Who is the Criminal

Abstract

Increasingly widespread and seductive movement to revolutionize the concepts of and criminal has developed around the fashionable dogma of crime. This is actually a particular school among those who contend that the criminologist should study antisocial behavior rather than law violation. The chapter explores the white-collar criminal and find an amazing diversity, even among those flowing from the same pen, and observe that characteristically they are loose, doctrinaire, and invective. A special hazard exists in the employment of the term, in that it invites individual systems of private values to run riot in an area where gross variation exists among criminologists as well as others. Having considered the conceptions of an innovating sociology in ascribing the terms crime and criminal, let us state here the juristic view: Only those are criminals who have been adjudicated as such by the courts. Criminal behavior as here defined fits very nicely into the sociologists' formulations of social control.