Mundane Crime

Abstract

Popular discussions of "the crime problem" rarely give much attention to "mundane crime," which is a term for a variety of commonplace, low visibility, and often innocuous forms of lawbreaknig found in abundance in American society. Four kinds of mundane crime are identified and discussed: petty vice and public disorder offenses, folk crime, work place crime, and environmental abuse offenses. This paper also argues that a large share of mundane crime arises out of situational influences and other causal processes that have been insufficiently studied by criminologists.