, or nice. It’s normal for people to accidentally stub their toes every now and then; it’s normal for hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis to occur; and it’s normal for some people to step outside the bounds drawn by their society. Even in a community of saints living in a monastery, said Durkheim, there will be laws — and even in that community, every once in a while someone will break a law. That might mean a very minor offense — say, being late for prayers or letting a few weeds grow in the garden — but nonetheless, it will count as a “crime” in that particular society.
The whole point of laws, after all, is to force people to not do something that they may otherwise be tempted to do. It would obviously be a serious problem if every single person in a country decided to take one particular day off work, but there are no laws forcing people not to all take the same day off because it’s so extremely unlikely that it would occur. It’s much more likely that someone would cheat on their taxes, so there are laws against that.
At the same time, laws are written to cover situations where there is actually some chance where the laws will be enforced. It would be nice if everyone in a country said “please” and “thank you” at the dinner table, but cops have more important things to worry about than enforcing table manners . . . so there are no laws against simple rudeness.
Because laws are written to apply in situations where people are likely to break them, it’s more or less guaranteed that any given law will be broken sometimes — which means that it’s almost guaranteed that a society will have “criminals.” It’s not necessarily guaranteed that a society will have murderers or embezzlers (think of Durkheim’s hypothetical community of saints), but it is hard to imagine a society with no crime whatsoever.
Crime is useful
Saying that crime is normal may seem to imply that there’s no point in having law enforcement. If crime can’t be eliminated, if crime is inevitable, why bother hiring police officers?