Crime & Jurisprudence

A Dyadic Perspective on Crime and Criminality

Crime is usually defined legally: a crime is an act prohibited by law and punishable by the state. That definition is useful in courts, but it is not sufficient for understanding crime as a human phenomenon.

A Dyadic perspective begins elsewhere.

Crime is not merely rule-breaking. Crime is an act perceived by a community as tyrannical: an act that subordinates another person’s agency, violates the cooperative order, and is experienced not only as an offense against a victim, but as an offense against the community itself.

This does not mean that every law identifies a real crime. Nor does it mean that every real tyranny is recognized by law. States, corporations, institutions, and other permanent hierarchies often criminalize conduct that produces no true victim, while ignoring or protecting acts that are deeply tyrannical. The law is one community’s formal attempt to define and respond to crime, but it is never identical with crime itself.

From a Dyadic perspective, crime begins with agency.

Healthy human life is cooperative. Each person is a center of agency, meaning, intention, and interpretation. We do not merely exist beside one another; we become ourselves with one another. Human beings are not isolated monads. We are relational creatures whose selves emerge through interaction.

The criminal act, in its deepest form, occurs when one person treats another person’s agency as subordinate to his own.

The criminal says, implicitly or explicitly:

“When my goals conflict with your autonomy, your autonomy loses.”

Violence is one expression of this principle, but it is not the only one. Theft, fraud, exploitation, coercive control, abuse, trafficking, corruption, and institutional oppression can all follow the same basic pattern. The criminal act reduces another person from a fellow center of agency into an object, instrument, obstacle, resource, or target.

This is why coercion may be more fundamental than violence. Violence is often the final tool of coercion, but many tyrannical acts are nonviolent. A person can dominate through deception, manipulation, threat, bureaucracy, social pressure, economic control, or institutional power. The absence of physical violence does not necessarily mean the absence of tyranny.

This also means that criminality should not be simplistically attributed to poverty, mental illness, ideology, identity, or demographic category. These may correlate with some crimes in some contexts, but correlates are not explanations. Most poor people do not commit crimes. Most mentally ill people are not violent. Most people who suffer humiliation, trauma, rejection, rage, or despair do not cross the threshold into criminal action.

The more important question is not merely, “What pain did this person experience?”

The question is:

“What made coercion seem permissible, necessary, profitable, or inevitable?”

A Dyadic criminology would examine the relational conditions that attract crime. Four such attractors are especially important.

First, crime is attracted to low-risk, high-reward situations. If an act appears profitable and the real or perceived risk is low, some people will ask, “Why not?” This is not because they are uniquely evil, but because the moral and relational signals restraining the act have weakened.

Second, crime is attracted to systemic corruption. When institutions reward dishonesty, predation, or rule manipulation, individuals learn that cooperation is for fools. If everyone appears to be exploiting the system, exploitation becomes normalized.

Third, crime is attracted to environments with a high density of tyrannical individuals. In such settings, people may learn that trust is dangerous, vulnerability is weakness, and domination is survival. A child raised among coercive adults may come to believe that all relationships are contests for control.

Fourth, crime is attracted to marginalization. When people are excluded from meaningful participation in the cooperative order, conformity loses legitimacy. A person who experiences the community only as rejection, humiliation, or exploitation may become more vulnerable to criminal identities, criminal networks, or criminal adaptations.

These attractors can exist in any social class. Poverty does not automatically produce crime, and wealth does not prevent it. Different classes simply provide different criminal opportunities. A poor person may have access to one set of illegal strategies; a wealthy or powerful person may have access to another. The underlying issue is not class-based criminality, but opportunity, accountability, and the condition of the relational field.

Permanent hierarchies are especially concerning because they tend to concentrate agency. The higher one rises in a rigid hierarchy, the easier it becomes to treat others as instruments of one’s purposes. The state may criminalize theft while committing unjust seizures. A corporation may condemn fraud while profiting from deception. A religious institution may preach virtue while protecting abusers. An academic or bureaucratic system may speak of care while rewarding control.

The Dyadic critique is not that structure itself is evil. Some structure is necessary. The challenge lies in permanent hierarchy: arrangements in which some persons or institutions acquire durable authority to define reality, assign blame, restrict agency, and punish dissent without sufficient reciprocal accountability.

This can lead to inconvenient and uncomfortable truths.  For example, the state’s promise is to reduce crime by protecting the community from tyranny. But the state also claims a monopoly over defining and punishing unsanctioned tyranny. This creates an unavoidable danger: the state may punish real crimes, ignore crimes useful to itself, and invent victimless crimes that serve moral panic, political control, or institutional self-preservation.

A Dyadic perspective therefore tends to favor legal minimalism. Before criminal law is used, a community should ask: Is this truly the government’s business? Is there a real victim? Is coercive law the least tyrannical effective response? Can the matter be handled at a smaller, more local, more relational level? Does the proposed law protect agency, or does it merely expand institutional control?

From a Dyadic perspective, the goal of justice should not be vengeance. It should be restoration of cooperative order wherever possible. This does not mean naïveté. Some people must be restrained because they remain dangerous. Some harms cannot be undone. Some offenders may never safely return to ordinary community life.

But even then, the aim should remain humane: truth, accountability, protection, rehabilitation where possible, and the refusal to become tyrannical in the name of opposing tyranny.

A Dyadic approach to criminal justice would therefore emphasize:

- minimal criminal laws (laws applying only to tyrannical acts, only to behaviors and not thoughts or beliefs, etc.)
- no victimless crimes,
- strong due process,
- the presumption of innocence,
- opposition to the death penalty,
- rehabilitation as the purpose of incarceration,
- careful protection against wrongful conviction,
- best practices in policing, prosecution, and judging,
- restorative justice where appropriate,
- and serious attention to the relational conditions that generate criminal behavior.

The central question is not simply, “How do we punish crime?”

The deeper question is:

“How do we build communities in which cooperation remains more available, more credible, and more rewarding than coercion?”

Crime is a failure of agency-in-relation. It occurs when one person, group, or institution refuses the equal agency of another. Criminality is not merely a trait inside an individual. It is an emergent pattern in a damaged relational field.

To reduce crime, then, we must do more than threaten punishment. We must strengthen the conditions under which people can live with one another without domination.

A healthy community teaches:

“I know myself with you.”

A tyrannical one teaches:

“I know myself against you.”

Crime begins where the second replaces the first.

Justice begins when the first becomes possible again.