Cultural Criminology

This week’s article examines cultural criminology by Hayward and Young. They argue that cultural criminology focuses on interactions which power is exercised of rules created and rules broken. Cultural criminology refers to the notion of culture correlated with crime and its control. It has the potential for creativity through the lens of both crime and the agencies of control as cultural products. In other words, cultural criminology looks at the dynamic interplay of culture, crime and crime control which operate as cultural processes and explains the effects of crime and deviance.

Cultural criminology tries to bring back the role of culture and social construction in a criminological manner. This theory relates with strain theory. As discussed in class, strain theory states that individuals that lack the opportunity to achieve socially accept goals, achieve their goals illegitimate through criminal activities such as stealing. In the theory of cultural criminology, offenders are motivated by feelings through their experience of culture. They are left feeling strain because their culture is different then the others. This happens when individuals move to a different location and are forced to adapt to a new culture.

In modern society, tattoos have become mainstream. However, tattoos can question an individual’s professionalism. Connecting this perspective of “questioning a person’s ability to work” with labelling theory, we often see through the media that people who have tattoo’s are criminals or ex-offenders. Therefore, this raises the question, as our culture grows and more individuals have tattoo’s, is it fair to label people with tattoos as criminals or have we come to accept the norm of tattoos through the construct of culture?