Class, power and crime

-Functionalism sees the law as a reflection of society's shared values, and crime as the product of inadequate or inappropriate socialisation into these values. Not everyone is equally socialised into society's shared culture. In modern societies with their complex division of labour, different groups and classes may develop their own separate subcultures. 

-For example, Walter B. Miller argues that the lower class has developed an independent subculture with its own distinctive norms and values that clash with those of the mainstream culture, and this explains why the lower class have a higher crime rate. Conforming to subcultural norms such as toughness and the pursuit of excitement can lead to legal conflict.

-People engage in deviant behaviour when their opportunties to achieve in legitimate ways are blocked. For example, Merton argues that American society's class structure denies working class people the opportunity to achieve money success that American culture values so highly. 

-As the working class are more likely to be denied legitimate opportunities to achieve success, they're more likely to achieve their money success through illegitimate means. Merton referred to this as innovation. In Mertons view, this explains why the woring class has a higher rate of utilitarian crime than the middle class.

-These stem from the idea that working class deviance comes from the blocked opportunity for legitimate success. A.K Cohen sees working class youths as culturally deprived; they have been denied socialisation into the mainstream, middle class culture. As a result, they lack the means to achieve in education and find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy. Their failure to succeed gives rise to status frustration. 

-The delinquent subculture that they join or form is the solution to the status frustration. By inverting mainstream values such as respect for property, working-class youths can gain status from their peers, for example by vandalising property. Cohen's theory thus helps to explain why the working class are mroe likely to commit non-utilitarian crime. 

-Cloward and Ohlin build on Merton and Cohen. They use the concept of illegitimate opportunity strucures to explain why a range of different crimes are more prevalent in the working class. They identify a criminal subculture in stable working class neighbourhoods that offers professional criminal career opportunities, a conflict subculture of gang violence and turf wars in poor areas with a high population turnover, and a retreatist, dropout drug subculture made up of those who fail in both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures. 

-Labelling theorists reject the view that official statistics are a useful resource for sociologists that give a valid picture of which class commits most crime. 

-Instead of seeking the supposed causes of working class criminality, they focus on how and why working class people come to be labelled as criminal. They emphasise the stereotypes held by law enforcement agencies that see the working class as typical criminals and the power of these agencies to successfully label powerless groups such as the working class.

-For this reason, labelling theorists have been described as 'problem makers'. They do not see official crime statistics as valid social facts or a useful resource. Rather, crime statistics are a topic whose construction we must investigate by studying the power of control agents to label working class people as criminal. 

-Crime is inevitable in capitalism because capitalism is criminogenic; by its very nature it causes crime. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class. It is therefore particularly damaging to the working class and this may give rise to crime:

-Poverty may mean that crime is the only way the working class can survive.

-Crime may be the only way they can obtain the consumer goods encouraged by capitalist advertising resulting in utilitarian crimes such as theft. 

-Alienation and lack of control of their lives may lead to frustration and aggression, resulting in non-utilitarian crimes such as violence and vandalism. 

-However, crime is not limited to the working class. Capitalism is a 'dog eat dog' system of ruthless competition among capitalists, while the profit motive encourages a mentality of greed and self interest. The need to win at all costs or go out of business, along with the desire for self enrichment, encourages capitalists to commit white collar crime and corporate crimes such as tax evasion and breathes of health and safety laws.

-Gordon argues that crime is a rational response to the capitalist system. 

-Marxists see law making and law enforcement as only serving the interests of the capitalist class. For example, Chambliss argues that laws to protect private property are the cornerstone of the capitalist economy. 

-Chambliss illustrates this with the case of the introduction of English law into Britains east african colonies. Britains economic interests lay in the colonies tea, coffee and other plantations, which needed a plentiful supply of local labour. 

-At the same time the local economy was not a money economy and so the British introduced a tax payable in cash, non payment was a punishable criminal offence. Since cash to pay the tax could only be earned by working on the plantations, the law served the economic interests of thr capitalist plantation owners. 

