Despite increasing public understanding of how “crime” is shaped by political, social and economic contexts, and how different bodies enacting the same behaviors are treated differently by the legal system, criminal behavior is still often treated as a simple matter of individual choice. In turn, criminal stigma is seen as less deserving of social empathy or legal protection than those stigmas that are the result of accident or birth. People who are labelled as criminal have long been stigmatized as dishonest, untrustworthy and otherwise disreputable and must constantly navigate and work to counter this perception.