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19 Windsor Y.B. Access Just. 326 (2001)
Crime as a Category

handle is hein.journals/windyrbaj19 and id is 330 raw text is: CRIME AS A CATEGORY by Laura Nader* It is a crime to kill a neighbor, an act of heroism to kill an enemy, but who is an enemy and who is a neighbor is purely a matter of social definition. E.R. Leach (1968:27) Introduction In a succinct article titled Toward A Radical Criminology, published in the. first edition of The Politics of Law -A Progressive Critique, Will- iam Chambliss (1982) juxtaposed the traditional question that criminolo- gists ask, Why is it that some people commit crime while others do not? with the sociology of law question, Why are some acts defined by law as criminal while others are not?' He explains the reappraisal of the leading question as due to the 1960s civil rights demonstrations, anti-Vietnam war protests, and the media reporting on blatant criminality by political leaders and giant corporations. These, among other happenings, forced a reap- praisal of criminology's focus on the individual and caused what Chamb- liss called a paradigm revolution, encompassing the more broadly liberal understandings of criminal justice of the 1950s and 1960s. In his paper Chambliss notes that what is criminal changes over time and that the political and economic forces behind the creation of criminal law is revealed in history. He gives some examples: [V]agrancy laws reflected the tensions in precapitalist England among feudal landlords, peasants, and the emergent capitalist class in the cities ... rights of rural village dwellers to hunt, fish, and gather wood were retracted and such activities became acts of criminality punishable by death as a result of the state's intervention on the side of the landed gentry in opposition to the cus- toms, values, and interests of the majority of the rural population....2 At the same time, Chambliss is careful to take exception to the conflict the- orists who argue that law is simply a result of ruling class activity. As an example he cites factory health and safety legislation which criminalizes an owner's refusal to comply. Only a few years later, the second edition of The Politics of Law leaves out Chambliss' dramatic rethinking of criminology and includes a new piece by Elliott Currie called Crime, Justice, and the Social Environ- ment. Moving away from the constructivist approach that Chambliss chronicled for criminology, Currie speaks about the emergence of a conser- vative revolution in criminology, a revolution that defined crime as largely a criminal justice problem. He dates the beginning of this conservative rev- * Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 1 Chambliss 1982 at 230. 2 Ibid. at 233. (2001), 19 Windsor Yearbook ofAccess to Justice