-The ruling class also have the power to prevent the introduction of laws that would threaten their interests. Thus, for example, there are few laws that seriously challenges the unequal distribution of wealth. Similarly, Snider argues that the capitalist state is reluctant to pass laws that regulate the activities or businesses or threaten their profitability. 

-Marxists agree with labelling theorists that although all classes commit crime, when it comes to the applicaton of the law by the criminal justice system, there is a selective enforcement. While powerless groups such as the working class and ethnic minorities are criminalised, the police and courts tend to ignore the crimes of the powerful.

-The law, crime and criminals also perform an ideological function for capitalism. Laws are occasionally passed that appear to be for the benfit of the working class rather than capitalism, such as the workplace health and safety laws. 

-Pearce argues that such laws often benefit the ruling class too; for example by keeping workers fit for work. By giving capitalism caring face, such laws create a false consciousness. 

-In any case, such as laws aren't rigorously enforced. For example, despite a new law against corporate homicide being passed in 2007, in its first 8 years there was only one successful prosecution of a uk company, despite the large numbers of death at work estimated to be caused by employers negligence. 

-Furthermore, because the state enforces the law selectively, crime appears to be a largely working class phenomenon. This divides the working class by encouraging workers to blame the criminals in their midst for their problems, rather than capitalism. 

-The media and some criminologists also contribute by portraying criminals as disturbed individuals , thereby concealing the fact that it is the nature of capitalism that makes people criminals. 

-Neo marxists are influenced by marxists, but combine elements of other theories. 

-The most important neo-marxist contribution to the understanding of crime and deviance has been the new criminology by Ian Taylor by Walton and Young. 

-Taylor agrees with Marxists that: Capitalist society is based on exploitation and class conflict and characterised by extreme inequalities of wealth and power. Understanding this is key to understanding crime. The state makes and enforces laws in the interest of the capitalist class and capitalism should be replaced by a classless society to reduce the levels of crime. The views of Taylor et al are described as critical criminology.

-Taylor et al argue that Marxism is deterministic. For example, it sees workers as driven to commit crime out of economic necessity. They reject this explanation, along with theories that crime is caused by other external factors sich as anomie, subcultures or labelling, or by biological and psychological factors. 

-Instead, Taylor et al take a more voluntaristic view. They see crime as meaningful action and a conscious choice by the actor. In particular, they argue that crime often has a particular motive, for example to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Criminals are not passive puppets whose behaviour is shaped by capitalism: they are delibrately striving to change society.

-Taylor et al aim to create a fully social theory of deviance; a comprehensive understanding of crime and deviance that would help to change society for the better. The theory would have two main sources: Marxists ideas about the unequal distribution of wealth and who has the power to make and enforce the law and ideas from interactionism and labelling theory about the meaning of the deviant act for the actor, societal reactions to it and the effects of the deviant label of the indivduals.

-In their view, a complete theory of deviance needs to unite 6 aspects: The wider origins of the deviance act in the unequal distribution of wealth and power in capitalist society, the immediate immediate origins of the deviant act the particular conext in which the individual decides to commit the act, the act itself and its meaning for the actor, the immediate origins of societal reaction and the wider origins of social reaction in the structure of capitalist society

-Edwin Sutherland defined white collar crime as: "A crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation'. Sutherland's aim was to challenge the stereotype that crime is purely a lower class phenomenon. However, his defintion fails to distinguish between occupational and corporate crime.

-Occupational crime committed by employees simply for their own personal gain, often against the organisation for which they work, e.g. stealing from the company or its customers. 

-Corporate crime committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals.

-A further problem comes from the fact that many of the harms caused by the powerful do not break the criminal law. For example, some may may administrative offences such as company failing go comply with codes of practice laid down by government regulators. 

-To overcome this, Pearce and Tombs define corporate crime as: "An illegal act or omission that is the result of deliberate decisions or culpable negligance by a legitimate business organisation that is intended to benefit the business."

