Criminal class

Abstract

Crime is a cry of distress.1 It is the cry from the victim, but also a cry from the criminal. It is the cry of a wretched soul already imprisoned in conditions that created the need for the (cry)me. This social incarceration preexists the juridical incarceration-the formal sentencing only makes manifest the invisible walls, razor wire, and impermeable social, economic, and psychic barriers that exclude, silence, and paralyze. Crime makes visible these unseen boundaries-it is always a cry for dignity, a cry for freedom, not a cry to be apart, but a cry to be a part. The (cry)me is the sublimated scream of society’s repressed desires, the irruption of a neurosis-both individual and social-that has incubated in the subterranean darkness of the unconscious. Crime is society revealing to itself the aspects of its psyche that have been silenced, oppressed, buried, those parts of the psyche that must speak, sublimate, return. (Cry)me is this treble cry: the yell of the violated, the violator, and the soul of society itself.