Until recently... Law was seen as a reflection and reaction to social values and behavior patterns (that is, as a dependent variable) rather than having in its own right some positive impact on the social order. Recent uses of the law as a conscious instrument for promotion of social change (as in racial desegregation and equal opportunity policies) helped produce a rethinking of this passive concept of law. But in the area of crime and delinquency analysis, it has taken sociologists a long time to heed the wisdom of Hermann Mannheim's sensible comment:
"We have made considerable efforts to discover what sort of person the offender is and why he has broken the law, and we rack our brains to find out what to do with him... Hardly ever do we pause for a moment to examine critically the contents of the very law the existence of which alone makes it possible for the individual to offend against it."
Oh wow. Ohhhh. Oh I gotta sit down. Wait, I'm already sitting down.
We often prefer to see crime and delinquency as alien phenomena, as somehow existing outside of society, involving attacks on society. These disturbing acts, we would like to think, do not reflect the normal workings of our social system, but rather represent some kind of aberrational malfunctioning of the system. Were it true, such an idea might well be reassuring, but clearly it is not. Crime and delinquency, along with other problems, are integral features of the social order and cannot be explained by reference to some "external" or "abnormal" phenomena or occurrences.
Unfortunately, the persisting unwillingness to face up to this fact (and the related fact that legislation itself "produces" crime and delinquency) has even led some sociologists to commit what they term the "evil causes evil" fallacy. This fallacy, that "bad" consequences must have "bad" causes, blinds one to the ways in which socially disturbing behavior may be grounded in aspects of the dominant social structure and prevailing value systems.
published in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and seventy three
A corollary of this reasoning is the belief that such problems as crime and delinquency always require special solutions... One particularly unfortunate result of this is an inordinate focus on the individual deviants or "offenders" themselves. Such individuals are seen as being basically different from nonoffenders...and it is in this basic differentness that the "causes" of delinquency problems are believed to lie.