4.3.2 - Crime, science, value freedom and social policy
Crime and deviance is where abstract Theory and Methods debates become concrete. In this lesson, you will test whether crime can be studied scientifically, whether crime data are really "facts", why criminologists argue about value freedom, and how competing perspectives produce very different crime-control policies.
Can crime be scientific
Positivists argue that crime can be studied in a systematic, evidence-based way. The key idea is that criminal behaviour is not random: it has patterns, causes, and regularities that sociologists can measure. This is why positivists value official statistics, victim surveys, self-report studies, and comparative data across class, gender, ethnicity, age, and locality.
Positivism
The view that society can be studied using scientific methods to identify patterns, causes, and regularities.
Lombroso (1876) tried to turn crime into a scientific subject by searching for biological signs of the "born criminal". His specific claims are now widely rejected, but he mattered historically because he treated crime as something to be observed, classified, and explained rather than simply morally condemned.
Durkheim took a more sociological route. He argued that crime rates can be treated as social facts: patterned features of social life shaped by forces such as anomie, inequality, and social regulation. From this view, the important question is not just why one individual steals, but why some social groups or periods produce higher rates of recorded offending than others.
Interpretivists reject the idea that crime is a natural object waiting to be measured. What counts as crime depends on law, power, policing, and social reaction. Because crime is bound up with meaning and labelling, they argue that the study of crime must also examine how offenders, victims, and control agencies define situations.
| Approach | View of crime | Preferred evidence | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Positivist | A measurable social pattern with discoverable causes | Official statistics, surveys, large-scale comparisons | May treat recorded crime as more objective than it really is |
| Interpretivist | A socially constructed category shaped by meanings and labels | Interviews, observation, case studies | Harder to generalise and predict large-scale patterns |
This debate also links to wider arguments about science. Popper would ask whether theories of crime make risky, falsifiable predictions. Kuhn would note that sociology lacks one agreed paradigm, because functionalists, Marxists, feminists, realists, and interactionists all explain crime differently. That does not make crime research worthless. It means sociology may be scientific in the sense of being systematic and evidence-led, without looking exactly like physics or chemistry.
Social facts and methods
The sharpest dispute in crime sociology is whether crime rates are genuine social facts or artefacts produced by social control agencies. For Durkheim, crime rates reveal something real about the organisation of society. If an area shows persistently high violence or theft, positivists ask what structural pressures are operating there: weak regulation, blocked opportunities, deprivation, or rapid social change.
Interactionists push back. Becker (1963) argued that deviance is not an inherent quality of an act; it is the result of others applying rules and labels. Cicourel (1968) extended this to official crime data by showing that statistics are shaped by typifications, routines, and discretionary decisions inside the criminal justice system. Police, courts, and social workers do not simply record crime; they help produce the categories that later appear in statistics.
This is why the relationship between theory and methods matters. A positivist theory of crime tends to favour methods that count and compare. An interactionist theory tends to favour methods that uncover meanings, negotiations, and labelling processes. Realists sit somewhere in between: Left Realists such as Lea and Young were critical of official statistics but still wanted empirical data, so they used local victim surveys to capture unreported crime and fear of crime as well as recorded offending.
Imagine a local police force reports a sharp rise in youth drug crime after increasing stop and search patrols. A positivist may read the new figures as evidence that offending has risen. An interactionist would ask whether more intensive surveillance has turned more youth behaviour into recorded crime, especially for working-class and minority ethnic young men.
Values and taking sides
Once we move from "what crime is" to "how we research it", the question of values becomes unavoidable. Crime research deals with victims, offenders, police power, punishment, race, gender, and inequality. These are morally and politically charged issues.
Value freedom
The principle that sociologists should try to collect and analyse evidence objectively rather than letting personal beliefs distort their findings.
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