Class, power and crime: a summary
- Created by: Azia Singh
- Created on: 12-10-16 12:53
View mindmap
- Class, power and crime
- Marxism, class and crime
- Crimogenic capitalism
- 3 ways in which capitalism may lead to W/C crime
- Poverty makes crime the only way to survive
- Only way to obtain consumer goods
- Alienation leads to frustration and agression
- Gordon: crime is found in all social classes in capitalist society because it is a rational response to the capitalist system
- 3 ways in which capitalism may lead to W/C crime
- The state and law making
- Law making and law enforcement serve the interests of the capitalist class
- The British forced a money economy on East African colonies and with it a tax system, creating a new type of crime
- Snider: the state is reluctant to pass laws that regulate the activities of businesses or threaten their profitability
- Selective enforcement
- Powerless groups such as the W/C and EM's are criminalised by the justice system
- Impact of this: crime appears to be largely a W/C phenomenon. This divides the W/C by encouraging workers to blame the criminals in their midst for their problems, rather than capitalism
- Ideological functions of crime and law
- Pearce: some laws are passed that appear to benefit the W/C because they also benefit the ruling class
- The media and criminologists portray criminals as disturbed individuals, thereby concealing the fact that it is the nature of capitalism that makes people criminals
- Evaluation of Marxism
- Useful explanation of the relationship between crime and capitalist society
- Shows the link between law making and enforcement and the interests of the capitalist class
- Puts into a wider structural context the insights of labelling theory regarding the slective enforcement of law
- Largely ignores the impact of non-class inequalities
- Too deterministic
- Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates e.g. Japan
- Criminal justice system does sometimes act against the capitalist class
- Crimogenic capitalism
- Neo-Marxism: critical criminology
- A fully social theory of deviance
- Six aspects
- Wider origins of the deviant act
- Immediate origins of the deviant act
- The act itself
- The immediate origins of the social reaction
- The wider origins of social reaction
- The effects of labelling
- Two sources
- Six aspects
- Evaluation of criitcal crminology
- Feminists: gender blind
- Left realists: romanticises W/C crime; does not take crime on poor seriously and ignores its effects on W/C victims
- Walton and Young: 'The New Criminology' combated the 'correctionalist bias' in most existsing theories and laid some of the foundations for later radical approaches that seek to establish a more just society
- A fully social theory of deviance
- Crimes of the powerful
- White collar and corporate crime
- Sutherland aimed to challenge the stereotype that crime is a purely lower class phenomenon
- Pearce and Tombs defined white collar crime as corporate whereas Sutherland defined it as occupational
- Tombs: corporate crime does more harm than street crime because it has enormous costs
- The invisibility of corporate crime
- Lack of reporting on corporate crime and the sanitisation of it when it is reported
- Lack of political will to tackle it
- The crimes are often complex and law enforcers are understaffed, under-resourced and lacking technical expertise to investigate effectively
- Consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation at the level of laws and legal regulation
- Evaluation
- Nelken: strain theory and Marxism over-predict the amount of business crime - it is unrealistic to assume that all businesses would offend were it not for the risk of punishment
- Crime is not always carried out in the pursuit of profit e.g. state agencies in the former communist regimes
- May be more profitable for a comapny to be law-abiding e.g. Braithwaite and US pharmaceutical companies
- White collar and corporate crime
- Marxism, class and crime
Comments
No comments have yet been made