14: Crime

The Social Construction of Crime

The social construction of crime refers to the idea that crime is not an objective concept. Instead, society, through its institutions, norms, values, and laws, constructs the definition of what is considered criminal behavior, how that the behavior will be viewed, and how severe the punishment will be for it.

For example, the laws and punishments for different forms of cocaine. Crack cocaine is produced from powder cocaine, but the amount of crack cocaine that triggered eligibility for a mandatory minimum sentence was 1/100th the amount of powder cocaine. This disparity embodied racial biases, as the majority of individuals (more than 80%) of those convicted for crack cocaine offenses were African American, compared to a third of those convicted for powder cocaine and other drugs. In response to outcry around the bias in sentencing, this ratio was changed to set a minimum sentence for crack cocaine at 1/20th the amount of powder cocaine. However, the law still embodies biases that disproportionately harm African-American communities. (Bjerk 2016; Vagins and McCurdy 2006)

As another example, people understand property theft clearly as a crime, as when an employee steals goods from an employer, or a customer shoplifts. But what is less well known and less seen as a crime is wage theft. Wage theft can come in many forms: paying less than minimum wage, not paying overtime, not granting sick leave, not giving tips to workers who are supposed to receive them, asking for “off the clock” work before or after a shift begins, denying meal breaks, taking illegal deductions from checks, or misclassifying workers as independent contractors to avoid paying minimum wage or overtime. Wage theft is worth billions of dollars to employers, yet people are much less likely to know about it, talk about it, or hear about it in the news or other media, especially as it mostly impacts low-wage workers, immigrants, minorities, and women. Wage theft is not constructed as a crime in the way other property theft is.

Society generally socializes its members to view certain crimes as more severe than others. For example, when people think of violent and non-violent crime, they often picture street crime, or offenses committed by ordinary people against other people or organizations, usually in public spaces (for example, mugging as violent crime or car theft as non-violent crime). An often overlooked category of both violent and non-violent crime however is corporate crime. There is nonviolent corporate crime (or “suite crime”), crime committed by white-collar workers in a business environment. Embezzlement, insider trading, Ponzi schemes, false advertising, price-fixing and fraud are all types of corporate crime. Although these types of offences rarely receive the same amount of media coverage as street crimes, they can be far more damaging. The 2008 world economic recession was the ultimate result of a financial collapse triggered by corporate crime.

There is also corporate violence, actions by corporations that kill or maim people or leave them ill. The victims of corporate violence include corporate employees, consumers of corporate goods, and the public as a whole. These involve unsafe work places, which cause illness and death, and unsafe products that kill or maim consumers. The toll of white-collar crime dwarfs the toll of street crime, even though the latter worries us much more than white-collar crime. Despite the harm that white-collar crime causes, the typical corporate criminal receives much more lenient punishment, if any, than the typical street criminal (Rosoff et al., 2010).

The media can play into this. One reason is that violent crime lends itself to spectacular media coverage that distorts its actual threat to the public. Television news broadcasts frequently begin with chaos news — crime, accidents, natural disasters — that present an image of society as a dangerous and unpredictable place. However, the image of crime presented in the headlines does not accurately represent the types of crime that actually occur. The issue is that the news is a commercial product used to sell newspapers and advertising. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the adage that describes the financial motivation to publish the most dramatic crime news because it sells more subscriptions and receives more views. Czerny and Swift (1988) argue that the commercial media distort the content of the news in a number of ways. Typically stories emphasize:

• the intense (stories are selected to play up drama and action)
• the unambiguous (complex issues and lived experiences are simplified into straightforward moral stories of good and bad)
• the familiar (stories are made to fit in with common sense understandings and prejudices)
• the marketable (stories are packaged to appeal to consumer tastes, often with sex and violence imagery)

This distortion is amplified by the use of on-line sources where many people get their news most of the time. Emotional responses to stories rather than critical analysis influence people’s decisions to “retweet” a story (Stieglitz & Dang–Xuan, 2013). Emotions have also been shown to be contagious in on-line environments and are linked to rumor spreading behavior (Kramer et al., 2014; Oh et al. 2013; Pröllochs et al., 2021). Vosoughi et al.’s (2018) research showed that on social media platforms like Twitter “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.”

