Mutual engagement: Criminology and the sociology of law

Abstract

How are conceptions of crime as abnormal sustained in the face ofpersistent sociological evidence that crime is normal? While ostensiblyexpressing different images of crime, together the accounts of crime asepisodic ruptures of the social fabric and as a normal feature of healthysocieties sustain the possibility of the sociality necessary for collective life.This paper explores the contradictory relationships between law and crimeas a normal feature of social life and crime as a rupture in the social web.Decades of research in crime, law and deviance have documented howcrime is a constituent and normal feature of any legal system: theorized asan aspect of law; professionally managed through law andinterpreted on the basis of the normal and conventionalcharacter of events and relationships; organized as a reflection andreproduction the encompassing social structure; experienced as familiar,ordinary and frequent. Crime is a normal and expected feature of any legalsystem whose anticipation is a resource for the production of law. Yet inpopular culture, rather than professional sociology, crime is experienced asbizarre, abnormal, a distinct rupture of what is conventionally portrayedas a seamless web of normative conformity. Conceptions of law'sabnormality helps to maintain normal appearances, to sustain the illusionof society, to individualize the event as one person's pathology, to containits threat, and to turn it into an economically and professionally managedproject. The contradictory cultural representations and experiences helpsustain a hegemonic reality in which crime is both a usual feature ofordinary social life to be understood and managed like any other mundanematter, and an episodic event that need not challenge confidence in whatis in effect a reified conception of society.