CRIMINOLOGYof their social groups as well as a personal interest
in financial gain or professional advancement.
This helps to explain why police are often more
enthusiastic about enforcing some criminal laws
than they are about enforcing others.
Another consequence of criminalization is that
the criminal law, being universal in its reach, can-
not make allowances for subgroup variation in
sentiments about what is right and what is wrong.
Thus, some people are imprisoned for behavior
that neither they nor members of their social
group regard as reprehensible, as in Northern
Ireland where members of the Irish Republican
Army convicted of assassinating British soldiers
considered themselves political prisoners. They
went on hunger strikes—in some cases to the
point of death—rather than wear the prison uni-
form of ordinary criminals.
CONCLUSIONThe more heterogeneous the culture and the more
swiftly its norms are changing, the less consensus
about right and wrong exists within the society. In
the United States, moral values differ to some
extent in various regions, occupations, religions,
social classes, and ethnic groups. This sociocultu-
ral value pluralism means that it is difficult to
identify behavior that everyone considers devi-
ant. It is much easier to identify crime, which is
codified in politically organized societies. The
criminalization of deviance makes it clear when
collective reprisals will be taken against those who
violate rules.
Deviance exists in smaller social systems, too:
in families, universities, and corporations. In addi-
tion to being subjected to the informal disapproval
of other members of these collectivities, the devi-
ant in the family, the university, or the work or-
ganization can be subjected to formally organized
sanctioning procedures like a disciplinary hearing
at a university. However, the worst sanction that
these nonsocietal social systems can visit upon
deviants is expulsion. A university cannot impris-
on a student who cheats on a final exam. Even in
the larger society, however, not all deviance is
criminalized, sometimes for cultural reasons as in
the American refusal to criminalize the expression
of political dissent, but also for pragmatic reasons
as in the American failure to criminalize body
odor, lying to one’s friends, or smoking in church.
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Interest, 130, Fall.JACKSON TOBYCRIMINOLOGY
The roots of modern criminology can be found in
the writings of social philosophers, who addressed
Hobbes’s question: ‘‘How is society possible?’’
Locke and Rousseau believed that humans are
endowed with free will and are self-interested. If