ABSTRACT
Fyodor Dostoevsky, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist imprisoned for four years in a Siberian prison camp for alleged political crimes, is often quoted as saying that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” While prisons can indeed tell us much about the values of a society, crime in general—its definition, what we believe to be the causes, and how a society reacts to it—allows us to observe not only civilization but other dimensions of social and intellectual life. These dimensions, or themes, relate to crime and also pertain to fundamental—and unresolved—questions about human existence. In this chapter, I consider how these fundamental themes within the human experience, mediated through six academic disciplines, shape our conceptions of crime.
