The postmodernist view of crime and deviance is the sociological position that crime is not a fixed, objective category with a single cause, but a label produced by shifting discourses of power, media representation and consumer culture, so that explaining it means examining how societies define, watch and punish behaviour as much as why people offend. It applies the wider scepticism of postmodernism to the study of law, policing and punishment, and it differs from most earlier theories in questioning the categories those theories take for granted.
What is the postmodernist view of crime and deviance?
Postmodernism in sociology grew out of the claim, set out by Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition in 1979, that the grand narratives of modernity, such as progress, science and class struggle, have lost their authority. Applied to crime, this means rejecting any single master explanation. Functionalists explain crime through social integration, Marxists through capitalism and class power, and social constructionists through the creation of definitions. A postmodernist would say that each of these tells a story that cannot claim to be the truth, and that the most interesting questions concern how such stories, and the categories of criminal and law-abiding, come to be believed.
Three themes recur in postmodern writing on crime. The first is power and discourse, associated above all with Michel Foucault, which examines how knowledge about crime is produced and used to govern people. The second is simulation and hyperreality, drawn from Jean Baudrillard, which asks how media images shape our sense of what crime and order are. The third is the place of consumption and identity in late modern life, associated with Zygmunt Bauman and with cultural criminology. Taken together, they shift attention from the offender’s motives to the wider cultural and political environment in which crime is defined and experienced.
It is worth noting at the outset that postmodernism is less a single theory of crime than a set of tools and suspicions. Few sociologists call themselves postmodern criminologists, and some of the writers discussed below, including Foucault, rejected the label. They are grouped together because they share a refusal to treat crime as a natural fact.
How did Foucault explain crime, power and punishment?
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, is the most influential text. It begins with the public execution of Robert-Francois Damiens in France in 1757, a spectacle of sovereign power exercised on the body, and contrasts it with the timetabled regime of a prison less than a century later. Foucault’s argument is that punishment changed from a display of the monarch’s force to a system of discipline aimed at the mind and the habits of the offender. Power, on this account, is not simply repressive. It is productive, since it creates the kinds of people it seeks to manage. A fuller summary appears in the post on Discipline and Punish, and his wider thinking is covered in Who Was Michel Foucault?.
The key image is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a prison design in which a central tower can see every cell while the prisoners cannot tell whether they are being watched. Foucault argued that the effect is to make inmates police themselves, because they must assume that they may be observed at any moment. He saw this as a model for modern society, in which schools, factories, hospitals and barracks use observation, examination and routine to produce what he called docile bodies. The links between the architecture and the theory are discussed in the posts on Bentham’s panopticon and its relationship to Foucault.
Foucault also challenged the idea that prisons exist to reduce crime. He observed that prisons have been criticised as failures almost since their invention, because they produce reoffending, and he suggested that this failure has a use. By producing a recognisable class of delinquents, the prison separates serious offenders from the wider population and makes the existence of policing and surveillance appear necessary. Crime, in this reading, is not just a problem for the system of control but also something that helps to justify it. Historians and sociologists have disputed the details of his history, but the idea that institutions of control shape the people they claim to correct has proved lasting.
For deviance more broadly, Foucault’s work on madness, medicine and sexuality showed how experts classify people as abnormal. A person is defined as a criminal type or a sick individual by discourses of psychiatry, law and criminology that claim scientific authority. These classifications then become part of how people understand themselves. The overall effect is to treat deviance as something produced by systems of knowledge and not simply discovered by them. Surveillance in the present day, from CCTV to data collection, is often analysed in the same way, as in the posts on surveillance and the panoptic society in the UK.
What is hyperreality and how does it affect crime?
Jean Baudrillard argued that in late capitalist societies, images and signs have come to replace the things they once represented. He called the result hyperreality, a condition in which the copy, or simulacrum, becomes more influential than any original. The point applies to crime because most people’s knowledge of it comes from media, not experience. Television news, crime dramas, true crime podcasts and social media produce a picture of crime that may bear little relation to official statistics, and that picture shapes fear, policy and politics. The related sociology of fear and exaggerated reaction is discussed in moral panics.
Baudrillard used several illustrations that bear on crime and law. He argued in Simulacra and Simulation that Disneyland is presented as a fantasy in order to make the rest of America appear real, and he suggested that in the same way, public scandals and prisons can function to conceal how far the wider system is itself compromised. He also described the thought experiment of a staged hold-up, in which a fake robbery would be treated by the police and the courts as a real one because the system cannot separate the simulation from the act. The point is not that crime is imaginary but that the system’s reaction is driven by signs and codes, so that the boundary between real and simulated offences becomes uncertain.
