Objectivity and the Definition of Crime Reexamined

At this point, we have now explored a number of logical problems that emerge for criminologists when they employ the criminal-law definition of crime to represent their abstract conceptions about the causes of crime. Those logical problems, we have asserted, produce a range of additional problems related to the validity of the concept and measure of crime derived from the criminal law. This returns us to the need to examine the definition of crime and its objectivity as a measure of what criminologists mean when they talk about crime.

In order to address some of the problems examined thus far, criminologists need an objective measure of crime, one that they produce so that it is consistent with their efforts to explain crime and can be measured and can be measured independently from the variations the criminal law exhibits across time and place. As we have noted, the criminal-l aw definition only tells us which of the deviant acts that occur in a specific location at a specific time attract significant enough attention from lawmakers to cause them to create a criminal-law statute. The criminal law has no predefined rules for identifying when this should occur, and thus lawmakers are left to their own devices to decide when a deviant behavior is “serious enough” to call on the criminal law. Lawmakers interpret some deviant acts as deserving the label “crime,” and criminologists, though they do not know the rationale for that decision, accept it as making up the concept of crime they employ and the behaviors they attempt to explain. Thus the only difference, perhaps, between a deviant act and an act defined in some other form of law and crime is the political process followed to transform an act of deviance into a crime. How this occurs is an important issue, one that has been studied (Allen 1958; Chambliss and Zatz 1993). With respect to criminology, the unknown properties of the political act that creates crime are allowed to define and constantly redefine the core concept of our discipline. We have explored some of the problems this creates for criminologists and particularly with respect to testing explanations of crime. To further that discussion, it is necessary to engage in an examination of questions concerning the difference between deviance and crime, how that difference is produced by labels, and whether these different kinds of labels imply something about the nature of these behaviors.