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Key Words crime, law, public policy, legal reform, deviance, social control
Abstract Organizing scholarship both chronologically and thematically, this article provides a review and critical evaluation of the literature that examines factors influencing criminalization. The first part of the paper examines three streams of inquiry and theorizing: (a) classic work that has shaped decades of scholarship on criminalization by focusing on the relationship between demographic changes, material and symbolic politics, and the emergence of criminal law; (b) contemporary work that unpacks the nature of the relationship between organizational, social movement, and state-related factors that structure and mediate the outcome of definitional and political processes involved in efforts to criminalize elements of social life; and (c) more recent work that envisions criminalization as a social process intimately connected to, and indeed arguably derivative of, larger processes of institutionalization, globalization, and modernization. The discussion and conclusion section summarizes the consequences of these three streams of inquiry and theorizing for our collective understanding of the structures and processes that underlie criminalization. Thereafter, the article concludes with a proposed agenda for subsequent research on criminalization and related topics.
INTRODUCTION
Over a half a century ago Edwin Sutherland (1950a,b) published one of "the earliest and best known sociological investigations of the origins of a specific type of criminal law" (Galliher & Tyree 1985, p. 100). In his groundbreaking and frequently cited study of criminalization,1 Sutherland argued that the origins and diffusion of sexual psychopath laws is largely the result of two things: the manipulation of public opinion by the press and the influence of experts on the legislative process. Since the publication of this study, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, and sociolegal scholars alike have affirmed the crucial role the media and experts play in processes of criminalization; however, they increasingly have pointed to a plethora of demographic, organizational, political, structural, and institutional conditions that shape when and how social behaviors and statuses become defined as criminal over time and across geopolitical boundaries. Moreover, from Chambliss's (1964) classic work on the social forces that enabled vagrancy laws to emerge in the fourteenth century to Boyle's (2002) recent examination of the global diffusion of laws designed to curb female genital cutting in the modern era, the criminalization literature has become increasingly...