Evalutation of Marxist Crime

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Evalutation of Marxist Crime

Advantages

  • It offers a useful explanation of the relationship between crime and capitalist society.
  • Marxists also offer a solution to crime. By replacing capitalist society with an egalitarian Communist society, the root cause of crime would be removed
  • It shows the link between law making and enforcement and the interests of the capitalist class (by doing so it also puts into a wider structural context the insights of labelling theory regarding the selective enforcement of the law).
  • The criminal justice system does sometimes act against the interests of the capitalist class. For example, prosecutions for corporate crime do occur (however, Marxists argue that such occasional prosecutionsperforman ideological function in making the system seem impartial).
  • It has also influenced recent approaches to the study of the crimes of the powerful.

Disadvantages

  • It ignores individual motivation. It is highly deterministic, rarely considering notions of individual free-will.
  • Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates
  • It largely ignores the relationship between crime and other inequalities that may be unrelated to class, such as ethnicity and gender.
  • Left realists argue that Marxism focuses largely on the crimes of the powerful and ignores intra-class crimes (where both the criminals and victims are working class) such as burglary and ‘mugging’, which cause great harm to victims.
  • It over-predicts the amount of crime in the working class: not all poor people commit me, despite the pressures of poverty.
  • Not all laws, however, are so clearly in ruling class interests. Many seem to benefit everyone, such as traffic laws
  • IIt as also influenced recent approaches to the study of the crimes of the powerful.

Evaluation

Marxists focus too much on the class divide and ignore free will and instincts of criminals, does not explain crime for all types of people

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