The media tends to highlight crimes committed by African Americans or other people of color and crimes with white victims. A greater percentage of crime stories involve people of color as offenders than is true in arrest statistics. A greater percentage of crime stories also involve whites as victims than is actually true, and newspaper stories of white-victim crimes are longer than those of black-victim crimes. Crimes in which African Americans are the offenders and whites are the victims also receive disproportionate media coverage even though most crimes involve offenders and victims of the same race. In all these ways, the news media exaggerate the extent to which people of color commit crimes and the extent to which whites are victims of crimes.

Policing and Race

People of color, Black, and Latinx Americans along with Indigenous people, are disproportionately surveilled and killed by the police. Between 1980 and 2018, police killed an estimated 30,800 people. Black and Latinx Americans were significantly more likely to be killed than White Americans (Sharara et al. 2021). Public opinion studies from the Pew Research Center show that Black Americans are more likely to report having been stopped unfairly by police. It is obvious that Black Americans have very different interactions with police than White Americans, which is reflected in their differences in opinion about the police. They are also less likely to have a positive view of how officers treat different racial and ethnic groups, and they see fatal police shootings as signs of broader issues with the criminal justice system (Desilver, Lipka, and Fahmy 2020).

What is causing the disproportionate impact? There are a few factors that contribute to these trends. The first explanation for racial disparities in policing is the role of spatial profiling. Compared to low-crime, middle and upper-class neighborhoods, high-crime, low-income neighborhoods are more heavily surveilled by the police. It is in these neighborhoods that Black and Latinx Americans are more likely to live, exposing them to more significant contact with the police.

Police training may also play a significant role. For example, only a few training hours are dedicated to topics such as ethics, de-escalation tactics, and providing social services. Instead, using firearms, defensive tactics, and police procedures comprise most of the training. Consequently, it is not surprising that police are more adept at using their weapons when a situation escalates rather than turning to nonviolent options.

The next explanation is bias—both explicit and implicit. (Explicit bias refers to the biased attitudes people know they hold, whereas implicit bias refers to the biased attitudes people hold but might not be consciously aware of and may actually contradict their stated beliefs.) Explicit bias is still an issue with at least some proportion of law enforcement officers. A recent study analyzing 40 years of General Social Survey data has shown that police, unlike most Americans, believe that they should receive more funding and have the right to use physical force against citizens (Roscigno and Preito-Hodge 2021). They also found that White male officers were, in particular, more racist than the general population or those in similar occupations (Roscigno and Preito-Hodge 2021). Implicit bias is also an issue among law enforcement, as it is in the broader American population. Studies have found that implicit bias plays a role in decisions about whether officers will use deadly force (Fridell and Lim 2016).

Racism and discrimination have a direct role in creating explicit and implicit biases, which is evident when looking at the history of the institution of policing. Historically, in both the North and the South, police have been used as a tool of social control to manage “unruly” populations. In the North, police intended to control the growing poor European immigrant population and quell labor protests. In the South, the earliest manifestations of police were slave patrols. While these institutions became more bureaucratic over time and looked more like northern police agencies, they still enforced Jim Crow laws and were not afraid to beat and arrest anyone who dared protest these racially discriminatory laws and practices. Given this history, it is not surprising that there is distrust between Black communities and police departments.

Courts

In the US legal system, suspects and defendants enjoy certain rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights and provided in various Supreme Court rulings since these documents were written some 220 years ago. Although these rights and protections do exist and again help distinguish our democratic government from authoritarian regimes, in reality the criminal courts often fail to achieve the high standards by which they should be judged.

