LAWS1110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Critical Criminology, Labeling Theory, White-Collar Crime
Document Summary
It is, for example, both a legal concept (we have criminal laws which indicate which acts are illegal) and a socially constructed one (who becomes labelled. In some senses the most obvious, and most commonly used, definition of crime is simply to view it as an infraction of the criminal law. Within the criminal law, a crime is conduct (or an act of omission) which, when it results in certain consequences, may lead to prosecution and punishment in a criminal court. Writers starting from this position see crime" as a label applied, under particular circumstances, to certain acts (or omissions), suggesting that crime is something that is the product of culturally bounded social interaction. Thortsen sellin, an american criminologist writing in the 1930s, once observed that the criminologist does not exist who is an expert in all the disciplines which converge in the study of crime" (sellin, 1970: 6).
