Constructing Crime examines the central question: Why do we define and enforce particular behaviours as crimes and target particular individuals as criminals?

To answer this question, contributors interrogate notions of crime, processes of criminalization, and the deployment of the concept of crime in five radically different sites. Two studies of fraud against welfare recipients and physicians illustrate that uneven enforcement of the law can leave the privileged with a sense of entitlement and the marginalized with an imposed criminal self-concept. An examination of the...