A basic problem is the lack of adequate counsel for the poor. Wealthy defendants can afford the best attorneys and get what they pay for: excellent legal defense. An oft-cited example here is O. J. Simpson, the former football star and television and film celebrity who was arrested and tried during the mid-1990s for allegedly killing his ex-wife and one of her friends (Barkan, 1996). Simpson hired a “dream team” of nationally famous attorneys and other experts, including private investigators, to defend him at an eventual cost of some $10 million. A jury acquitted him, but a poor defendant in similar circumstances almost undoubtedly would have been found guilty and perhaps received a death sentence.

Although poor defendants enjoy the right to free legal counsel, in practice they receive ineffective counsel or virtually no counsel at all. The poor are defended by public defenders or by court-appointed private counsel, and either type of attorney simply has far too many cases in any time period to handle adequately. Many poor defendants see their attorneys for the first time just moments before a hearing before the judge. Because of their heavy caseloads, the defense attorneys do not have the time to consider the complexities of any one case, and most defendants end up pleading guilty.

Another problem is plea bargaining, in which a defendant agrees to plead guilty, usually in return for a reduced sentence. Under our system of justice, criminal defendants are entitled to a trial by jury if they want one. In reality, however, most defendants plead guilty, and criminal trials are very rare: Fewer than 3 percent of felony cases go to trial. Prosecutors favor plea bargains because they help ensure convictions while saving the time and expense of jury trials, while defendants favor plea bargains because they help ensure a lower sentence than they might receive if they exercised their right to have a jury trial and then were found guilty. However, this practice in effect means that defendants are punished if they do exercise their right to have a trial. Critics of this aspect say that defendants are being coerced into pleading guilty even when they have a good chance of winning a not guilty verdict if their case went to trial (Oppel, 2011).

A final problem is the system of bail. If a person is arrested, wrongfully or not, they are in almost all justifications required to pay bail to leave jail and return home to fight the charges. The original idea behind this was to make sure that people returned to court to face the charged against them. However, this system now perpetuates widespread wealth-based incarceration. Poorer Americans and people of color often can't afford bail, leaving them incarcerated in jail sometimes for months or even years while they await trial, losing their jobs and unable to care for their families. Meanwhile, wealthy people accused of the same crime can pay the bail, obtain their freedom, and return home. This practice may be considered unconstitutional, because it violates the rights to due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, the prohibition against excessive bail found in the Eighth Amendment, and the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. These practices do, however, make money for the for-profit bail bond companies and the insurance companies who back them.

The Death Penalty

The death penalty is perhaps the most controversial issue in the criminal justice system today. The United States is the only Western democracy that sentences common criminals to death, as other democracies decided decades ago that civilized nations should not execute anyone, even if the person took a human life. About half of Americans in national surveys favor the death penalty (Death Penalty Information Center, 2025).

First, capital punishment does not deter homicide: Almost all studies on this issue fail to find a deterrent effect. An important reason for this stems from the nature of homicide. As discussed earlier, it is a relatively spontaneous, emotional crime. Most people who murder do not sit down beforehand to calculate their chances of being arrested, convicted, and executed. Instead they lash out. Premeditated murders do exist, but the people who commit them do not think they will get caught and so, once again, are not deterred by the potential for execution.

Second, the death penalty is racially discriminatory. While some studies find that African Americans are more likely than whites who commit similar homicides to receive the death penalty, the clearest evidence for racial discrimination involves the race of the victim: Homicides with white victims are more likely than those with African American victims to result in a death sentence (Paternoster & Brame, 2008; also see Death Penalty Information Center, 2025). Although this difference is not intended, it suggests that the criminal justice system values white lives more than African American lives.

Third, many people have been mistakenly convicted of capital offenses, raising the possibility of wrongful executions. Sometimes defendants are convicted out of honest errors, and sometimes they are convicted because the police and/or prosecution fabricated evidence or engaged in other legal misconduct. Whatever their source, wrongful convictions of capital offenses raise the ugly possibility that a defendant will be executed even though they were actually innocent of any capital crime. In March 2011, Illinois abolished capital punishment, partly because of concern over the possibility of wrongful executions. As the Illinois governor summarized his reasons for signing the legislative bill to abolish the death penalty, “Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it” (Schwartz & Fitzsimmons, 2011:A18).

