Intro To Criminology Contents

EXCERPTED FROM
Crime, Justice, and Society:

An Introduction to Criminology
FOURTH EDITION
Ronald J. Berger,
Marvin D. Free, Jr.,
Melissa Deller, and
Patrick K. O’Brien
Copyright © 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62637-225-2 pb
1800 30th Street, Suite 314

Boulder, CO 80301 USA
telephone 303.444.6684
fax 303.444.0824
This excerpt was downloaded from the

Lynne Rienner Publishers website
www.rienner.com
Contents
List of Tables and Figures xi

Preface xiii
Part 1 Introducing Sociological Criminology
1 The Social Problem of Crime 3

The Media, 5
Crime Waves and Moral Panics, 7 • Drug Scares, 11
The Politics of Crime Control, 13
The Reagan-Bush Years, 14 • The Clinton Years, 16 •
The George W. Bush Years, 19 • The Obama Years, 21
The Sociology of Crime, 22
Challenges to the Legalistic Definition of Crime, 26 •
Inequality and Crime, 29
2 Counting Crime 35
The Uniform Crime Reports, 35
Underreporting by Citizens, 38 • The Organizational
Production of Crime Data, 39 • Clearance and Arrest Data, 41 •
Explaining the Declining Crime Rate, 43
Other Counts of Crime, 46
The National Crime Victimization Survey, 46 • Self-Report
Surveys, 49 • Drug Surveys, 51
Counting White-Collar Crime, 53
3 Individualistic Explanations of Crime 57

Biological Explanations, 58
Early Biological Criminology, 58 • Contemporary
Biosocial Criminology, 60
Psychological Explanations, 67
Freudian Psychology, 67 • Personality and Crime, 70 •
vii
viii Contents
Mental Illness and the Insanity Defense, 71 •

Behaviorism, 74 • Rehabilitative Treatment, 74
Rational Choice and Deterrence, 79
Classical and Neoclassical Criminology, 79 •
Contemporary Deterrence Research, 81
4 Microsocial Explanations of Crime 85

Symbolic Interaction and Social Learning, 86
Edwin Sutherland and the Theory of Differential Association, 86 •
Social Learning Theory, 88 • Techniques of Neutralization, 90 •
Labeling Theory, 93
Social Control and the Life Course, 95
Travis Hirschi and Social Control Theory, 95 • Complicating
the Relationship Between Religion and Delinquency, 98 • Social
Bonds Across the Life Course, 99
5 Macrosocial Explanations of Crime 103

Social Disorganization and the Social Ecology of Crime, 103
The Contribution of Shaw and McKay, 104 • The Decline
and Revival of Social Disorganization Theory, 106 • Routine
Activities and Crime, 108
Crime and the American Dream: Anomie-Strain Theory, 111
The Contribution of Robert Merton, 111 • Adaptations
to Strain, 113 • A Decade of Liberal Reform, 118
Conflict Theory, 120
Group Conflict, 120 • Feminist Criminology, 125 •
Peacemaking Criminology, 126
Part 2 Patterns of Criminality and Victimization
6 Street Crime 133

The Economic Context, 133
Capitalist Development and Urbanization, 133 • Complicating
the Relationship Between Unemployment and Crime, 135 •
Homelessness and Crime, 138
Racial Inequality in Urban Context, 139
The Urban Underclass, 140 • Beyond the Subculture
of Violence, 144
The Illegal Economy, 148
Teenage Thievery, 148 • Street Robbery, 149 •
The Drug Trade, 152 • Street Prostitution, 154
Urban Gangs, 158
Gangs in Historical and Contemporary Context, 159 •
Girls in Gangs, 165
Contents ix
7 Illegal Drugs 171

Drug Prohibition and Racial/Ethnic Discrimination, 172
The Early Decades, 172 • The Contemporary War
on Drugs, 173
Upper- and Middle-Level Drug Use and Dealing, 174
Upper-Level Drug Dealers, 174 • College Drug Dealers, 177 •
Implications of College Students’ Use of Medical Marijuana, 179
Alternatives to the War on Drugs, 184
Drug Policy in Comparative Perspective, 186 • The Special Case
of Marijuana, 189
8 Sexual Violence 193

Rape and Sexual Assault, 194
The Prevalence of Rape and Sexual Assault, 194 • Sexual Scripts
and Rape Myths, 198 • Rape-Law Reform, 202 • The Question of
Pornography, 204 • Personal Resistance Strategies, 207
Sexual Abuse of Children, 210
The Abuse of Girls, 210 • The Abuse of Boys, 213
Battering of Women, 215
The Experience of Battering, 216 • Mandatory Arrest Policies, 223 •
Batterer Intervention Programs, 225
9 Corporate Crime 229

The Internal and External Environment, 229
Corporate Culture and the (Mis)management of Power, 230 •
Criminogenic Market Structures, 233
Corporate Financial Crime, 235
Antitrust Violations, 235 • High Finance and Banking, 237 •
Corporate Fraud, 244
Corporate Violence, 249
Crimes Against Workers, 249 • Crimes Against Consumers, 254 •
Crimes Against the Environment, 260
10 Political and Government Crime 269

Terrorism, 269
Al-Qaida, 270 • Domestic Terrorism, 272
Hate Crimes and Hate Groups, 277
Data on Hate Crimes, 278 • Organized Hate Groups, 280
State Crimes of Foreign Policy, 281
Overthrow of Foreign Governments, 281 • The Vietnam War, 285 •
The Iran-Contra Scandal, 288 • The Iraq War Controversy, 291 •
The Question of Torture, 295
Corruption of Government Officials, 299
Financial Corruption, 300 • Electoral Corruption, 305
x Contents
Part 3 The Criminal Justice System
11 The Police and Courts 317

The Modern Police Force, 317
Policing in Historical Perspective, 317 • Organizational Styles
of Policing, 319
Police Culture and the Work of Policing, 326
Racial Profiling, 328 • Diversity in Policing, 330 • Police
Corruption, 332 • Police Brutality and Use of Deadly Force, 335
Prosecuting and Defending the Accused, 339
Initial Screening, 339 • Plea Bargaining, 343 • The Trial, 344 •
Wrongful Convictions, 348
Sentencing the Convicted, 350
Models of Sentencing, 350 • Discrimination in Sentencing, 353
12 Punishment and Corrections 359

The Death Penalty, 360
Legal Lethality, 360 • Women and the Death Penalty, 364
The Modern Penitentiary, 365
Prisons in Historical Perspective, 365 • The Incarceration
Boom, 368 • Privatization of Prisons, 370
Living and Working in Prison, 372
The Society of Captives, 372 • Convict Labor and Prison
Industries, 379 • The Work of Correctional Officers, 380 •
Minority and Women Correctional Officers, 382
Community Corrections, 384
Probation: Conventional and Alternative Approaches, 384 •
The Problem of Prisoner Reentry, 388 • The Restorative
Justice Movement, 390
References 395
Index 449
About the Book 471
1
The Social Problem of Crime
President Franklin Roosevelt famously said that “the only thing

we have to fear is fear itself.” When it comes to the problem of crime, how-
ever, this observation is both true and untrue. It is true that Americans have
considerable fear of crime, but this fear does not always comport with real-
ity. For example, studies indicate that a large portion of the public believes
that crime rates in their communities or the country at large have been ris-
ing, even when they have actually been on the decline (Kappeler & Potter
2005; Roberts & Stalans 2000). Moreover, this fear of crime is often
about the wrong things. Take the case of economic inequality, which has
increased markedly in the United States over the past few decades (Dom-
hoff 2013; Johnston 2014). Although societies marked by high levels of
inequality also experience more social ills, including education and health
disparities, as well as crime, the paradox is that we continue to do little to
remedy (and in fact we often exacerbate) the very economic conditions that
give rise to the social problems we abhor (Glassner 1999).
Criminologist John Hagan (2010) also notes a related change in US
crime policy that occurred during the presidential administration of Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s, when a more punitive approach to street crime was
undertaken, fueled in large part by a “war on drugs,” at the same time that
a more lenient approach to corporate misconduct was initiated through a
policy of business deregulation. The former had a disproportionate impact
on racial minorities and the poor, an impact that may be viewed as discrim-
inatory (in result if not intent), insofar as blacks do not use more illegal
drugs than whites (Alexander 2010; Tonry 1995). And at the same time that
people in the lower economic stratum of society were being incarcerated in
increasingly large numbers, fueling a historically unprecedented “incarcer-
ation boom” (see Chapter 12), the deregulation of the economy that contin-
ued under subsequent presidential administrations resulted in a series of
corporate scandals—from the collapse of the savings and loan industry in
the late 1980s to the corrupt investment and banking practices that gave rise
3
4 Introducing Sociological Criminology
to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the late 2000s
(Madrick 2011).
In his aptly titled book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison,
Jeffrey Reiman (2007) illuminates this paradox by noting that more people
are physically harmed, even killed, by exposure to workplace hazards and
environmental pollution—some of which is legal, and some of which is
illegal—than are harmed by all the assaults and homicides associated with
the conventional street crimes that are the priority of the criminal justice
system; and more money is stolen through “white-collar” crimes like corpo-
rate fraud and illegal price-fixing than from crimes of theft like burglary
and robbery. Stephen Rosoff and colleagues observe, for instance, that the
cost of the taxpayer bailout of even one corrupt, federally insured savings
and loan in the late 1980s “surpassed the total losses of all the bank rob-
beries” in the entire history of the United States (2007:xi, emphasis added).
In this book we aim to introduce students to the exciting field of crim-
inology, and in particular sociological criminology, in the hopes of encour-
aging readers to step outside of conventional understandings of crime.
Criminology* is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry that involves theoreti-
cal explanation and empirical research regarding the process of lawmaking
and lawbreaking, and the societal reaction to lawbreaking (Sutherland
1947). The discipline of sociology has occupied a special place among the
disciplinary components of criminology, which include biology, psychol-
ogy, and economics, among others (Guarino-Ghezzi & Treviño 2005), and
we agree with Ronald Akers in thinking that sociological criminology still
constitutes the field’s “intellectual center of gravity” (1992:4). For much of
the twentieth century, criminology in the United States was most often
taught in departments of sociology, and its most widely used textbooks
were written by sociologists. Hence the study of criminology was defined
as an attempt to understand crime as a social rather than an individual phe-
nomenon—that is, as a consequence of social relationships and the organi-
zation of society.
In the late 1960s, however, sociology began to lose its hold on the
field. The federal government provided funds that enabled law enforcement
agencies to upgrade their educational requirements and encourage their per-
sonnel to obtain postsecondary education degrees. This resulted in an
expansion of college and university criminal justice programs outside of
sociology departments, which became readily apparent by the 1980s. By
1990 there were more than a thousand such programs in the United States
offering undergraduate degrees, and nearly a hundred offering graduate
degrees (Akers 1992; Sorensen et al. 1994).
*Key terms are indicated in boldface the first time they appear in the book.
The Social Problem of Crime 5
The terms criminology and criminal justice suggest different orienta-

