Crime and Punishment

Nuts, sluts, perverts, prostitutes, slags, murderers, psychopaths, militants, muggers, rioters, squatters and scroungers are all social censures with the potential to mobilise the forces of law, order and moral purity against targeted sections of the population.[1] In A Theoretical Introduction to the Function of Psychoanalysis in Criminology, Lacan says we would do well to recognise that it is the law and its accompanying punishment that delineates the crime. Indeed, we can understand that a person becomes a criminal not by breaking the law, but rather when s/he is caught.…