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Michael Shofi

Prof. Dupont
Critical Criminology
29 November 2018
While both readings for class this week I found interesting and intellectually stimulating,
I certainly got the most out of the latter one. “A Crime by Any Other Name,” is a chapter of a
textbook which is packed full of relevant statistics about the criminal justice system and how it is
“a carnival mirror that distorts reality by magnifying the threat of street crime while minimizing
other harmful behaviors.” (A Crime…). The abundance of facts and statistics made the chapter
much easier for me to draw conclusions and think about than the other reading did. “The
Construction of Deviance” by an E. Goode was indeed thought-provoking, but the conceptuality
of it wasn’t as effective without the hard facts and statistics. I did appreciate all of the questions
Goode posed. To get his point across, he would literally comprise certain paragraphs entirely of
questions like, “What constitutes theft in the first place? Is borrowing and not returning
something theft? Is adopting someone else’s ideas and then profiting from them “intellectual
theft”? (Goode 1).
By far, my favorite part of “The Construction of Deviance” was the story about “Sally”
“who’s purpose was to show that deviance is often a “package deal,” that is, the same person is
involved with various and multiple deviance” and “engaging in deviance frequently leaves one
vulnerable to being abused and victimized by friends, acquaintances, and even strangers.”
(Goode 25). Sally’s story was a touching one because unfortunate circumstances led her to each
specific incident of deviance. It baffled me how hard it appears to be to get out of the cycle of
misfortune regarding deviance. Alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, rape, etc. all seem to be
oddly connected by an invisible thread- when one is present, the others can’t be too far away. A
lot of this in my opinion has to do with socio-economic status. It is a generalization, but a true
one that more crime of this nature occurs in the lower classes. It is not the nature of poor people
to abuse drugs, but when a blue collar worker finds his/herself forced to flip drugs on the side as
a well-needed additional source of income, they are more likely to get hooked on blow than a
college student is. In one case, the exposure to bad things is frequent and normalized, in the
other case exposure is rare if not sought out.
“sIn the nation, where blacks made up 11.4 percent of the population in 1974, they
accounted for 34.2 percent of arrests for Index crimes.” (A Crime…)… I could not believe that
when I heard it. How can an entire ethnicity be so disproportionate in the amount of crimes
committed? It didn’t take long to realize that it is the criminal justice system of the United States
of America at work. For years, America and the justice system has been forming this
stereotypical idea of what your average criminal looks like, and it is a young, black man. The
problem with this picture is its inaccuracy and blatant racism. The serious crimes America
should be focusing in on are not the ones that read into this stereotype. They should be focusing
in on the people who are least suspecting and hold the most power. Their crimes are severe and
occasionally lie in a gray area, but that is all the more reason to bring them to justice and into the
public eye. It’s time we redefine the true “American criminals.”

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