Fourth, executions are expensive. In 2020, keeping a murderer in prison for life cost about $1 million dollars (say 40 years at $25,000 per year), while the average death sentence costs the state about $2 million to $3 million in legal expenses. Capital trials (in which the defendant, if found guilty, would face the death penalty) are also much more expensive than non-capital trials. (Death Penalty Information Center, 2025).

This diverse body of evidence leads most criminologists to oppose the death penalty. In 1989, the American Society of Criminology adopted this official policy position on capital punishment: “Be it resolved that because social science research has demonstrated the death penalty to be racist in application and social science research has found no consistent evidence of crime deterrence through execution, The American Society of Criminology publicly condemns this form of punishment, and urges its members to use their professional skills in legislatures and courts to seek a speedy abolition of this form of punishment.” https://asc41.org/about-asc/policy-page/

Costs – and Benefits?

According to the ACLU, incarceration costs the nation at least $80 billion annually. (https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration). What does the expenditure of this huge sum accomplish? It would be reassuring to know that the high US incarceration rate keeps the nation safe and even helps reduce the crime rate, and it is certainly true that the crime rate would be much higher if we had no prisons at all. However, many criminologists think the surge in imprisonment during the last few decades has not helped reduce the crime rate at all or at least in a cost-efficient manner (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011). Greater crime declines would be produced, many criminologists say, if equivalent funds were instead spent on crime prevention programs instead of on incarceration (Welsh & Farrington, 2007).

Criminologists also worry that prison may be a breeding ground for crime because rehabilitation programs such as vocational training and drug and alcohol counseling are lacking and because prison conditions are substandard. They note that more than 700,000 inmates are released from prison every year and come back into their communities ill equipped to resume a normal life. Once free they face a lack of job opportunities (how many employers want to hire an ex-con?) and a lack of friendships with law-abiding individuals, as our earlier discussion of labeling theory indicated. Partly for these reasons, imprisonment ironically may increase the likelihood of future offending (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011).

Living conditions behind bars merit further discussion. A common belief of Americans is that many prisons and jails are like country clubs, with exercise rooms and expensive video and audio equipment abounding. However, this belief is a myth. Although some minimum-security federal prisons may have clean, adequate facilities, state prisons and local jails are typically squalid places. As one critique summarized the situation, “Behind the walls, prisoners are likely to find cramped living conditions, poor ventilation, poor plumbing, substandard heating and cooling, unsanitary conditions, limited private possessions, restricted visitation rights, constant noise, and a complete lack of privacy” (Kappeler & Potter, 2005, p. 293).

Some Americans probably feel that criminals deserve to live amid overcrowding and squalid living conditions, while many Americans are probably at least not very bothered by this situation. But this situation increases the odds that inmates will leave prison and jail as more of a threat to public safety than when they were first incarcerated. Treating inmates humanely would be an important step toward successful reentry into mainstream society.

Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration refers to the overwhelming size and scale of the U.S. prison population.

Some of this dramatic increase was due to the public portrayal of crack cocaine as a highly addictive drug sweeping its way through America. Politicians capitalized on the resulting hysteria and passed policies that rapidly increased the prison population. Even so, the vast majority of arrests and enforcement were not of high-level, violent dealers but, more often, small-time dealers or people struggling with addiction. In fact, during the 1990s, the period of the largest increase in the U.S. prison population, the vast majority of prison growth came from cannabis arrests (King and Mauer 2005).

The 1980s and 1990s were also an era during which states turned to partnerships with private companies to meet the booming demand for facilities, leading to the rise of private prisons. Private prisons are for-profit incarceration facilities run by private companies that contract with local, state, and federal governments. The business model of private prisons incentivizes them to keep their prisons as full as possible, while spending as little as possible on care for inmates. Down 16 percent from its peak in 2012, private prisons still held 8 percent of all people incarcerated at the state and federal level as of 2019 (The Sentencing Project 2021). Still, it is essential to note that the use of these facilities varies by local context. For instance, Oregon has no private prison facilities in the state, while Texas has the highest number of people incarcerated in private prisons.