tions. Criminology tends to focus on the phenomena of crime and crimi-
nals, while criminal justice tends to focus on the agencies that respond to
criminal law violation: the police, courts, and correctional systems. Crimi-
nology tends to be more theoretical and research-oriented, while criminal
justice is more practical or applied. But in many respects the division
between criminology and criminal justice is artificial, and the two are so
closely interwoven that a convergence has been under way for some time.
As Jonathan Sorensen and colleagues noted, “criminal justice programs
often include criminology in the curriculum . . . [and] criminologists often
teach in criminal justice programs . . . and conduct research on the criminal
justice system. . . . As criminal justice develops further as a discipline, the
methodology employed in criminal justice research will become compara-
ble to that used in criminology” (1994:152–153).
In this first chapter of Crime, Justice, and Society, we begin our exam-
ination by considering the role of the media and politics in shaping public
attitudes and opinions about crime and crime policy. We then provide fur-
ther introduction to a sociological perspective that places issues of inequal-
ity at the center of criminological inquiry.
The Media
Our view of reality is drawn not just from personal experience, but also
from representations of events that we do not directly experience ourselves.
Research indicates that the mass media, politicians, and law enforcement
officials are major sources of our opinions about crime. They play a defin-
itive role in generating, shaping, and reinforcing viewpoints and mobilizing
support for particular policies. They provide us with a taken-for-granted
conceptual framework that helps us identify particular issues as crime-
related, interpret the causes of criminal behavior, and apply ready-made
solutions to the problem at hand (Beckett 1994; Kappeler & Potter 2005;
Surette 2011).
Let us first consider the mass media, which may be defined as an insti-
tutionalized system of communication that conveys information and sym-
bolic messages to audiences through print and technology. The formative
influence of the mass media is pervasive, and there is arguably no single
subject matter that provides more content for media communication than
crime. As an example, a study called “Dying to Entertain,” sponsored by
the Parents Television Council, found that violent content (including sexual
violence) in prime time was prevalent in about half of all prime-time televi-
sion programs (Schulenburg 2007). Moreover, most people report relying
on the news media to learn about crime and criminals, and readers of news-
papers are more likely to read crime items than any other subject matter
(Pollak & Kubrin 2007; Surette 2011).
In the late 1980s, a new genre of television crime programming

emerged: the tabloid-style infotainment shows such as Cops, America’s
Most Wanted, Unsolved Mysteries, and many similar programs. These
shows represent “true crime” stories (sometimes in documentary style or as
dramatized reenactments) that blur the traditional distinction between news
and entertainment. They promote a “shared disgust for anyone alleged to be
a criminal” and serve to heighten our fear by suggesting that crime is all-
pervasive (Bond-Maupin 1998:33; Fox et al. 2007).
Today, in all sources of news reporting, the distinction between news
and entertainment is blurred. Television news emphasizes the sordid details
of individual crimes, often packaged in 30- to 60-second time spots, and
rarely discusses crime as a social issue. There is heavy reliance on law
enforcement officials as convenient sources of information, and deadlines
leave little time for independent investigation or follow-up. The novelty or
sensational quality of the crime increases its news value—if it bleeds it
leads—although through repetition the extraordinary becomes ordinary. In
television news, as well as entertainment media, the crimes portrayed are
the ones less likely to occur in real life: violent crimes are overrepresented,
while property crimes and white-collar crimes are underrepresented (Fox et
al. 2007; Pollak & Kubrin 2007; Surette 2011).
The heroes in crime entertainment—in literature, television, and film—
are the crime fighters who work both within and, when necessary, outside
the formal rules and institutional authority of the legal system. Take the
genre of the private eye or private detective, for instance, originally popu-
larized in nineteenth-century print media. Here the “good guy” oddly
resembles the criminal he is pursuing: a highly individualistic loner who
may be on the side of justice, but who is not bound by the conventional
rules of society. The heroics of fictional “super” crime fighters—like Bat-
man, Superman, and Spider-Man—also underscore the need to work out-
side the official legal order (Newman 1993; Surette 2011).
Dirty Harry, the classic film of the 1970s that spawned several sequels,
best illustrates the popular media image of the crime fighter, an image that
continues to be relevant to this very day. Harry, played by Clint Eastwood,
is a maverick police officer who feels little obligation to abide by “due
process” formalities. He is a man of action who has no patience for the Bill
of Rights, the constitutionally protected liberties that he holds responsible
for allowing scores of dangerous criminals to go free. In the Dirty Harry
films, the qualities that made Eastwood a film star—“the quiet one with the
painfully bottled-up capacity for violence”—break loose, as Harry chal-
lenges criminals to resist and “make my day” (Ebert 1986:193).
Another iconic figure of Hollywood film lore is Paul Kersey, played by
Charles Bronson in the series of Death Wish films, also released in the
1970s. Kersey is an average, law-abiding citizen whose wife and daughter
are brutally raped by criminal evildoers; his wife is killed and his daughter
is left in a catatonic state. The police tell Kersey that the prospect of catch-
ing the assailants is slim. But Kersey also witnesses other violent crimes
and, frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the police, decides to take matters
into his own hands and become a vigilante killer. The message we are left
with is that law-abiding citizens need to arm themselves to protect them-
selves and their families against bloodthirsty criminals.
Crime Waves and Moral Panics

