Abstract
In the search for the etiology of transgression, one theoretical venture is prized above all others: a general theory of crime. However, the term itself is inconsistently defined and its feasibility rarely questioned. This paper forms an explicit definition of general theory as that which purports to explain one or more of the following: (1) all types of crime, (2) crime committed by all types of people, and (3) crime across all contexts. While the search for a general theory has refined theoretical thinking and guided decades of empirical research, each of these three goals constitutes a conceptual trap wherein the desire for parsimonious universality inherently discounts the complex and multifaceted nature of human behavior. Thus, theorists of the etiology of crime must begin to explicitly acknowledge and further explore the justifications for and ramifications of general theories of crime.
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Notes
While Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) aspire to combine classical and positive criminology, their ultimate formulation conceives of low self control as a simultaneous overlap of the two traditions. Rather than ascribing causality to a multi-faceted process, this approach is fundamentally reductionist.
This paradigmatic divide comes from Messner and Rossenfeld (2001, p. 38) whose conceptual schematic moves beyond prior confusion over “levels of explanation” which conflate explanations for individual differences in behavior with explanations for variation across social systems.
The substantive differences between crime, delinquency, and/or deviance are often marginally addressed if not entirely dismissed in these works. The extent to which these authors negate such distinctions also varies, with Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990, p. 10) claim that “crime, deviant behavior, sin, and accident” should not be treated as “distinct phenomena subject to distinct causes” as the most extreme perspective.
And in this vein, the crimes of the powerful (such as corporate crime and state violence) must similarly be understood as reflecting particular unequal social arrangements in particular cultural and historical contexts.
This is not to imply the innate accuracy of cultural relativism to the negation of anything culturally universal. In fact, the emergent notion of social harm (Barak et al. 1997; Henry and Milovanovic 1996; Milovanovic and Henry 2001; Tifft and Sullivan 2001), which is defined as damage that results from investing human time or energy into the domination of others and entails both crimes of reduction (signifying any loss relative to one’s previous standing such as the loss of property, health, or dignity) and crimes of repression (which occur when people are limited in their full human potential through externally-imposed boundaries like poverty, sexism, racism or any other institutionalized restriction), has immense importance for the future direction of criminological theorizing directly because it stands as a far better cultural universal than the legal construct of crime. The salient point here is that a cultural relativist position that forges fragmented theories of crime has a lengthy and respectable history in the labeling tradition as well as significant potential for new theory development.
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Madfis, E. Across Crimes, Criminals, and Contexts: Traps Along the Troubled Path Towards a General Theory of Crime. Crit Crim 20, 429–445 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-012-9159-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-012-9159-y