Emotions and Crime

Crime is not only a legal fact; it is also a social fact whose experience, interpretation, and response are deeply shaped by socially produced emotions. Victims, offenders, judicial actors, the media, and citizens experience and interpret crime through sensibilities that shape definitions, attributions of responsibility, and institutional responses.

The sociology of bodies and emotions and studies on deviance and social control converge isin this session to address the emotional dimension surrounding crime from complementary perspectives. Fear, indignation, compassion, empathy, revenge, forgiveness, remorse, the desire for punishment, or expectations of reparation and reintegration are not merely individual experiences, but also socially produced and distributed phenomena that intervene in the configuration of public policies, systems of social control, and forms of social coexistence.

This joint session between RC58 Society and Emotions and RC29 Deviance and Social Control invites contributions that explore the relationship between emotions and crime from diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives. We welcome research addressing, among others, the following themes: social emotions surrounding crime and deviance; the emotional experiences of victims, offenders, and their social environments; the institutional, political, and media production of sensibilities related to crime and their impact on public decision-making; processes of stigmatization, criminalization, and social control; emotions linked to punishment, reparation, and restorative justice; and emotions as factors in the reproduction or transformation of social order.

Keywords: emotions, crime, social control, criminalization, politics of sensibilities.