In the previous two chapters, the discussion focused on the two different aspects of Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world: that is, the reality of the social world and its inseparable connection to the presencing of a human being. By focusing our discussion in this way, the distinction of a human being's unity with the world could be more thoroughly explored without concluding that either of these co-constituting aspects of being-in-the-world can ever be configured as separate or discrete philosophical categories. To be a being-in-the-world is to discover a fluid phenomenology that emerges from this unified phenomenon. When this project is applied to the social construction of crime and criminal behavior, a similar phenomenology is revealed.

When one explores the phenomenology of the social construction of crime and criminal behavior, what becomes immediately apparent are the various ways in which individual existence and social context become powerfully configured within this meaning-generating process. The very foundation of the construction of social knowledge is situated within not only a given set of human experiences, but must also include the contextual ground from which these socially constructed meanings are engaged and lived. Perhaps stated more simply: there is no subjective construction of experience absent that is not situated within a social world(s) that is separate human experience.

As Quinney has observed, the production of crime is always the “result” of something else, of something that has come before the actual act of crime; it is this “something else” that helps to reveal not only the phenomenology of this individual act, but a phenomenology that always reveals the social world as well. It is often incorrectly argued that phenomenology, given its overly subjectivist stance, is simply incapable of taking up the reality of the world in this constructive process. From this point of view, individual perceptions or the “mineness” of Dasein are constructed as isolated events that are somehow closed off to the contextual realities of the social world. Individual perception becomes a self-contained in-itself, whose perspective of the world emerges from an isolated perceptual field.