Homelander and the criminology of impunity: when the crime is committed by the most powerful

Picture a man capable of melting a person with his gaze, who does it, and who the next morning appears smiling in the ad campaign of the company that manufactured him. That's The Boys in one sentence. Homelander isn't interesting because he's the most powerful being on the planet, but because his power includes something far more terrifying than eye-lasers: the power to keep his atrocities from being called atrocities. When he pulls the trigger, Vought's machinery doesn't report a crime. It reports an act of heroism.

Before we go on, the guiding principle of this house: to explain is not to excuse. Pointing out that the system shields Homelander doesn't dilute his personal responsibility; it underlines it. Critical criminology doesn't say «poor powerful man, it's the structure»: it says there is a structural responsibility —that of the apparatus that covers for him— and an individual responsibility —that of the one who chooses to kill knowing he can. Fiction exaggerates the mechanism so we can see it. In reality it works the same way, only without the lasers.

// The uncomfortable questionwho holds the power to decide what a crime is

Traditional criminology took crime for granted: there are laws, there are people who break them, let's study those people. In the nineteen-seventies, a group of criminologists flipped the question around. In The New Criminology (1973), Taylor, Walton and Young argued that the prior question isn't «who commits crime», but who holds the power to define what counts as a crime. Because the law doesn't fall from the sky: it is written, applied and interpreted by actors with interests, and not all of them have the same capacity to shape it.

That's where critical criminology comes from: a lens that studies crime as a social and political category, not as a natural fact. Its thesis is deliberately uncomfortable: the penal system tends to hunt down the crimes of the weak with a magnifying glass —street theft, petty drugs— while leaving in the shadows the massive harms of the powerful, which often aren't even classified as crimes, or which, when they are, rarely end in a conviction.

Vought is that net made corporation. The company doesn't just produce superheroes: it produces the narrative that decides which of their actions is «saving the world» and which gets buried in a confidentiality agreement. Homelander kills, and Vought manufactures the frame in which that act reads as strength, authority or necessary collateral damage. Crime, in his world, is literally whatever the marketing department decides not to call heroism.

// The theorysutherland, reiman and the crimes that are almost never tried

The intuition goes back a long way. In 1949, Edwin Sutherland coined the concept of white-collar crime, and shook his discipline: crime isn't a matter for the poor, he said; the costliest harms are committed by respectable people from positions of power, and precisely for that reason they escape the penal radar. They don't fit the image of «the criminal», so we don't even see them.

Decades later, Jeffrey Reiman took it to the bone with a title that says it all: The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (1979). His argument is that the penal system doesn't fail when it doesn't pursue the powerful: it works exactly as it was designed to work. It selects downward. It turns into «crime» what those at the bottom do, and it naturalizes, makes invisible or legalizes the harm of those at the top. Homelander is the perfect caricature of that asymmetry: the more powerful, the further from the cell.

// From withinhow the conscience of one who thinks himself a god is shielded

The psychological question remains: how does someone cause harm and still sleep, and even believe himself good? Albert Bandura studied it under the name of moral disengagement (1999): the set of mental tricks with which a person deactivates the self-censorship that normally restrains cruelty. Justifying the harm as a greater good, dehumanizing the victim, blurring responsibility within the group, minimizing the consequences… None of them require superpowers.

Homelander uses them all, amplified. He sees himself as a kind of divinity in the service of a people who should be grateful to him; those he harms he reduces to obstacles, ingrates or less-than-human; and when something goes wrong, the fault always lies with his surroundings, never with him. Moral disengagement is the software that lets him be, at once, executioner and, in his own head, the hero of the story. Vought's external power and the conscience's internal shielding feed off each other.

A caution is in order: describing these mechanisms isn't psychoanalyzing anyone from a distance, nor turning evil into a diagnosis. It's naming documented processes that operate in ordinary people, not only in supervillains. That is precisely the usefulness of fiction: Homelander makes visible, on a monstrous scale, something that on a human scale goes unnoticed every day.

// He's not alonea gallery of villains the law never reached

Homelander heads a lineage of villains defined not by their ferocity, but by their impunity. Lex Luthor commits in plain sight what, coming from anyone else, would be a sure prison sentence, but his fortune and his image rewrite how each act is read. Logan Roy shows that a media empire can manufacture the reality that suits it, including the definition of what is abuse and what is «doing business».

Immortan Joe takes the idea to its dystopian extreme: when you control the water, you are the law, and your cruelty dresses itself up as order. And the counterpoint is provided by Bill Butcher, the hunter of supes who, in his crusade against impunity, becomes contaminated by the very methods he fights —a reminder that pointing out the crime of the powerful doesn't exempt you from examining your own. You can begin the journey with Homelander's case file and pull the thread.

Critical criminology doesn't propose that we stop looking at the thief on the corner, but that we stop looking only there. Its discomfort is healthy: it forces us to ask why we call the one who steals a wallet a criminal and the one who ruins thousands a visionary, why the label of criminal sticks so easily to some bodies and slides off others. Homelander doesn't exist. The asymmetry he caricatures does. And that's the part we should take seriously when the screen goes dark.