ABSTRACT
In my own case, for example, I was assigned the criminology course in my first year of teaching as an instructor at Princeton University, although I knew almost nothing about the field, a kind of assignment of little concern apparently to sociology departments then and now. But I began learning what I could, one step ahead (often a misstep) of my students. I was appalled to find that textbooks in the field made almost no effort to examine what I would have thought to be basic issues such as varying conceptions of crime, how and why society defined some behavior criminal, and the meaning of crime from the viewpoint of the offender. The vast body of writing in the law (which I was dimly aware existed) was largely ignored, including the analysis of criminal intent that evidently played a large part in legal thought. And punishment was almost uniformly viewed as a
358 The Structural-Functional Perspective on Imprisonment
barbarism, and ineffective to boot. A number of liberal sentiments, which I largely shared, seemed to have hardened into a set of clichs that closed off inquiry. But my experience in the army had persuaded me that, for better or for worse, people often became whatever they were assigned regardless of personal proclivities or skills, and I set about becoming a criminologist.
