Conscience Collective
The Community of True Crime
Long before Serial, The First 48, American Justice, The Central Park 5, or Helter Skelter, people felt the close-knit bond that develops in the wake of a serious crime. The bond unites them as a community, centering on their response to the transgressor, and the ways they make sense of what the wrongdoer did.
These communal responses have occurred very long before the emergence of the contemporary true crime era. Regarding the timelessness of community reactions to crime, these passages from Ecclesiastes 8 are revealing.
Why do people commit crimes so readily? Because crime is not punished quickly enough. A sinner may commit a hundred crimes and still live.
Oh yes, I know what they say: “If you obey God, everything will be all right, but it will not go well for the wicked. Their life is like a shadow and they will die young, because they do not obey God.”
But this is nonsense. Look at what happens in the world: sometimes the righteous get the punishment of the wicked, and the wicked get the reward of the righteous. I say it is useless.
Foremost, there is a clear symbiotic relationship between crime and punishment, and by extension, between criminal and community. If the offender is not appropriately dealt with, the public is troubled.
In Biblical times, followers of God and the godless live amongst each other, but are often treated the same, a state of equality that strikes many as unfair. It is seen as unfair because the righteous and the wicked are not the same. They are not brothers, and they are not morally equivalent.
Inherent to the relationship between the community and offenders are notions of deservedness and morality. Those who harm others are morally deserving of condemnation, just as victims and members of the public are deserving of justice. As philosopher Adam Smith brilliantly opined, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
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The broad concept at play here is the conscience collective, an intangible but very real public sentiment. The conscience collective appeared in sociologist Émile Durkheim’s book The Division of Labor in Society published in 1893.
Acknowledged as one of the founders of the academic discipline of sociology, Durkheim emphasized the supra-individual forces that constitute and mold society, forces that cannot be reduced to the mere biological and psychological characteristics of individuals. From his perspective, aggregate things like the conscience collective are “social facts.”
According to Durkheimian theory, an action is criminal when it arouses condemnation and shocks the conscience collective. During this condemnatory process, emergent feelings—above and beyond the people involved—develop and determine the appropriate response to the crime.
To think of it in contemporary language, the conscience collective is a true crime vibe that hangs in the air serving to bond, unite, and unify us against serious criminals.
That true crime fans consider themselves a community, complete with a sense of “we-ness” is further illustration of these communal principles.
Durkheim’s writings evoke some of the sentiment of Biblical scholars writing about pre-modern societies. Like Ecclesiastes, Durkheim describes the righteous anger that bubbles up in response to wrongdoing.
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them. We have only to notice what happens, particularly in a small town, when some moral scandal has just occurred. Men stop each other on the street, they visit each other, they seek to come together to talk of the event and to wax indignant in common. From all the similar impressions which are exchanged, and the anger that is expressed, there emerges a unique emotion, more or less determinate according to the circumstances, which emanates from no specific person, but from everyone. This is the public wrath.
Since criminal actions are reflexively condemned, the immediate response to the conduct is punishment. This process is made easier in societies where crime is framed in moralistic terms and law violations are construed as not only wrong, but sinful. However, in this context punishment is not a formal process imposed by a court, but a communal passion that cares about offensive conduct, what criminologists would refer to today as antisocial behavior. That caring is the public wrath.
Communal passion manifests in many ways in true crime America. It is seen in the throngs of concerned citizens outside the courthouse where inside a murderer faces trial. It is seen among the millions of consumers listening to true crime podcasts as they walk their dog or mow their lawn. It is seen when perusing the top-selling books on Barnes & Noble and Amazon sales lists. It is seen anywhere where criminal behavior shocks our moral cultural fabric.
It is also seen in unlikely places.
In 1978, Lawrence Singleton, a 51-year-old itinerant laborer, picked up 15-year-old Mary Vincent who was seeking a ride outside Modesto, California. The teenager thought she was getting assistance from a helpful, older man. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
After driving for a brief period, Singleton brutally attacked Vincent, sexually assaulting her, and then—as if out of a horror movie—using a hatchet to cut off her arms at the elbow. Convicted of rape and mayhem, Singleton received a 14-year prison term, but was paroled after eight years. The Singleton case is yet another reminder there is very little truth in criminal sentencing.
Singleton’s release incensed the public. With the assistance of local media, residents mobilized to force Singleton from their community if he attempted to locate near them. He was a total pariah. Even the late U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, formerly the mayor of San Francisco and a politician who was not known as a crime control enthusiast, lamented the parole of Singleton and the correctional system’s failure to value public safety.