From the inception of the war on drugs, racial biases were at the center of these policy changes. For instance, John Erlichman, one of Richard Nixon’s top advisors, explicitly admitted to this in a 2016 interview:

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with cannabis and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (Baum 2016)

Even as the racial gap in incarceration has narrowed in recent years, the United States disproportionately incarcerates Black Americans. While Black Americans make up 13 percent of the population, they make up over 30 percent of incarcerated individuals (Gramlich 2019). Similar trends exist among Latinx Americans: while Latinx people comprise 16 percent of the U.S. population, they account for over 20 percent of incarcerated individuals (Gramlich 2019). In contrast, while White Americans comprise 64 percent of the population, they only make up 30 percent of those incarcerated (Gramlich 2019).

This network of policies and unequal institutional practices led to what scholar Michelle Alexander terms the New Jim Crow. The New Jim Crow refers to the network of laws and practices that disproportionately funnel Black Americans into the criminal justice system, stripping them of their constitutional rights as a punishment for their offenses in the same way that Jim Crow laws did in previous eras. Because of these new mass incarceration policies, a new iteration of the racial caste system has emerged: one in which Black Americans can legally be denied public benefits, housing, the right to vote, and participation on juries because of a criminal conviction.

The detention of immigrants also intersects with the system of mass incarceration. Recently, attention has been brought to how immigration law and criminal law have been combined in the form of “crimmigration” (Hernandez 2022). The combination of these laws has had a detrimental effect on immigrants. The same companies that run private prisons also play a role in running immigrant detention centers. To learn more about this, you can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UttL8utsvLA&t=1s

The table above demonstrates the degree to which countries use imprisonment as a form of criminal justice. The United States has by far the largest number of individuals imprisoned, 1.8 million (as of 2022). It is important to note that the United States also has a large population, but even in terms of the rate of imprisonment (prisoners per thousand individuals), the United States has one of the highest rate of imprisonment of any major nation (Institute for Criminal Policy Research 2024).

While racial disparities are one of the most pressing and continuing concerns in the criminal justice system, other marginalized groups face similar institutional inequalities. Recently, there has been an rise in incarceration rates of women and folks who identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Between 1980 and 2019, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700 percent (The Sentencing Project 2022). Furthermore, while the United States incarcerates more men than women, the rate of growth of women’s incarceration has been twice as high as that of men since 1980 (The Sentencing Project 2022).

This increase in women’s incarceration is also directly connected to the disproportionate involvement of the LGBTQIA+ population in the criminal justice system. As of 2019, gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals were over two times as likely to be arrested in the past 12 months than straight individuals (Jones 2021). This disparity particularly impacts lesbian and bisexual women, who are four times as likely to be arrested as straight women (Jones 2021). The high rates of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people behind bars can, in part, be attributed to the longer sentences courts impose on them (Meyer et al. 2017). Transgender individuals also report high arrest and incarceration rates and uncomfortable encounters with the police, with one in six transgender individuals having spent time incarcerated (Grant et al. 2011).

Individuals marginalized as a result of their sexual or gender identity may also face issues when incarcerated. These groups are more likely to be sexually victimized while incarcerated, placed into solitary confinement, and report current psychological distress (Meyer et al. 2017). Similarly, transgender and gender nonconforming individuals lack the same civil rights protections as other groups, which leads to poor treatment in incarceration facilities. For instance, President Trump revoked Obama-era federal guidance, which stated that people who are transgender and incarcerated should be held in facilities matching their gender identity and have access to gender-affirming healthcare services. Then, when President Biden took office, he again instituted the Obama-era guidance. When Trump was re-elected, he sent out an executive order denying the existence of trans people altogether, thus the possibility of treatment according to their gender. This reversal from administration to administration is just one example of how contested federal and state political issues directly impact the lives of individuals.