Another way in which the media influence our perceptions of crime is
through the construction of crime waves and moral panics. The concept of a
crime wave is used by criminologists to refer to a sudden rise (and eventual
fall) of a particular type of crime. Crime waves may or may not be related to
actual fluctuations in criminal behavior. Typically, media-reported crime
FURTHER EXPLORATION
Stand Your Ground: George Zimmerman vs. Trayvon Martin
On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black male, was fatally
shot by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old male of white and Hispanic
descent, as Martin was walking home from a convenience store while visiting
his father in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman was the coordinator of the
neighborhood-watch program in the gated community in which the shooting
took place, and just prior to the shooting he called the police to report a “real
suspicious” individual after observing a teenager wearing a black hoodie who
was “just walking around looking about.” The dispatcher told him not to pur-
sue Martin, but Zimmerman did so anyway, telling the dispatcher, “These ass-
holes . . . always get away” (Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence 2013).
Zimmerman had been issued a license to carry a gun, even though he had
previously been arrested for assaulting a police officer and was the subject of
a restraining order related to a domestic violence dispute. Following the
shooting, he was taken into custody and questioned for several hours but sub-
sequently released. Although Martin was unarmed at the time of his death—
he was found carrying only a bag of Skittles and a bottle of ice tea—and was
not engaged in any illegal activity, the police said they had no evidence to
disprove Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense under Florida’s stand-your-
ground law, which relieves an individual who feels threatened by another of
the obligation to retreat in order to avoid harm (Law Center to Prevent Gun
Violence 2013).
Martin’s death resulted in intense media coverage and much public out-
cry, in which Zimmerman was portrayed as a “police wannabe” of sorts or
even a Death Wish–type vigilante figure. Forty-five days passed before
Zimmerman was finally charged for Martin’s murder and a criminal trial
ensued. The jury was presented with evidence that Zimmerman had incurred
continues
continued
a bloody nose and cuts on his head, but Martin was not alive to dispute
Zimmerman’s claim that it was Martin, not Zimmerman, who had instigated
the altercation. If Zimmerman had never approached Martin, as the police
dispatcher advised, Martin would be alive today. Nevertheless, Zimmerman
was acquitted of all charges under the terms of Florida’s stand-your-ground
statute.
The racial overtones of the Martin shooting did not go unnoticed, espe-
cially in the wake of other incidents in which white shooters have used stand-
your-ground statutes, which have been enacted in more than 20 states, to jus-
tify their actions (Cheng & Hoekstra 2013; Yancy & Jones 2013). In another
Florida case in 2012, for example, Michael Dunn, a 47-year-old white man,
fired multiple shots into a car parked at a convenience store occupied by four
black teenagers, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. Dunn had apparently asked
the youths to turn down their “thug music,” as he later described it, and when
they refused, an argument ensued. The teenagers were unarmed, but Dunn
fired multiple shots into the vehicle, even after the youths were driving away.
Unlike Zimmerman, Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder and three
counts of attempted murder (Younge 2014).
Gary Younge (2014), commenting on the Zimmerman, Dunn, and sim-
ilar cases, wonders whether the very presence of “free Black men” remains
a threat to gun-carrying white men in certain times and places. As such,
Younge would not be surprised by a study conducted by the Tampa Bay
Times, which found that defendants using stand-your-ground defenses in
Florida have been more likely to be acquitted for killing black defendants
than white defendants (Hundley et al. 2012). Additionally, a nationwide
study of the impact of stand-your-ground laws found that these laws have
led to a net increase in the number of homicides (Cheng & Hoekstra
2013).
waves are not. In a classic study that was instrumental in developing the
crime wave concept, Mark Fishman (1978) examined a seven-week media-
reported crime wave in New York City in the mid-1970s involving an
alleged surge in what was labeled “crimes against the elderly.” Police statis-
tics, however, did not indicate any particular singling out of the elderly.
Crimes increased for people of all ages during this period; for some crimes
the increases were greater for the elderly and for some they were not. While
the media began their coverage of crimes against the elderly with reports of
several gruesome murders, and 28 percent of the news stories were about
homicides, homicides actually made up less than 1 percent of crimes against
the elderly. This theme of “crimes against the elderly” conveniently allowed
journalists to cast a particular incident as an instance of something threaten-
ing and pervasive, something with greater news value.
Fishman also found that the New York City Police Department
(NYPD) was receptive to the media’s claims about crimes against the eld-
erly. In fact, the NYPD used the purported crime wave to justify expansion
of its Senior Citizens Robbery Unit (SCRU), and images of SCRU officers
dressed as elderly people arresting muggers provided attractive subjects for
news-camera crews. One newspaper reporter, whose feature articles broke
the “crimes against the elderly” story, acknowledged that SCRU officers
contacted him with information about muggings or murders of elderly per-
sons and repeatedly complained that the SCRU unit was unappreciated,
understaffed, and in need of more resources.
Importantly, the New York City crime wave had a nationwide impact
on the public’s perception of the crime problem, as the story was dissemi-
nated through the wire services and nationally read newspapers like the
New York Times and Washington Post. The Harris polling organization also
began to include a new category—crimes against the elderly—in its survey
questionnaire, and the majority of polled respondents in a national sample
indicated that they believed that such crimes had been increasing in their
communities when, in fact, they had not.
Marjorie Zatz’s study (1987) of the “gang problem” in the city of
Phoenix, Arizona, yielded results that paralleled Fishman’s research. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, newspaper accounts relying primarily on infor-
mation provided by the Phoenix Police Department suggested that the city
had experienced a dramatic rise in Chicano (Mexican-American) youth
gang activity. The claims of the police that the problem might escalate even
further were coupled with well-publicized requests for additional local and
federal funding for specialized gang-related law enforcement. The reality
was, in fact, more complicated.
The term gang evokes a threatening social imagery that has the sym-
bolic power to transform occasional or sporadic acts of delinquency into
more purposeful activity. In Phoenix, the police department provided its
officers with the Latin Gang Member Recognition Guide, which included
cartoon caricatures of youths in gang attire, a glossary of relevant Spanish
words and expressions, and other criteria that could be used to identify
gang members. Increased police surveillance of the Chicano community
then yielded an identifiable population of offenders who provided the raw
material for media reporting on the gang problem. Zatz found, however,
that the claims of the police and the media were disputed by knowledge-
able social service workers and counselors who worked with Chicano
youths, as well as by representatives of the Chicano community. As one
juvenile probation officer noted: “It’s fair to say there is some violence and
destruction going on. But maybe there is also a bit of an injustice when
kids in cowboy hats and pickups, drinking beer and cruising . . . aren’t
thought of as a gang. But when you have Chicano kids driving lowriders,
wearing bandannas, and smoking marijuana, they are singled out as being
gangs” (p. 136).
In addition, Zatz analyzed juvenile court records and found that while
youths who were officially labeled as gang members were more likely than
nongang youths to have been arrested in larger groups and for fighting
offenses, they were less likely than nongang youths to have had prior court
referrals and to have been referred for drug offenses. Zatz concluded that
gang members “typically engaged in relatively minor squabbles, and not in
. . . serious violent crimes that would be dangerous to . . . anyone outside of
the gang world” (pp. 140, 143).
Zatz characterized claims about the Phoenix gang problem as a moral
panic—that is, a discrepancy or disjuncture between a perceived threat and
an actual threat that, when reported in the media, generates public support
for doing something dramatic about a particular problem (McCorkle &
Miethe 2002). In Phoenix, Zatz observed, the more ordinary inclinations of
adolescents to congregate in public spaces took on a more ominous appear-
ance and fueled unwarranted fears about Chicano youths as an inherently
lawless population. Zatz did not deny that youth gangs existed or that they
could pose a serious problem for communities. Nor did she claim that the
media always portrayed law enforcement in a positive light. Rather, she
cautioned against uncritically accepting police and media accounts of social
problems.
However, Fishman (1978) found that there are times in which public
officials downplay media stories about crime, being concerned that media
reporting causes the public to panic unnecessarily or to believe that the
police are ineffective. Thus, for instance, officials from the New York City
Transit Authority (NYTA) stopped an emergent theme involving “crimes on
the subways” from becoming a media-reported crime wave. In this case, the
NYTA police chief told one reporter that there was no such crime wave,
and three senior NYTA officials called a news conference to assure the pub-
lic that “the subways were safer than the city streets” (Fishman 1978:541).
But more often than not, media and law enforcement interests converge
in finding mutual benefit from portrayals of escalating crime. Philip Jenk-
ins’s study (1994) of the serial murder problem is a case in point. The media,
as noted earlier, are attracted to the unusual. During the 1980s, media
accounts began to describe serial murder as reaching epidemic proportions.
The serial murderer—typically described as a psychotically compulsive
offender capable of extreme violence who selects multiple victims at ran-
dom, often while traveling from state to state—was featured in a front-page
New York Times article in 1984 that suggested serial murders accounted for
about 20 percent (about 4,000) of all the homicides committed in the United
States each year. Over the next two years, this estimate was repeated in
numerous other news reports. The data in these reports were based on Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics on “motiveless” and “unsolved”

murders and on interviews with law enforcement officials.
In his research, Jenkins was interested in ascertaining whether these
numerical estimates were accurate and whether serial murders had, in fact,
been on the rise. Jenkins compiled a list of cases that were reported
between 1940 and 1990 in three well-indexed and highly regarded newspa-
pers (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune), and
he supplemented this data with other sources. Jenkins concluded that there
had been a significant increase in this type of offense since the late 1960s,
but that serial murders still accounted for no more than 2 to 3 percent of all
homicides.
Jenkins observed that officials in the US Justice Department and in par-
ticular the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) were the primary sources
of information for the exaggerated media claims about the serial murder
problem. He also noted that in 1983 concerns about serial murder became a
central justification for the development of a new program, the Violent
Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), at the FBI Academy in Quan-
tico, Virginia, and for an expanded federal role in law enforcement regard-
ing repeat killers as well as rapists, child molesters, arsonists, and bombers.
According to BSU agent Robert Ressler:
There was somewhat of a media feeding frenzy, if not a panic, over [the
serial murder] issue in the mid-1980s, and we at the FBI and other people
involved in urging the formation of ViCAP did add to the general impres-
sion that there was a big problem and that something needed to be done
about it. We didn’t exactly go out seeking publicity, but when a reporter
called, and we had a choice whether or not to cooperate on a story about
violent crime, we gave the reporter good copy. In feeding the frenzy, we
were using an old tactic in Washington, playing up the problem as a way of
getting Congress and the higher-ups in the executive branch to pay atten-
tion to it. (quoted in Ressler & Schachtman 1992:203)
Drug Scares
Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (1989) identify drug scares as a peren-
nial type of crime wave and moral panic that in the United States goes back
at least to the early part of the twentieth century. Drug scares typically
involve an association between an allegedly “dangerous drug” and a “dan-
gerous class” of individuals: working-class immigrants, racial or ethnic
minorities, youths, or some combination thereof. Historically this has been
true for the Chinese and opium, African Americans and cocaine, and Mex-
icans and marijuana (see Chapter 7). During drug scares, antidrug crusaders
often receive extended media coverage, which helps mobilize public opin-
ion in support of new drug laws and increased law enforcement against
drug offenders. In the 1930s, for example, Harry Anslinger, commissioner
of the federal Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Narcotics, led a

national campaign against the sale and use of marijuana (Gray 1998).
Under Anslinger’s leadership the bureau prepared a number of “educa-
tional” articles for distribution to magazines and newspapers. These articles
included a number of outrageous atrocity stories such as the following inci-
dent reported in American Magazine in 1937:
An entire family was murdered by a youthful [marijuana] addict in

Florida. When officers arrived at the home they found the youth stagger-
ing about in a human slaughterhouse. With an ax he had killed his father,
mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze. . . . He had
no recollection of having committed the multiple crimes. The officers
knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was piti-
fully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said he had been in the
habit of smoking something which youthful friends called “muggles,” a
childish name for marijuana. (cited in Becker 1963:142)
In the 1980s, crack cocaine emerged in the media as the preeminent

dangerous drug (Reeves & Campbell 1994). Crack is a smokable form of
cocaine that can be easily manufactured by boiling powdered cocaine
(cocaine hydrochloride) with additives like Novocaine and baking soda and
placing the boiled mixture in ice water until it hardens. In his book The Rise
and Fall of a Violent Crime Wave: Crack Cocaine and the Social Construc-
tion of a Crime Problem, Henry Brownstein (1996) attributes the rise of
crack cocaine to the overproduction of coca leaves (the source of powder
cocaine) in the three countries that are the greatest source of cocaine
imported into the United States (Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru) and to the
consequent opportunity for drug traffickers to expand the cocaine market.
Whereas powder cocaine is consumed primarily by middle-class and affluent
individuals, crack can be sold in small, inexpensive quantities to low-income
people (four ounces of powdered cocaine can serve a thousand).
Media stories about crack cocaine first appeared in a November 1984
Los Angeles Times article and in the New York Times a year later. At that
time crack had only appeared in the impoverished neighborhoods of a few
large cities. But by the spring of 1986, drug coverage reached a virtual
feeding frenzy in the national media, which claimed that crack cocaine and
a “coke plague” had spread to the suburbs and America’s heartland and now
constituted a “national crisis.” Existing crime data, however, suggested that
this simply was not true. Even the federal Drug Enforcement Administra-
tion (DEA) announced in 1986 that “crack was not a major problem in most
areas of the country” (cited in Brownstein 1996:41).
In his research, Brownstein (1996) was especially concerned with
media claims, echoed by politicians and law enforcement officials, that
crack cocaine was linked to an epidemic of violent criminal behavior.
According to Brownstein, when crack was first introduced, the market was
in fact “dominated by young . . . well-armed . . . entrepreneurs who oper-
ated independently of established drug trafficking organizations . . . [and
who] turned to violence over such things as market share and product qual-
ity.” But over time this disorganized and rather violent market evolved into
“confederations of independent dealers . . . [and] a more highly structured
and less violent business-like industry” (p. 40). Moreover, research indi-
cated that while almost all crack users had previously used other illegal
drugs, their involvement with crack was for the most part unrelated to
increased nondrug or violent criminality (Johnson et al. 1995). Neverthe-
less, the media constructed a moral panic that suggested that crack-related
violence could affect anyone, anywhere. According to Time magazine, “A
growing sense of vulnerability has been deepened by the belief that deadly
violence, once mostly confined to crime-ridden ghetto neighborhoods that
the police once wrote off as free-fire zones, is now lashing out randomly at
anyone, even in areas once considered relatively safe” (Attinger 1989:38).
Reinarman and Levine (1989) acknowledge that crack is a very danger-
ous drug. They believe, however, that exaggerated drug scares are an inef-
fective way to solve the drug problem and may even increase interest in
drug use.
The Politics of Crime Control