This has practical echoes. Concerns about online fraud, deepfakes and identity theft involve crimes in which the victim, the offender and even the thing stolen are digital constructions. In these cases the postmodern emphasis on unstable identities and signs is easier to apply than in cases of physical violence. A post on moral panic and video games shows a related case, where claims about media and violence often rest on images more than evidence.
How do consumer culture and late modernity shape crime?
Zygmunt Bauman, whose work is introduced in The Work of Zygmunt Bauman, argued that in liquid modernity people are defined above all as consumers. Social status depends on what one can buy, and those who cannot participate become what he called flawed consumers. Bauman suggested that this group is increasingly managed through policing and imprisonment, as the state withdraws from welfare, and he read the English riots of 2011 as in part an expression of the frustrated consumer desires of those excluded from the market. The riots included looting of goods such as trainers and electronics, which supports the claim that consumption was a central motive, though other researchers emphasise anger at policing and inequality.
Ulrich Beck’s idea of the risk society adds that contemporary life is organised around anticipating and managing hazards. Crime control in this context concentrates on risk, using prediction, profiling and prevention in place of correction. This links to the broader changes of late modernity, in which established institutions lose their hold and identities become more fluid and open to choice.
Cultural criminology brings these ideas together. Researchers such as Jock Young, Jeff Ferrell and Keith Hayward argue that crime and the response to it are bound up with culture, media and emotion. Ferrell’s work on graffiti and street art shows how writing on walls can be at once an offence, an act of identity and a form of expression, depending on who is judging. Jack Katz’s Seductions of Crime, published in 1988, drew attention to the thrill and moral emotion that accompany offending, while Stephen Lyng’s idea of edgework describes the voluntary pursuit of risk. Cultural criminologists argue that these experiences are not noise in the data but central to why crime occurs and why it attracts attention.
What is constitutive criminology?
Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic’s Constitutive Criminology, published in 1996, is the most developed attempt to build a postmodern theory of crime. They argue that crime is not just a product of society but also helps to constitute it, so that offenders, victims and institutions create each other through their interaction. They define crime as harm, understood as the power to deny others their humanity, and they point out that the law’s definition of crime often ignores harms caused by powerful organisations. This approach connects to the study of white collar crime, in which harmful conduct is frequently handled outside the criminal law.
Examples of the postmodernist view of crime and deviance
Surveillance is the clearest example. The spread of CCTV, facial recognition and online tracking is read as a modern form of the panopticon, in which people regulate their behaviour because they might be watched. Graffiti and street art show how the label of deviance depends on context, since the same act can be treated as vandalism or celebrated as art once it enters a gallery. Online crime shows identities and evidence that are easily faked, and the rise of true crime entertainment shows how offences are turned into media products. The 2011 riots show consumer culture and exclusion interacting, although interpretations of them remain contested. In each case the postmodernist asks who is doing the defining and what that definition achieves.
What are the criticisms of the postmodernist view of crime and deviance?
The most forceful critique comes from left realists, such as John Lea and Jock Young in What Is to Be Done About Law and Order?, published in 1984. Young himself later turned to cultural criminology, but the realist objection remains that crime has real victims who are often poor, and that an approach which concentrates on discourse and representation can seem to trivialise their experience. Marxists argue that postmodernists neglect the material basis of power in ownership and class, and that talk of fluid identities hides inequality. Feminists point out that violence against women is a pattern with clear causes that a theory suspicious of causes may obscure.
A second criticism is about method and evidence. Postmodern writing is often highly abstract, and its claims, such as Baudrillard’s argument that the 1991 Gulf War did not take place, appear to deny facts in a way that critics find irresponsible. It is difficult to test and offers little guidance for policy, because if every definition is contingent there is no clear basis for choosing between them. David Garland, in Punishment and Modern Society in 1990, engaged closely with Foucault and argued that his account of punishment was too focused on discipline and neglected other functions, such as moral expression. A final point is that the approach can be accused of its own grand narrative, since the claim that power is everywhere is itself a general theory.
Defenders reply that questioning categories is a necessary part of critique and that the approach has produced empirical work, especially in cultural criminology, which uses ethnography and visual methods. They also note that the policy risks of an uncritical trust in official definitions are plain from the history of misuse of surveillance and classification.
Why does the postmodernist view of crime matter in sociology?
The view matters because it shows that definitions of crime are never neutral. By asking who defines crime, who watches whom and what images shape public opinion, it brings power, media and consumption into criminology. It also fits a world of online offending, mass surveillance and rapidly circulating images better than some older theories. Students will usually be asked to compare it with other approaches, such as labelling theory, with which it shares a concern for definition, and the symbolic interactionist account, and to set out both its insights and its weaknesses. A good answer states the postmodernist claim, supports it with Foucault, Baudrillard and Bauman, and evaluates it with the realist, Marxist and feminist objections.
