The Criminal: Conventional and Unconventional Views

Abstract

The term criminal, as currently used, has a strong pejorative connotation. It is a value-laden term, which conveys, more than most other terms used to designate those who violate the law, society’s hatred, contempt, and disapproval. In recent years, there has been a tendency in criminological literature to replace the term ‘criminal’ with more neutral terms such as ‘offender’, ‘perpetrator’, ‘law breaker’, ‘law violator’, ‘transgressor’, and so forth.

The criminal produces an impression now moral, now tragic, and renders a ‘service’ by arousing the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public…the criminal interrupts the monotony and security of bourgeois life…he protects it from stagnation and brings forth that restless tension, the mobility of spirit without which the stimulus of competition would itself be blunted…crime, by its ceaseless development of new means of attacking property calls into existence new measures of defence and its productive effects are…great…in stimulating the invention of machines.

Karl Marx, quoted in Steven Box (1971:28)

Deviance, Reality and Society