The Holocaust and Disciplinary Myopia in Criminology and Sociology: Social injury as a response to the challenges of legal formalism

Criminological and sociological discourse recognizes the impact of structure on crime, but generally eschews the consideration of structural damage and human suffering emanating from malevolent social movements (e.g., the Holocaust). Legal formalism presents conceptual challenges that has hindered analysis of harmful macroscopic phenomena, as it created jurisprudential impediments to be surmounted by the architects of the Nuremberg Tribunals. In considering these issues, a new ‘dark figure’ is identified that is compatible with phenomena examined from the social harm perspective, and to remediate disciplinary myopia, a specification of Edwin Sutherland’s (1945) concept of social injury is suggested and contrasted with Galtung’s (1969) construct of structural violence. Social injury refers to the recursive damage to social structure and human potential through the functional impairment of social institutions.