In many ways the 1960s defined the terms of the contemporary political
debate over what to do about crime (Miller 1973). Liberals of that era
claimed, as they do today, that crime could be prevented through social
policies aimed at ameliorating the underlying “root causes” associated with
economic inequality and poverty, especially with regard to racial and ethnic
minorities, for whom discrimination is a persistent problem. Government-
supported social programs that promote economic and educational opportu-
nities and provide needed social services are the prescribed cure. For those
already caught up in the cycle of crime, rehabilitation rather than punish-
ment per se is the preferred objective, with those accused and convicted of
crimes being guaranteed rights of due process while under the control of the
criminal justice system.
Conservatives, on the other hand, emphasized the role of personal
responsibility in refraining from criminal behavior. Unfavorable life condi-
tions are no excuse. Criminal behavior is a choice, and those who choose to
commit crime must be held accountable. We must resign ourselves to the
fact that “wicked people exist” and we have no recourse but to set them
apart from the rest of us (Wilson 1975:235). To the extent that there are root
causes of crime, these reside in the decay of moral values, not in the
absence of opportunities. The government can do little to solve these prob-
lems and should get out of people’s lives. We need to liberate our criminal
justice system from undue restraint so that punishment can be more certain,
swift, and severe.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, established the Pres-
ident’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.
Johnson asked the commission to “deepen our understanding of the causes
of crime and of how society should respond to the challenge” of reducing
crime. The commission acknowledged the liberal agenda when it wrote in
1967: “Crime flourishes where the conditions of life are the worst. . . .
Reducing poverty, discrimination, ignorance, disease and urban blight,
and the anger, cynicism or despair those conditions can inspire, is . . .
essential to crime prevention” (p. 279). This apparent statement of liberal
principles was a mere footnote, however, to the more conservative-
oriented criminal justice strategies that dominated the commission’s 17-
volume report—that is, strategies that involved “policemen, prosecutors,
judges [and] correctional authorities.” Even so, in the 1968 presidential
campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon and right-wing American
Independent candidate George Wallace accused the Democrats of being
“soft on crime” (Hagan 2010).
The Reagan-Bush Years

In 1974, less than two years after President Nixon was reelected, he was
forced to resign for his involvement in a cover-up of a burglary that had
been committed on behalf of his reelection campaign at the Democratic
National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel/office complex
(see Chapter 10). The Watergate affair focused public attention on the prob-
lem of political corruption and encouraged the pursuit of white-collar crime
as an investigative priority of the US Justice Department during the admin-
istration of President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in the late 1970s (Katz
1980).
In the 1980s, however, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican,
shifted federal law enforcement priorities by moving the drug problem to
center stage in the political debate about crime. Reagan declared a war on
drugs, a war that would require not just a redoubling of conventional law
enforcement efforts but also an unprecedented involvement of the military
in international drug interdiction (Gordon 1994a). Domestically, the slogan
zero tolerance emphasized “the culpability of casual users” and the belief
that “the present problem is [due] to past tolerance . . . [for which] nothing
short of wiping out all illicit drug use will do” (p. 33). The war on drugs,
in Reagan’s words, was “our national crusade” (p. 34). To accomplish this
goal, the Reagan administration diverted millions of federal dollars from
drug education, treatment, and research to law enforcement. To be sure,
the Reagan administration’s antidrug agenda was a bipartisan effort, as
Democrats in Congress also favored passage of punitive drug laws in order

to curry votes and ward off being perceived by the public as soft on crime
(Hagan 2010).
At the same time, the Reagan administration was embroiled in political
scandals of its own. On the domestic front, one scandal involved Anne Gor-
such, an antiregulatory state legislator from Colorado who was Reagan’s
first choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gorsuch’s
appointment was sponsored by Joseph Coors, the archconservative Coors
brewery mogul who had founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a
group dedicated to the evisceration of environmental regulations. During
Gorsuch’s brief term in office, she increasingly staffed the EPA with people
who had previously worked for the very corporations the agency was sup-
posed to be regulating. In 1982 the so-called Sewergate scandal erupted,
which revealed Gorsuch’s assurances to polluting corporations that the EPA
would not enforce environmental regulations against them. These assur-
ances included arrangements that allowed polluting companies to avoid full
payment of environmental cleanup costs, as well as delays in waste-site
cleanup timetables. The scandal forced Gorsuch to resign, and Rita Lavelle,
who had been appointed to head the EPA’s Superfund environmental
cleanup program, was convicted on criminal charges of perjury for lying
under oath about her antiregulatory activities (Kennedy 2004; Szasz 1986).
On the foreign policy front, the Reagan administration was also
embroiled in a foreign policy controversy—dubbed the Iran-Contra scan-
dal—that was related to its covert actions in the Middle East and Central
America, which we will consider later in this book (see Chapter 10). But
despite its tainted record, the administration managed to gloss over the
apparent hypocrisy that might have undermined its claim to be a champion
of “law and order” (Hagan 2010). As such, then–vice president George
H. W. Bush was not deterred from using the soft-on-crime argument against
Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, in the
1988 presidential campaign, infamous in the annals of campaign history for
the Willie Horton television commercials aired by Bush supporters.
Horton, an African American, had been sentenced to life in prison for
his involvement in an armed robbery that resulted in the death of a teenage
gas station attendant in Massachusetts. After serving 10 years in prison, he
was released for the first of three furloughs (temporary home leaves or
community releases). Furlough programs are used by more than half the
prison systems in the United States as part of a risk-management policy
aimed at the gradual reintegration of convicted felons back into the commu-
nity. To be sure, furloughs are not without risk. But research on furlough
programs in the 1970s and 1980s indicated that on the whole these pro-
grams actually reduced criminal recidivism (Skolnick 1996). Horton, how-
ever, was not a good candidate for a fourth release. Although prison offi-
cials had received complaints about his behavior during his previous fur-
loughs, they released him once again. This time he escaped and remained
free for almost a year until he burglarized the home of a white suburban
couple, Angela Miller and Clifford Barnes, and brutally assaulted them.
While Horton was raping Miller, Barnes managed to escape and get help. If
he had not, they likely would have been killed (Anderson 1995).
The Horton incident was a tragedy. But Bush supporters used it to por-
tray Governor Dukakis as responsible for the release of convicted violent
felons. Because Dukakis also opposed the death penalty, Bush was able to
portray him as soft on crime. The Democrats, in turn, accused the Bush
campaign of exploiting racial stereotypes in an unconscionable way. Never-
theless, the ad was extremely effective.
As president, Bush continued his predecessor’s focus on drugs. During
his first year in office, he addressed the nation in a 1989 televised Labor
Day speech that illustrates how politicians exploit the crime issue for polit-
ical advantage. In a dramatic gesture, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine
that had been purchased by DEA agents at a park across the street from the
White House. We learned later that the arrest had actually been arranged to
help dramatize the speech! The Bush administration had asked the DEA to
make an illegal drug-buy at the park, but since agents could not find anyone
who was selling crack at that location, they lured a dealer to the park in
order to make the arrest (Glassner 1999).
The Clinton Years