As shown in the true crime documentary The Dark Side of Parole, part of the long-running A&E Investigative Reports series, angry residents—the embodiment of the conscience collective—were so opposed to Singleton that community supervisors sued the state to legally bar him from being paroled to their community.
Without any viable community placements, correctional authorities housed Singleton in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin State Prison, which now has the sanitized name San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. There, Singleton completed his parole sentence in isolation, and without incident.
Lawrence Singleton did not remain without incident for long. After returning to his home state of Florida, Singleton accrued several convictions for theft and served multiple sentences in county jail and state prison. But his conduct would escalate.
In February 1997, Singleton fatally stabbed Roxanne Hayes. This time the legal process was less forgiving. A Florida court convicted Singleton of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced him to death in 1998. Singleton died of natural causes three years later.
At his sentencing, the court found two aggravating circumstances. The first was the heinous, atrocious, and cruel nature of the murder and the second was Singleton’s prior violent felony convictions for rape, kidnapping, mayhem, sodomy, and attempted murder. For many, that laundry list of prior bad acts makes the blood boil.
At the penalty phase of his capital murder trial, Mary Vincent, whose prosthetic arms were a vivid reminder of the mayhem that Singleton inflicted, provided powerful testimony. Her poignant testimony ran point for the conscience collective that supported her in California.
To Durkheim, condemnation and the raw emotion of the conscience collective are particularly at play in more primitive, i.e., less “civilized” societies, where a personal style of justice supersedes the bureaucratic flavor of the formal legal system of modern society. Although that might be true, the notion that emotional outrage toward crime is uncivilized could also be an early sign of academic condescension toward punitive reactions to crime.
To the present, elitist perspectives sometimes portray retributive responses to crime, such as support of capital punishment, as reactionary and simplistic, lacking the “nuance” of more sophisticated opinions. It is one of many examples of ideological posturing that underscores reactions to crime.
In time, the community-building features of the conscience collective developed, and Durkheim suggested that punishment also evolved to take on a deterrent function.
It punishes, not because chastisement offers it any intrinsic satisfaction, but so that the fear of punishment may paralyze those who contemplate evil. It is no longer anger, but a well thought-out precaution which determines repression.
This means that as society evolves, it naturally rings out the blood and raw emotion from its response to crime.
It is also interesting that Durkheim uses the word “evil” to describe potential criminals, perhaps a subtle indicator that the father of sociology also had true crime instincts. Perhaps he too was a true crime aficionado.
When considering the development of the conscience collective and the impulses to punish, it is important to recognize that punishment can, and often does, have multiple purposes and philosophical rationales.
Harsh punishment can be retributive and deterrent just as slight punishment can be rehabilitative and deterrent. We sentence defendants to community service, probation, prison, or death for multiple reasons, often with an intentional blend of the carrot and the stick.
The Durkheimian perspective and the sociological research perspectives derived from it make clear that interest in criminal offenders and the response to them, both in terms of the informal communal reaction and formal or official state reaction, serve a critical societal purpose. We care when an offender victimizes others and violates our sense of moral and behavioral decency.
It is for these reasons that true crime podcasts, such as Serial Killers, Serial, or The Serial Killer Podcast, true crime national bestsellers, such as In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song, or Green River, Running Red, and classic films, such as the non-fictional Monster or the fictional The Silence of the Lambs usually involve the most violent types of offenders.
Heinous crimes arouse the greatest outrage because they allow a community to circle the wagons in the defense of their propriety.
Common but less severe forms of criminal behavior, such as drunk driving, larceny, or other non-violent crimes usually fail to arouse public anger. Consequently, these crimes fail to generate as much public interest. A podcast about a jaywalker or an individual who failed to appear in court for a traffic violation is not going to attract any listeners.
There is a lot to this. Some acts are considered innately evil (mala in se) whereas others are illegal but without the moral baggage (mala prohibita). Nominal criminals whose violations are a technical legal violation but not a moral one, remind us of ourselves. We have little revulsion toward normal criminals. As a result, true crime content creators usually ignore them.
Instead, we seek to understand those who criminal conduct is reprehensible and violates our basic sense of what is appropriate and good. We seek to understand that which shocks us. We respond viscerally to those who commit horrible crimes especially for which there is no easily apparent explanation.
As sociologist George Herbert Mead advised, “The revulsions against criminality reveal themselves in a sense of solidarity with the group, a sense of being a citizen which on the one hand excludes those who have transgressed the laws of the group and on the other inhibits tendencies to criminal acts in the citizen himself.”
Crime and punishment are among the primary vectors of community life. Once that is understood, it is easier to see why true crime is so culturally popular.