... for a crime to be prosecuted, corpus delicti (or "proof of a crime") must be established. The concept of "crime or criminology" denotes both definite perspectives and broader orientations that have emerged in criminology, sociology, and criminal justice over the past few years. Most specifically, cultural criminology represents a perspective developed by Ferrell & Sanders (1995), and likewise employed by Redhead (1995) and others (Kane 1998a), that interweaves particular intellectual threads to explore the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life. Crime as Culture To speak of crime as culture is to acknowledge at a minimum that much of what we label criminal behavior is at the same time subcultural behavior, collectively organized around networks of symbol, ritual, and shared meaning. Put simply, it is to adopt the subculture as a basic unit of criminological analysis. While this general insight is hardly a new one, ...

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