During the 1992 presidential campaign between the incumbent Bush and
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, it was difficult for Bush to characterize
Clinton as a soft-on-crime Democrat. As governor, Clinton had demon-
strated his support for the death penalty by signing four execution orders,
including the order to execute a mentally impaired African-American felon
(Kramer & Michalowski 1995). Clinton also favored the expansion of the
nation’s police forces, a cornerstone of his crime control policy. On the
other hand, Clinton differed from Bush in his support of federal gun control
legislation, particularly the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act,
known simply as the Brady Bill, which required a five-day waiting period
for the purchase of a handgun. The Brady Bill was named for James Brady,
the press secretary for President Reagan, who had been shot and seriously
disabled in 1981 during John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of the
president (see Chapter 3).
Politically, gun control has received more support from liberals than
from conservatives. Many conservatives feel strongly that the Second
Amendment to the US Constitution—“A well regulated militia being nec-
essary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and
bear arms, shall not be infringed”—preserves their right to own any gun
of their choice without government interference. Liberals, on the other

hand, interpret these words more narrowly, and in their original historical
context, viewing the Second Amendment not as providing a constitution-
ally protected individual right to own a firearm, but as preventing the new
national government from interfering with the collective right of the citi-
zenry to participate in state-regulated militias (Sunstein 2007). As presi-
dent, Reagan had opposed the Brady Bill, only to endorse it after he left
office, perhaps because he no longer needed to worry about incurring the
wrath of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a well-funded and influ-
ential organization that supports conservative pro-gun political candi-
dates. Unlike Reagan, Bush continued to oppose the bill. But since it was
difficult to characterize Clinton’s advocacy of gun control as soft on
crime, Bush was unable to use the crime issue to his advantage. After
Clinton became president, he signed the Brady Bill into law in December
1993.
The Brady Bill expired in 1998 and was replaced by a national comput-
erized system of background checks operated by the FBI. A decade later, in
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the US Supreme Court ruled that the
District of Columbia’s ban on handguns was in violation of the Second
Amendment, thus upholding an individual’s right to “keep and bear” a
handgun in one’s home for the purpose of self-defense. At the same time,
this decision did not preclude gun control measures that stopped short of a
ban on home handgun ownership.
During the 1992 campaign and the first year of his presidency, Clinton
gave indications that he might also be more liberal than his predecessors
on other crime issues. He appointed Lee Brown, a former New York City
police commissioner, as director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy. Brown, an advocate of prevention and rehabilitation approaches to
drug abuse, defined drug abuse “as a public health problem” that should be
addressed through “efforts to grow the economy, to empower communi-
ties, to curb youth violence, to preserve families, and to reform health
care” (quoted in Gordon 1994a:35). However, when Republicans accused
Clinton of “slipping into the old permissiveness,” he downplayed this view
and Brown eventually resigned in frustration (p. 35). Brown was replaced
by Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general. Similarly, when Attorney
General Janet Reno questioned the existing federal policy of lengthy
mandatory sentences for even minor drug offenders (which might necessi-
tate shorter sentences for violent offenders to reduce prison overcrowd-
ing), she was removed from the White House policymaking loop. And
when Jocelyn Elders, Clinton’s surgeon general, expressed interest in
examining the experiences of other countries that had decriminalized drugs
(and made other controversial statements as well), she was forced to resign
(Poveda 1994).
The most significant piece of crime legislation passed during the Clin-
ton administration was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act of 1994, also called the Federal Crime Bill. The provisions of the bill
indicated that the conservative position on crime had prevailed, insofar as
law enforcement and punitive strategies far outweighed crime prevention
and rehabilitation measures. The bill authorized the spending of more than
$30 billion and allocated 45 percent of this amount to the hiring of more
police officers and 33 percent to the building of new prisons. The bill also
included a “three strikes and you’re out” provision (life in prison for violent
and drug felons if the third conviction is in federal court), and expanded the
death penalty to more than 50 federal crimes (Milwaukee Journal 1994b).
The bill was passed in August 1994, while the Democrats were still in
control of Congress, and included three provisions that were generally
opposed by Republicans. The policing provisions favored by the Clinton
administration earmarked federal monies to local police departments will-
ing to implement community policing—law enforcement strategies aimed
at putting police in closer touch with the community, including foot patrols,
community meetings with residents, and an emphasis on solving commu-
nity problems rather than just making arrests (see Chapter 11). Republicans
would have liked to allow police departments to define their own priori-
ties—for instance, to use the money to buy more equipment, such as squad
cars and high-powered weapons, or to expand other law enforcement activ-
ities, such as specialized crime units.
Republicans also opposed a provision of the bill that banned the manu-
facture of 19 specific types of “military-style” assault weapons and other
firearms having similar characteristics (this ban expired in 2004 and has not
been reauthorized since). In addition, Republicans opposed the portion of
the bill that earmarked money (17 percent of the spending) for social pro-
grams aimed at crime prevention, such as youth clubs in housing projects,
midnight sports leagues, and drug treatment programs. One Republican
congressman characterized the bill as “riddled with social welfare spending
that is pork and a cops-on-the-streets program that is a sham” (quoted in
Milwaukee Journal 1994a:A3).
Although the Clinton administration was more favorable to environ-
mental regulation than its Republican predecessors had been, its record of
antitrust law enforcement was more ambiguous. Antitrust law in the
United States has its roots in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which pro-
hibits business combinations that result in a restraint of trade (including
noncompetitive agreements to fix prices) or the monopolization of an indus-
try. Technically speaking, a monopoly refers to one company, whereas the
concentration of corporate power in the US economy is best characterized
as an oligopoly, whereby a few firms dominate basic industries in society.
Nevertheless, the Clinton administration approved corporate mega-mergers
that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier and favored the dereg-
ulation of the financial industry as well (Berger 2011).
At the same time, the administration did pursue some high-profile
antitrust cases. Most notable was the case against Bill Gates’s Microsoft
Corporation, which was accused of abusing the virtual monopoly it had
acquired from its Windows operating system to gain an unfair competitive
advantage on sales of other software products. The most egregious action
involved Microsoft’s pressuring of retailers who sold Windows to also sell
its Internet Explorer browser rather than the Netscape Navigator browser,
which controlled a larger share of the market at the time. In 1999, a federal
judge ruled against Microsoft and suggested that severe sanctions might be
in order, including breaking Microsoft into two or more companies and
increasing government monitoring of its future acquisitions and its con-
tracts with retailers. Microsoft appealed the ruling, and when the adminis-
tration of George W. Bush took office, a more modest settlement was
reached (Rosoff et al. 2007).
Clinton, like the presidents before him, was embroiled in scandals of
his own. But among the many allegations of impropriety that surrounded
him, the only one that stuck was the allegation that he had lied under oath
about a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. Although he was impeached
by the US House, he was acquitted by the Senate. And although his trans-
gressions may have been morally discreditable, reasonable people would
agree that they pale in comparison to the transgressions that both preceded
and followed his administration (see Chapter 10).
The George W. Bush Years

Republican George W. Bush, son of the former president, assumed his pres-
idency amid controversy in the 2000 election over disputed ballots in the
state of Florida. In a highly controversial decision, the US Supreme Court
stopped a recount vote in Florida, giving Bush a narrow victory in the Elec-
toral College, despite the fact that Vice President Al Gore had won the pop-
ular vote nationwide (see Chapter 10).
During the first year of his administration, President Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney’s financial and political connections to Enron, a
multibillion-dollar energy corporation that went bankrupt due to fraudulent
financial practices, were starting to draw attention in the media (Corn 2003;
see Chapter 9). But what seemed to be emerging as an ongoing story was
moved off the front pages following the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which cost the lives of
more than 3,000 people and spurred the subsequent antiterrorism campaign
against Al-Qaida (“The Base”) and its leader, Osama bin Laden, as well as
the US military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter justified on the
basis of misleading and partly fraudulent evidence (see Chapter 10). Six
weeks later, the president signed the USA Patriot Act into law amid com-
plaints by civil libertarians that the law went too far in undermining consti-
tutional liberties (Patriot is an acronym for “Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”).
The most controversial elements of the Patriot Act included provisions
that allowed for warrantless residential searches of individuals deemed a risk
to national security, searches of computer files and tracing of Internet com-
munications and library transactions, and detainment of noncitizens without
charge for up to six months prior to deportation (Masci & Marshall 2003).
Controversial as well was the fact that the law did not contain any “new pro-
visions for the monitoring or control of firearms” (Bergman & Reynolds
2002:21). In fact, Attorney General John Ashcroft did not even allow federal
law enforcement investigators to use the national background check system
to track potential terrorists. Prior to his appointment as attorney general, as a
senator from Missouri, Ashcroft had received thousands of dollars of politi-
cal campaign contributions from the NRA; and one of his main objectives as
attorney general was to eliminate delays in the federal system of background
checks for gun buyers. The following year, in 2002, the Department of
Homeland Security Act was also passed, creating a massive, cabinet-level
department to oversee homeland security (Martin 2003; Shenon 2008).
Proponents of these measures claim they have been successful in pre-
venting another 9/11-type attack, while opponents raise concerns about the
massive expansion of a government surveillance apparatus that has been
monitoring millions of phone calls and e-mails an hour, both international
and domestic, including the monitoring of confidential personal and busi-
ness matters unrelated to national security (Bamford 2008). The full ramifi-
cations of this surveillance system, which continued into the administration
of Barack Obama, were not made known to the American public until
Edward Snowden released previously undisclosed “top secret” documents in
2013. Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, was
at the time of the leaks working for a private company that had been con-
tracted by the National Security Administration (NSA), an agency in the
Department of Defense. Time magazine described Snowden’s leaks as a rev-
elation about a “massive secret US national security state—$52.6 billion a
year, with more than 30,000 employees at the NSA alone” (Scherer 2013:84).
At the time these measures were enacted, the Bush administration
claimed that those who opposed them were playing into the hands of terror-
ists. As Attorney General Ashcroft opined: “To those who scare peace-
loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tac-
tics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our
resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to Amer-
ica’s friends” (quoted in Kappeler & Potter 2005:364). Additionally,
Ashcroft linked the “war on terror” to the war on drugs, as if even com-
mon drug users were responsible for the spread of terrorism:
The lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug
trafficking that supports terrorism. And the mutually reinforcing relation-
ships between terrorism and drug trafficking should serve as a wake-up
call for all Americans. When a dollar is spent on drugs in America, a dollar
is made by America’s enemies. The Department of Justice is committed to
victory over drug abuse and terrorism, and the protection of the freedom
and human dignity that both drug abuse and terrorism seek to destroy.
(quoted in Kappeler & Potter 2005:354)
Ironically, despite Ashcroft’s indignation against those who opposed

his post-9/11 policies, before 9/11 he had ignored FBI warnings about the
threat of terrorism. As former acting FBI director Thomas Pickard
reported, prior to 9/11 Ashcroft told him, “I don’t want to hear about al-
Qaida anymore. . . . There’s nothing I can do about that” (quoted in
Shenon 2008:247).
As for the problem of corporate crime, the policies of the George W.
Bush administration most resembled those of the Reagan administration. In
a cabinet appointment that harkened back to the Sewergate scandal, Gale
Norton was selected to head the Department of Interior. Previously, Norton
had been a member of an antiregulatory group deceptively called Wise Use,
whose founder, Ron Arnold, once said: “Our goal is to . . . eradicate the
environmental movement. We want . . . to be able to exploit the environ-
ment for private gain” (quoted in Kennedy 2004:27). J. Steven Griles, a
lobbyist for the mining industry, was appointed to head the Bureau of
Mines. Government scientists and inspectors responsible for evaluating
risks and enforcing law violations reported being thwarted in their efforts to
protect the public from corporate practices that savaged and polluted the
environment. As a result, deaths from mining accidents increased during the
Bush years (Frank 2007).
The Obama Years