Finally, the criminal justice system has significant problems with how it addresses mental health issues. In terms of policing, people with mental health issues are more vulnerable to experiencing violence at the hands of police. In 2015, 27 percent of police shootings involved a mental health crisis (Oberholtzer 2017). These inequalities by ability—whether due to disability or mental illness—are pervasive throughout the criminal justice system, including in incarceration.

Jails and prisons have been called modern-day asylums because of the high concentration of individuals with mental illnesses. About one-third of people in all federal or state prisons have been diagnosed with a mental illness, most of whom are not receiving treatment (Wang 2022). In some areas, these issues are even more acute. For instance, in Chicago’s Cook County jail, nearly 50 percent of the people incarcerated had some form of mental illness (Cook County Sheriff’s Office 2022).

Incarceration facilities rarely have the resources to address these mental health needs. More than 60 percent of people with a history of mental illness do not receive mental health treatment while incarcerated in state and federal prisons (Bronson and Berzofsky 2017). Even those on treatment regimens before incarceration often cannot continue that treatment once incarcerated. Over 50 percent of individuals taking medication for mental health conditions at admission did not continue to receive their medication once in prison (Reingle Gonzalez and Connell 2014).

It’s important to remember that we cannot talk about how identity impacts individuals’ experiences without taking an intersectional approach to these conversations. For instance, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx transgender people have significantly higher incarceration rates than White transgender people (Jones 2021). This is just one example of how identity is intersectional. To better understand how the criminal justice system impacts people, we must look at all of the different aspects of their identity—gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, citizenship, ability, and other forms of group membership.

Other Models

One way to think about different possibilities for this system is by looking at how other countries have tackled these problems. Using our sociological imagination, we can critically examine our institutions and think more deeply about what we could learn from the different ways crime is addressed around the globe.

Next, we explore three examples of how other countries have addressed criminal justice issues. In these examples, we’ll look at how countries have reformed their systems, effectively addressed recidivism, and created cultures of rehabilitation rather than punishment. In each system, crime is taken seriously, especially violent crime. At the same time, these systems address many of the issues we have examined in the U.S. system.

Policing and Prison in Nordic Countries

Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway) have very different systems of policing and imprisonment compared to other wealthy Western nations. While there are differences between each country’s political system, there are many more commonalities in their approach to criminal justice. Foremost, compared to other wealthy Western nations, they have much lower punishment severity, imprisonment rates, and violence rates. The primary focus of these systems is preventing crime from occurring in the first place. When crime does occur, the goal of these systems is to reduce recidivism and restore justice rather than simply punitively punishing an individual for an offense. Nordic countries have strong welfare states. By providing the essential resources that individuals need to survive, fewer individuals turn to criminal activities to make ends meet (Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry 2011). The top picture below shows comparisons between a prison in Iceland and Oregon prisons.

Differences in social policies and lower crime levels between Nordic countries and the United States are not the only factors leading to lower incarceration rates. The structure of the police looks very different in Nordic countries. Unlike in the United States, where police are organized at the state and local levels, all Nordic countries have unified, federally-organized police forces (Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry 2011). From here, the country is divided into police districts that are then overseen by chiefs of police. Police training looks much different in Nordic countries, as well. Police in these countries spend considerably more time being trained and cover topics such as criminological theory, health science, behavioral science, and social work. Use of force against citizens is incredibly low in these countries, with fatal police shootings being rare rather than commonplace, as they are in the United States.

In terms of incarceration, all Nordic countries have abolished the death penalty and only use incarceration for the most serious offenses. Generally, penalties for crimes are less severe in these countries, tending to hold individuals accountable through formal warning, fines, and community sanctions rather than imprisonment. When possible, the goal is for individuals to remain in their communities and access resources including therapy, job training, and other services to prevent individuals from committing crimes again. These policies are incredibly effective. Nordic countries have some of the lowest rates of lethal violence and extremely low levels of recidivism.