It has almost become essential to categorise the criminal. We have effectively created a criminal type. This idea has an appeal to the those in power, it makes the crime and the criminal appear as a species in its own right and it provides an explanation or rather an excuse.
7 billion people on the planet some of them are bound to have something in common. What we have in way of reassuring the public is making criminals seem different. The larger the crime the more the aura of the criminal. Take Hitler for instance numerous books about his ancestry, childhood, and failed love affairs are cited as his reason for megalomania. Almost all of us have bad childhood experiences and failed love affairs, but finding evidence of criminality in alleged pathology colludes with the criminal.
Criminality has acquired the status of the ‘other’ in our discourse of normality. By creating a criminal profile we stop asking how we create criminality or how we define crime. We have come to excuse the criminal of their crime. The most recent example would be how the new DSM is choosing to medicalise rape and thereby giving the rapist the sanction to rape. The rioters in UK were of all colours, religions or lack of them, communities, social strata and not all of them were young, all of them didn’t have neurochemical imbalances, which made them criminals.
Criminals are not born, criminals and crime are created spontaneously.
PS: Homosexuality was a crime too and homosexuals were also profiled to find what kind of social or personal inadequacies created homosexuality. The situation seems absurd now but it has taken the life of many homosexual individuals.
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