When Barack Obama, a Democrat, was inaugurated as president in 2009,
he inherited a financial crisis that was not of his own making. In order to
shore up the economy, he supported a taxpayer bailout of the financial
industry. At the same time, he also sought regulatory reforms that would
help avoid a repeat of this crisis, signing into law the Wall Street Reform
and Consumer Protection Act, also known as the Dodd-Frank Act, in 2010.
The law created broad federal guidelines to regulate banks, financial spec-
ulation, and credit card companies, but it required the writing and imple-
mentation of rules that were opposed by Obama’s Republican opposition,
who called it “an incomprehensively complex piece of legislation that is
harmful to our floundering economy and in dire need of repeal” (quoted in
Kuhnhenn 2013:A9).
Also on the domestic front, the issue of gun control reemerged due to
several high-profile mass shootings. The first of these incidents involved a
shooting by Jared Loughner at a campaign event of Democratic congress-

woman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011; Lougher
killed six people and seriously injured Giffords and more than a dozen oth-
ers. The second incident involved a shooting by James Holmes in a movie
theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012; Holmes killed 12 people. And the
third involved a shooting by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, Connecticut; Lanza killed 20 children and 6 adults. These
shootings, especially the Newtown incident, brought forth calls for gun con-
trol legislation, especially for a renewal of the assault weapons ban that had
expired in 2004, limits on high-capacity magazines, and background checks
for gun purchases from unlicensed sellers (not just from licensed dealers).
Although the Obama administration and a majority of the public supported
these measures, the political clout of the NRA in the US Congress was too
strong and no legislation was forthcoming (Fuller 2014). Since Sandy Hook,
there have been dozens of other shootings on school grounds, although the
calls for gun control reform continue to go unheeded (Frantz et al. 2014).
As for the war on drugs, during the Obama years a movement for
retreating from the punitive policies of the past gained momentum. In 2010,
the Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity between federal criminal
penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine that had been in place since
the mid-1980s (Cratty 2011). Prior to the Fair Sentencing Act, the penalties
for possession of crack cocaine, a less expensive form of cocaine consumed
primarily by low-income offenders, were a hundred times greater than
penalties for possession of comparable amounts of powder cocaine. Also in
2014, Colorado and Washington state led the way by implementing legisla-
tion to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. And US attorney general
Eric Holder announced his support for lighter sentences for lower-level
drug offenders and an end to mandatory minimum sentences that prevented
judges from exercising judicial discretion. Expressing a more liberal
approach to the problem of crime, Holder said he hoped to break the
“vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration that traps too many
Americans” (quoted in Schworm 2013).
The Sociology of Crime

Earlier we noted our interest in helping students step outside of conven-
tional understandings by acquiring a view of crime as a social rather than
an individual phenomenon. At the same time, we do not wish to suggest
that we have no interest in individual behavior. Indeed, as sociologist C.
Wright Mills (1959) would remind us, the essence of a sociological imagi-
nation is to understand the ways in which personal or private troubles are
related to public issues. In other words, we want to understand how individ-
23
FURTHER EXPLORATION
Right-to-Carry Laws
While opposing expanded gun control measures, the NRA and its supporters
have advocated the expansion of concealed carry laws, also known as right-
to-carry (RTC). Recently, more states have adopted “shall issue” laws,
which require states to issue right-to-carry permits to citizens who meet cer-
tain minimum eligibility requirements, such as passage of a certified gun-
safety course, as opposed to “may issue” laws, which give states broader
authority to deny permits unless the applicant can show “good cause” for
needing a gun.
There is some controversy in the criminological research literature as to
whether lenient right-to-carry laws reduce crime, increase crime, or have no
effect on crime. The expectation that these laws would reduce crime is based
on the assumption that the more law-abiding citizens are able to defend them-
selves, the more criminals will be deterred (Lott 1998). The expectation that
right-to-carry laws would increase crime is based on the expectation that the
more guns there are in circulation in the public sphere, the more they will be
used in unwarranted situations by irresponsible permit holders, including
criminals themselves (Diaz 1999).
In a widely publicized study about right-to-carry laws, economist John
Lott (1998) analyzed data from more than 3,000 counties in the United States
and found a statistically significant association between right-to-carry laws
and lower crime rates. On the other hand, several follow-up studies that cri-
tiqued Lott’s research methodology failed to confirm his findings, with some
even showing that crime rates rose rather than fell as a result of easing
restrictions on concealed weapons carrying (Ayres & Donahue 2003; Black
& Nagin 1998; Fagan 2003).
Overall, the best that can be said about the effect of right-to-carry laws
is that the evidence is mixed, with a review of studies by the National
Research Council of the Academies concluding there is no reliable evi-
dence that these laws have a causal impact on crime rates one way or the
other (Wellford et al. 2004). Additionally, Anthony Braga and Glenn Pierce
(2005) note that legal gun ownership itself is an important source of
firearms used by criminals. This occurs not only through theft from legal
owners, but also from sales from licensed dealers and private parties at gun
shows and flea markets, including “straw purchasers” who buy guns for
other people. And even after September 11, the United States has remained
“a global shopping center” for gun purchases by “terrorists, mercenaries,
and international criminals of all stripes” (Bergman & Reynolds 2002:19).
Nevertheless, William Vizzard (2000) is arguably correct in his observation
that political ideology, not empirical research, will likely remain the ulti-
mate adjudicator of the debate about guns and gun control.
ual lives are influenced by social forces that define and constrain people’s
choices and opportunities, their sense of the possible, their very sense of
themselves. A sociological imagination helps us understand how individual
biographies and the biographies of others intersect with broader social con-
ditions and the relationships people have with each other.
Victimization from crime, for example, is an unfortunate and often
traumatic private experience. But when victimization falls disproportion-
ately on a certain group or groups, such as the poor or economically disad-
vantaged, there is a nonrandom patterning to this problem that requires
sociological explanation. Or when large numbers of women experience
some form of sexual violence or abuse, mostly from people they know, this
cannot be understood without sociological insight.
This perspective is also well illustrated in the following accounts of the
lives of African-American gang members. In his book A Nation of Lords:
The Autobiography of the Vice Lords, David Dawley (1992) gives voice to
the experiences of Chicago youths growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s:
When we got here, the pattern was already laid out for us. We weren’t
aware of what was going on and what we thought, but we were living in
the years when you couldn’t walk the streets without somebody telling you
they were gonna down you. Much of what we did was bad, but we didn’t
know why, and there just wasn’t anybody who could help us. Now we
know something about what made us kill each other, but in 1958 we were
crammed so close together that the least little thing could touch something
off. (p. 3, emphasis added)
Similarly, in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member,

Sanyika Shakur (1993), also known as Monster Kody Scott, writes about his
life as a member of the Crips in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s:
My mind-set was narrowed by the conditions and circumstances prevailing

around me. Certainly I had little respect for life when practically all my life
I had seen people assaulted, maimed, and blown away at very young ages,
and no one seemed to care. I recognized early that where I lived, we grew
and died in dog years. . . . Where I lived, stepping on someone’s toe was a
capital offense punishable by death. . . . I did not start this cycle, nor did I
conspire to create conditions so that this type of self-murder could take
place. . . . To be in a gang in South Central when I joined—and it is still the
case today—is the equivalent of growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan,
and going to college: everyone does it. (pp. 102, 138, emphasis added)
When Dawley and Shakur speak of “the pattern . . . already laid out” or
the prevailing “conditions and circumstances” that they “did not start,” they
are referring to the influence of social structure on their lives. Social struc-
ture is a concept used by sociologists to refer to the patterns of social inter-
action and institutional relationships that endure over time and that enable
or constrain people’s choices and opportunities. Social structures are, in a

sense, external to individuals insofar as they are not of their own making
and exist prior to their engagement with the world. At the same time, social
structures do not exist independently of social action. Rather, they are
ongoing accomplishments reproduced by individuals acting in particular
ways in specific situations (Giddens 1984; Messerschmidt 1997). The mem-
bers of the Vice Lords and the Crips did not create the social structures that
they confronted in their lives, but through their actions they recreated or
reproduced the conditions that were already there.
A sociological imagination does not imply a view of individuals as
mere dupes or passive recipients of social structures. Individuals are
thinking, self-reflexive beings who are capable of assessing their circum-
stances and choosing among alternative courses of action (Sandstrom et
al. 2006). Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as a capacity for per-
sonal agency—that is, individuals’ ability to exercise a degree of control
over their lives and at times even manage to transform or reconfigure the
social relationships in which they are enmeshed (Berger 2008; Emirbayer
& Mische 1998). Social psychologists describe this as a matter of self-
efficacy—the ability to experience oneself as a causal agent capable of
acting upon rather than merely reacting to the external environment (Ban-
dura 1997; Gecas 1989). To illustrate this point, we need only recall the
actions of Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress who on a Decem-
ber day in 1955 refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on a bus in
Montgomery, Alabama, as she was required by law to do. Parks had
already been actively challenging bus segregation laws, and this “incident
sparked a year-long citywide boycott of the public transit system and gal-
vanized the entire civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,” dramat-
ically changing the nature of race relations in the United States (Newman
2000:21).
At the same time, many individuals are faced with so many structural
deficits that they find it difficult to exercise agency to overcome their social
disadvantage. Such circumstances are aptly illustrated by sociologist
William Brown’s account of his experience with Jimmy, a 15-year-old
African-American youth from Detroit. Jimmy was living with his sister, for
his mother was in prison and he had never met his father. Brown recalls the
day he and his wife took Jimmy out for a birthday celebration:
Where does a white, middle-class couple take a black soon-to-be-15 gang

