Justice & Law Quote by Freda Adler

Adler’s line is a cold shower for anyone who likes their law draped in moral velvet. By yanking away “ethical rationalizations” and “philosophical pretensions,” she’s not denying that harm exists; she’s exposing how often the language of principle is used as a press release for power. The sentence works because it reverses the usual order of legitimacy: instead of crime being a natural category the state neutrally identifies, the state becomes the author of the category.

The key move is her use of “group in power.” Not “society,” not “the people,” not even “government” in the abstract. It’s a reminder that law is drafted and enforced by coalitions with interests, blind spots, donors, and enemies. That phrasing smuggles in the criminological insight that what gets policed is rarely a pure measure of harm. It’s a measure of whose behavior is legible as threatening and whose is treated as normal, entrepreneurial, or simply invisible.

The subtext bites hardest when you think about how “crime” slides across eras and demographics: drugs versus pharmaceuticals, loitering versus leisure, protest versus “public order,” white-collar fraud versus street theft. Adler is also pointing at the asymmetry between prohibition and punishment: power doesn’t just define the boundary; it decides where to patrol it, who gets searched, and who gets a lawyer on speed dial.

As an educator speaking from within criminology’s critical tradition, she’s not offering cynicism for its own sake. She’s issuing a diagnostic: if crime is politically constructed, then reform isn’t just about better people or tougher sentences. It’s about interrogating who writes the rules, who benefits from them, and whose conduct is being named “criminal” to keep the social hierarchy tidy.