Are Offenders and Nonoffenders Really That Different?

The idea that offenders and nonoffenders are different kinds of people has logical appeal because it contains a positive psychological message for the “nonoffenders.” In general, however, criminologists understand that the criminal and the noncriminal are not all that different. Criminologists know this because they have examined the variability in crime across individuals employing self-report studies and found that criminal behavior is widespread among those who self-report their criminal behavior. Comments like those of Aromaa (1994, 22) that “almost everybody (i.e., over 90 percent) has at least some experience with some problem behavior (mainly alcohol and truancy) as well as of ‘other youth-related offenses’ (mainly fare dodging)” are very common in studies of self-reported crime (for review of self-report studies, see Thornberry and Krohn 2000). As a result of the widespread self-reporting of criminal behavior, it would seem logical to assume that individual-level differences have much less to do with crime than criminologists assume. Further, in comparing the results of self-report studies to criminal records, criminologists know that not everyone who commits a crime gets processed by the criminal justice system (see, for example, Chambliss 1973). Depending on the kinds of crime self-report research addresses, we can find studies that indicate that almost every person in a sample has committed some form of crime as defined by the criminal law (see Junger-Tas, Terlouw, and Klein 1994). These findings also make it clear that criminal justice system data underrepresents the volume of crime that occurs in society (Gove, Hughes, and Geerken 1985). If most people have, at some point in their lives, committed a crime, it is more likely that the factors that produce crime are due not to individual-level differences but to either individual-level similarities or structural similarities in the factors that produce crime.

Like self-report studies, victimization surveys indicate that crime is much more widespread in society than official criminal justice system data indicates. To be sure, it is possible that there are more victims than offenders and that part of the difference between the count of crime produced by victimization surveys and criminal- justice data are produced by the fact that offenders victimize multiple persons and commit multiple crimes and partly by the failure of the criminal-justice apparatus to identify all offenders. However, even if we take those differences into account, victimization surveys, like self-report studies, indicate that crime, as defined as a violation of criminal law, is more widespread than official crime statistics suggest.

Importantly, crimes defined as “violating the criminal law” are only a small portion of the crimes that occur in a society. Sometimes criminologists employ various definitions of crime that are independent of the criminal law to examine white-collar, corporate, environmental, and state crimes. Once these types of crimes are considered, the distribution of crime in society becomes extraordinarily widespread and includes a large segment of the population that possess wealth and power that are typically omitted by the counts of crime generated when using the criminal-law definition of crime or official crime data. For example, when criminologists measure crime they rarely make reference to corporate, white-collar, and environmental crime, and it is even rarer that empirical studies include measures of corporate, white-collar, and environmental crime using appropriate data sources that measure those crimes alongside measures of street crime.

Taken together, the study of crimes of the powerful, self-report, and victimization surveys indicate that crime is extremely widespread in society. Viewed in this way, the widespread nature of crime suggests that perhaps individual-level theories are inadequate for explaining criminal behavior. Microlevel explanations might still be adequate if there were a large number of individual causes that produce crime that could be identified and measured. The large number of explanations of crime found in the criminological literature also suggests that this alternative explanation of the utility of individual-level efforts to explain crime might be plausible.

While this discussion allows us to begin to question the logical adequacy of individual-level explanations of crime, microlevel research also has a larger logical problem. That problem stems from the compatibility between the criminal-law definition of crime and the assumptions about crime made by microlevel theories. It is to this logical problem that we now turn our attention.