member for his birthday? . . . [W]e decided that the Detroit Zoo, followed
by a movie, and perhaps dinner, would be both appropriate and appreci-
ated. . . . It had never occurred to [us that Jimmy] . . . had never visited a
city zoo. The day was absolutely perfect. . . . Jimmy was “hanging” out-
side his apartment . . . [in] “the projects.” Although attempting to maintain
the . . . attitude of a streetwise kid, there was a hint of excitement in
Jimmy’s voice as we exchanged greetings. . . .
I knew that Jimmy had been involved in illegal drug sales . . . [but] he
was, as usual, broke. . . . I gave [him] $20 so that he could have some
sense of independence. . . . We walked around the zoo for nearly six hours.
It was interesting . . . to watch Jimmy eat cotton candy, ice cream bars,
[and] popcorn . . . like a normal kid on an outing. I had seen him navigate
around a crack house and . . . he had been taking care of himself on the
streets of Detroit for several years now! . . .
Following the zoo . . . we went to a movie. . . . Jimmy ate two more
boxes of popcorn and one ice cream sandwich and drank an extra-large
drink. . . . After the movie we went to a preselected restaurant. At the
restaurant we encountered many stares and subtle examples of disapproval
from many of the [white] occupants. There were instances during our visit
to this restaurant when I wanted to respond to some of the rude onlookers,
but this was Jimmy’s Day. . . .
My wife and I will never forget Jimmy’s 15th birthday. It was a day
filled with good intentions . . . [but it] was also filled with cruelty. We
removed Jimmy, for a day, from “the projects.” . . . We gave him a glimpse
of life outside his . . . environment of poverty. . . . The probability of
escape for Jimmy, and for the thousands of “Jimmys” like him, is very
low—despite all the political rhetoric of “American opportunity.” (Shelden
et al. 2004:294–297)
Challenges to the Legalistic Definition of Crime

In addition to understanding the relationship between individuals and their
society, developing a sociological imagination also requires reconsidering
the legalistic definition of crime. Paul Tappan was a prominent proponent
of the legalistic definition: “Crime is an intentional action in violation of
criminal law . . . committed without defense or justification, and sanctioned
by the state as a felony or misdemeanor” (1947:100). Tappan believed that
criminologists should narrowly confine their subject matter to behaviors
that meet this definition. It is inappropriate, he maintained, for criminolo-
gists to assert their own values by defining what should or should not be
included in the criminal law as “crime.”
Edwin Sutherland, one of the most important criminologists of the twen-
tieth century, rejected this approach when he introduced the term white-
collar crime at his presidential address to the American Sociological Associa-
tion in 1939. Sutherland (1949), who defined white-collar crime as crime
committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of
their occupations, was especially interested in documenting the extent of law
violation among the largest corporations in the United States. He did not wish
his study to be constrained by the criminal code, and it was his contention that
noncriminal civil and regulatory law violations should also be considered.
All three systems of law—criminal, civil, and regulatory—are con-
cerned with the social control of actions that are deemed harmful or injuri-
ous by a governmental body. These systems of law all involve procedures
set up to adjudicate competing claims and to ascertain responsibility
regarding such conduct. Technically speaking, criminal law defines harm-

ful conduct as a public matter and mandates the intervention of traditional
law enforcement authorities such as the police and prosecutors. Civil law
defines harm as a private matter to be settled by individuals (and their
attorneys) as private parties in the courts, although the government may
also invoke civil law to litigate actions that affect the government or its
employees, and local municipalities may use civil law to enact and enforce
ordinances regarding public safety and behavior. Regulatory law is con-
cerned with the imposition of rules and standards for business-related
activity, and at the federal level involves agencies like the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
and the Securities and Exchange Commission. While the lines of demarca-
tion between these three systems are not always clear, only criminal law
allows for the imposition of jail or prison sanctions instead of or in addi-
tion to financial penalties, although failure to comply with civil or regula-
tory rulings may lead to such punishments. Violation of criminal law also
carries the greatest moral condemnation, because of the stigma associated
with crime.
In his research, Sutherland (1949) uncovered extensive law violations
on the part of corporations in areas such as antitrust, misrepresentation in
advertising, copyright infringement, and unfair labor practices, although
only 16 percent of these violations were prosecuted under criminal law.
Nevertheless, Sutherland felt justified in calling these violations crimes.
In his view, corporations that engaged in harmful conduct were able to
avoid the application of criminal law and the consequent stigma associ-
ated with such application because of their economic and political power.
Sutherland was unwilling to also allow corporations to exert such influ-
ence on criminological research.
The legalistic view expressed by Tappan is often associated with a con-
sensus perspective on crime. The consensus approach takes the existing
criminal law for granted and assumes there is general agreement in society
regarding what is right and what is wrong, regarding those behaviors that
should be criminalized and those that should not. In contrast, many of
Sutherland’s followers prefer a conflict perspective on crime, viewing def-
initions of crime as matters of disagreement, the assertion of economic and
political power, and the struggles of competing groups to use the law to
their advantage (Chambliss & Seidman 1971; Quinney 1970).
Labeling theory. Thinking about crime from a sociological perspective

requires us to move beyond the legalistic-consensus view. Labeling theory,
for example, encourages us to think about crime as “a label that is attached
to behavior and events by those who create and administer the criminal
law” (Barlow 1996:10). According to this perspective, legislators establish
legal definitions that label some actions as crimes, and criminal justice offi-
cials apply these definitions to particular individuals.
The labeling approach assumes that many (if not most) of us have vio-
lated the law at one time or another. If we were never caught, however, we
were never officially identified or stigmatized as a criminal. What matters
most then is the societal reaction to our behavior. Recall the comment of the
probation officer whom Zatz cited in her study of the moral panic over Chi-
cano gang violence: “Kids in cowboy hats and pickups, drinking beer and
cruising . . . aren’t thought of as a gang. But . . . Chicano kids driving lowrid-
ers, wearing bandannas, and smoking marijuana . . . are” (1987:136). This
type of bias was also documented by William Chambliss (1973) in his classic
study “The Saints and the Roughnecks.” Chambliss found that the delinquent
acts of the lower-class Roughnecks brought forth legal sanctions and com-
munity condemnation, while the (quite extensive) delinquencies of the
upper-middle-class Saints were treated lightly or ignored. From the perspec-
tive of labeling theory, being a criminal is an accorded social status that is
relatively independent of actual involvement in lawbreaking (Becker 1963).
Critical criminology. Sociological thinking about crime encourages us to

consider the ways in which social advantage and influence affect the
process of criminalization—that is, the process by which criminal law is
selectively applied, making some people and groups more or less vulnera-
ble to or immune from legal control (Hartjen 1974). Critical criminolo-
gists have been the most radical in their critique of the legal system’s bias
in the criminalization process, and they have searched for an alternative to
the legal definition of crime to broaden the subject matter of criminology.
Herman Schwendinger and Julia Schwendinger (1970), for example,
advanced a definition of crime as the violation of human rights. According
to the Schwendingers, egalitarian principles of social justice mandate that
all individuals be entitled to certain inalienable rights that are “the funda-
mental prerequisites for well-being, including food, shelter, clothing, med-
ical services, challenging work and recreational experiences,” as well as
security from predatory individuals, corporate transgressions, and govern-
mental repression (p. 145). From this perspective, economic or political
systems of injustice that deny these rights or that promote racism, sexism,
economic exploitation, or environmental degradation, for instance, are
proper topics of criminological inquiry.
This human rights definition of crime has been characterized as so
broad as to entail the abandonment of criminology as a distinct field of
study. Hence Raymond Michalowski (1985) proposed an alternative con-
cept, that of analogous social injury, as a way to broaden our understand-
ing of crime. Michalowski defined analogous social injuries as “legally per-
missible acts or sets of conditions whose consequences are similar to those

of illegal acts” (p. 317).
Inequality and Crime

Sociological analysis of social structure and challenges to the legalistic def-
inition of crime merge in efforts to place questions of social inequality at
the center of criminological inquiry. Inequality refers to the unequal distri-
bution of valued social resources such as economic, educational, and cul-
tural opportunities; and among the diverse elements of social structure that
affect people’s lives, criminologists have increasingly emphasized the piv-
otal role of class, race/ethnicity, and gender.
Class. Most people understand class as a hierarchical relationship that des-

ignates individuals on a continuum of lower to middle to upper class based
on financial indicators such as wealth (total assets) or annual income.
Viewed in this way, the class structure in the United States is marked by
considerable inequality. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first
century, for example, the top 1 percent of the country controlled 35 percent
of the nation’s combined net worth (assets minus debt). The richest 400
families alone had a net worth equal to the combined worth of half of all
Americans, some 155 million people. The average annual salary of a chief
executive officer of a US corporation was 344 times more than the pay of
an average factory worker, up from 42 times more in 1960. In a survey of
134 countries, Sweden ranked first as having the most income equality,
whereas the United States ranked ninety-third, with more inequality than
even China, Russia, and Iran. Intergenerational mobility, the ability of
young people to move up the class hierarchy, to do better than their parents,
is also lower in the United States than in countries with less inequality
(Domhoff 2013; Frank 2013; Howell 2013).
Most Americans accept the fact that some degree of inequality is nec-
essary in order to reward individual initiative and merit, but they do not
favor the extreme inequality that marks the country today. A study by
Michael Norton and Dan Ariely (2011) found that most Americans have no
idea of the wide distribution of wealth, and when asked about their views
on the distributive ideal, they favor a far more equitable distribution than is
the case today.
The implications of all this are profound, but it suffices to say here that
an individual’s class background affects not only their financial status, but
also the very nature of their existence. As Michael Lynch observes:
[Class] affects where you grow up, how you grow up, and the quality of
the schools you attend. . . . It affects your occupational choices, your
career path, whom you marry, and . . . even when you have children. It
affects your ability to enter politics, and . . . to influence politics. . . . It
affects your everyday, mundane decisions, from where you shop, to where
you eat, and sometimes, whether you eat at all. (1996:16)
As such, class also affects your incentives and disincentives to engage

in criminal behavior, as well as the resources you have at your disposal for
committing certain types of crimes (and not others) and for avoiding (or not
avoiding) official sanctions for your actions. Crime among the affluent, for
example, is facilitated by access to the organizational resources of busi-
nesses or governments that are for them “what the gun or knife is for the
common criminal—a tool to obtain money from victims,” enabling them to
perpetrate larger-scale crimes than individuals who act alone (Hagan
1992:9; see also Wheeler & Rothman 1982).
Race and ethnicity. It is arguably true that much progress has been made in
the area of race relations in the United States. After all, the country has
elected and reelected an African-American president. But the legacy of
racial and ethnic discrimination that has marked the history of this country
since the days of European colonization—slavery, forcible seizure of land
from indigenous peoples, legalized segregation, political disenfranchise-
ment, and lack of economic and educational opportunities—has by no
means disappeared, and inequality based on race and ethnicity remains an
enduring feature of American life.
Biological typologies of race most often divide humans into three
major groups—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid—characterized by var-
ious physical traits transmitted through heredity. But distinct racial groups
hardly exist today due to interracial mixing resulting from migration, explo-
ration, invasions, and involuntary servitude. Speaking of whites and blacks
in the United States, Coramae Richey Mann observes that “Euro-Americans
are a blend of many ethnic and tribal groups that originated in Africa and
Europe . . . [and] many millions of Africans were absorbed into the popula-
tions of Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece”
(1993:5). Additionally, the rape of black female slaves by their white over-
seers, as well as consensual interracial mixing, have resulted in millions of
mixed-race offspring, making the notion of unitary racial categories some-
what obsolete.
The concept of ethnicity further complicates the subject. Ethnicity
refers to distinctions among groups according to cultural characteristics
such as language, religion, customs, and family patterns. Often we speak of
groups according to their country of origin, such as Irish Americans, Italian
Americans, or Mexican Americans. Additionally, people of Hispanic origin
may be classified in racial terms as either white or black, and in the United
States the large majority of Hispanics are classified as white. According to

census data, about 81 percent of the US population is white, although
nearly a fifth of this group is Hispanic. Hispanics overall, including whites
and nonwhites, compose about 16 percent of the population. Blacks or
African Americans compose about 13 percent. Asians compose about 5 per-
cent. And American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Pacific Islanders com-
bined compose about 1 percent (US Census Bureau 2012).
Sociologists often use the term minority to refer to those racial/
ethnic groups who are typically a numerical minority and also distin-
guished by their disadvantaged social status. In the United States, at the
end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the median net worth of
black households was just 5 percent that of white households, and the
median net worth of Hispanic households was just 1.3 percent that of
white households (Domhoff 2013). Moreover, as suggested earlier, some
elements of the US criminal justice system, especially the war on drugs,
have had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Nowadays
about one-third of black men can expect to spend some time in prison;
among black men with less than a high school education, the figure is
nearly 70 percent (Lyons & Pettit 2011; Pettit & Western 2004). Michelle
Alexander (2010) dubs this policy the “new Jim Crow,” whereby mass
incarceration functions as a contemporary legal system of racial control,
while Diana Gordon (1994b) believes it reflects a fear of racial minorities
and a smokescreen for our inability or unwillingness to address the prob-
lems of the inner city.
Gender. In addition to class and race/ethnicity, gender is an element of

social structure that is of interest to sociological criminologists. Gender
refers to the social statuses and expectations for behavior that are
assigned to people who are deemed biologically male and biologically
female. The social construction of gender begins at birth (or even before
birth) when a child is identified as male or female on the basis of its gen-
italia. The child is named and dressed in such a way as to make this des-
ignation evident to observers, who respond to these gender markers by
treating those labeled “boys” differently from those labeled “girls.” In
turn, children respond to this differential treatment, albeit sometimes with
resistance, by coming to feel and behave accordingly. As Judith Lorber
observes, “In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn
what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways,
and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order”
(1997:43). To be sure, Lorber adds, resistance and rebellion have altered
gender norms, but thus far they have not erased gender statuses, and most
societies continue to rank genders unequally, giving men more social
advantages than women.
Sociologists refer to a society that is marked by this kind of inequality

between men and women—a society that grants men more power, prestige,
and privilege—as a patriarchy. In the United States, although women have
made great strides over the past few decades, on average they still earn less
than men, exercise less authority in the workplace, and exert less economic
and political power (Lorber 2012).
Traditionally, boys have been given more freedom than girls to be
competitive, aggressive, and risk-takers. Girls have been given less leeway
to behave in these ways and have been more closely supervised by their
parents. These patterns are mirrored in the generally greater amount of
crime committed by boys than girls. Among adults as well, men have
higher crime rates than women, not only for conventional crimes of theft
and violence, but also for white-collar crimes. To be sure, there are
nuances to these patterns that we will explore later in this book. Women
are more likely than men to be prostitutes, for instance. But this pattern,
too, is consistent with conventional gender norms, given society’s ten-
dency to view women as sex objects and men’s greater propensity to seek
out impersonal sex. At the same time, men are very much in control of the
prostitution business, as male pimps act as agents/protectors who live par-
asitically off women’s earnings and often beat them to keep them in their
place. More generally, men are more likely to commit sexual violence
against women than women are to commit sexual violence against men
(see Chapters 2, 6, and 9).
Of course, the social statuses we have been discussing—gender, race/

ethnicity, and class—do not exist independently of each other. Rather, they
interpenetrate each other in ways that make assumptions about singular
statuses tenuous. Sociologists refer to these overlapping domains in terms
of the concept of intersectionalities (Grabham et al. 2009). The implica-
tions of intersectionalities for criminology are illustrated by research con-
ducted by Darrell Steffensmeier and Emilie Allen (1988), who analyzed
gender-, race-, and age-specific arrest rates and found that female rates
were consistently lower than male rates within the same subgroup, but that
subgroup variations indicative of intersectionalities were apparent as well.
For example, for crimes against persons, the rate for black females was
higher than the rate for white females; for minor property crimes, the rate
for urban females approximated or exceeded the rate for rural males; and
for both serious and minor property crimes, the rate for younger females
was higher than the rate for older males. Other research also finds that
gender patterns of crime vary by class and racial status. In a study of urban
homicides, for example, Mann (1996) found that over three-fourths of the
women arrested for murder were African Americans, and that these women
also tended to be unemployed mothers who had not completed high
school. Sally Simpson, in her research, too, argued that “race and class
combine to produce uniquely situated populations of females” (such as

lower-class black women) who “appear to have unique patterns of crimi-
nality . . . when compared with their gender and racial counterparts”
(1991:115).
Summary
This chapter introduced readers to the interdisciplinary field of criminology,
and to sociological criminology in particular. We considered the role of the
media and politics in shaping public attitudes and opinions about crime and
crime policy, examining the phenomena of crime waves and moral panics
(including drug scares) and the politics of federal crime policy over the past
few decades. We then introduced a sociological perspective that contextual-
izes the criminal actions of individuals in terms of broader patterns of
social relationships by placing issues of inequality at the center of crimino-
logical inquiry and viewing the problem of crime and criminal law in terms
of three axes of inequality: class, race/ethnicity, and gender.

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EXCERPTED FROM

Crime, Justice, and Society:

1800 30th Street, Suite 314

This excerpt was downloaded from the

List of Tables and Figures xi

Part 1 Introducing Sociological Criminology

1 The Social Problem of Crime 3

3 Individualistic Explanations of Crime 57

Mental Illness and the Insanity Defense, 71 •

4 Microsocial Explanations of Crime 85

5 Macrosocial Explanations of Crime 103

Part 2 Patterns of Criminality and Victimization

6 Street Crime 133

7 Illegal Drugs 171

8 Sexual Violence 193

9 Corporate Crime 229

10 Political and Government Crime 269

Part 3 The Criminal Justice System

11 The Police and Courts 317

12 Punishment and Corrections 359

President Franklin Roosevelt famously said that “the only thing

The terms criminology and criminal justice suggest different orienta-

In the late 1980s, a new genre of television crime programming

Crime Waves and Moral Panics

eral Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics on “motiveless” and “unsolved”

of the federal Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Narcotics, led a

An entire family was murdered by a youthful [marijuana] addict in

In the 1980s, crack cocaine emerged in the media as the preeminent

The Politics of Crime Control

The Reagan-Bush Years

Democrats in Congress also favored passage of punitive drug laws in order

The Clinton Years

of their choice without government interference. Liberals, on the other

The George W. Bush Years

Ironically, despite Ashcroft’s indignation against those who opposed

The Obama Years

shooting by Jared Loughner at a campaign event of Democratic congress-

The Sociology of Crime

Similarly, in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member,

My mind-set was narrowed by the conditions and circumstances prevailing

or constrain people’s choices and opportunities. Social structures are, in a

Where does a white, middle-class couple take a black soon-to-be-15 gang

Challenges to the Legalistic Definition of Crime

regarding such conduct. Technically speaking, criminal law defines harm-

Labeling theory. Thinking about crime from a sociological perspective

Critical criminology. Sociological thinking about crime encourages us to

missible acts or sets of conditions whose consequences are similar to those

Inequality and Crime

Class. Most people understand class as a hierarchical relationship that des-

As such, class also affects your incentives and disincentives to engage

States the large majority of Hispanics are classified as white. According to

Gender. In addition to class and race/ethnicity, gender is an element of

Sociologists refer to a society that is marked by this kind of inequality

Of course, the social statuses we have been discussing—gender, race/

combine to produce uniquely situated populations of females” (such as

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