-White collar and corporate crime do far more harm than ordinary or street crime such as theft and burglary. For example, one estimate puts the cost of white collar crimes in the USA at over ten times that of ordinary crimes. 

-Tombs notes that corporate crime has enormous costs: physical, environmental and economic. He concludes that corporate crime is not just the work of a few bad apples, but rather it is 'wide spread, routine and pervasive'

-Financial crimes such as tax evasion, bribery and illegal accounting. Victims include other companoes, shareholders, taxpayers and governments. 

-Crimes against consumers, such as false labellng and selling unfit goods. In 2011, the French government recommended that women with breast implants from the manufactuer Poly implant Prothese, have these reomoved because they were filled with dangerous silicone, rather than medical silicone. 

-Crime against employees, such as sexual and racial discrimination, violations of wage laws, of rights to join a union or take industrial action. Tombs calculates that up to 1,100 work related deaths a year involve employers breaking the law. This is more than annual total homicides. Palmer estimates that occupational diseases cause 50,000 deaths a year in the UK

-Crimes against the environmental include illegal pollution of air, water and land such as toxic waste dumping

-State corporate crime refers to the harm committed when government institutions and businesses cooperate to pursue their goals. This is an increasingly important area, because private companies now work alongside government in many areas.

-Carrabine et al note that we trust high status professions with financial, health, security and personal information and issues. However, their position and status give them opportunity to abuse this trust.

-For example, the multinational accountancy firm KPMG admitted in the USA to criminal wrong doing and paid a $456m fine for its role in tax fraud, while a uk tribunal found a tax avoidance scheme devised by accountants Ersnt and Young for wealthy clients unacceptable. Described by a treasury spokesperson as 'one of the most blatantly abusive scams of recent years', the scheme could have cost the taxpayer over £300m per year.

-Similarly, accountants and lawyers can be employed by criminal organisations, for example to lunder funds into legitimate businesses. They can also act corruplty by inflating fees, committing forgery, illegally diverting clients' money etc.

-The respected status, expertise and autonomy of health professionals also afford scope for criminal acitivty. The USA has seen huge numbers of fraudulent claims to insurance claims that have. ot actually been performed, while in the uk dentists have claimed payments from the nhs for treatments they have not carried out

-However, perhaps the most notorious case of the abuse of trust is that of the gp harold shipman. In 2000, shipman was convicted of the muder of 15 of his patients, but over the course of the previous 23 years, he is believed to have murdered at least another 200.

-In 1976, Shipman had been convicted of obtaining the powerful opiate pethidine by forgery and deception, and in the same year had obtained enough to kill 360 people. Yet for this he received only a warning and was allowed to continue practicing as a gp.

-Crime of this kind violates the trust that society places in professionals. In Sotherlands view, this makes white collar crime a greater crime than street crime because it promotes cynicism and distruct of basic social institutions and undermines the fabric of society. 

-The media give very little coverage to corporate crime, thus reinforcing the stereotype that crime is a working class phenomenon. They describe corporate crime in sanitised language, as technical infringements rather than real crime. For examples, embezzlement becomes 'accounting irregularities'; defrauding customers is mis-selling, etc.

-Lack of political will to tackle corporate crime: politicians rhetoric of being tough on crime is based on street crime. For example, while the home office uses crime surveys to discover the true extent of ordinary crime, it doesnt do so for corporate crime. 

-The crimes are often complex and law enforcers are often understaffed, underresourced and lacking technical expertise to investigate effectively. 

-Delabelling at the level of laws and legal regulation, corporate crime is consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation. For example, offences are oten defined as civil not criminal, and even in criminal cases, penalties are often fines rather than jail. Investigation and prosecution are limited

-Under reporting, often the victim is society at large or the environment, but may not realise. Even when victims are aware, they may not call it real crime or feel powerless to fight against it.

-All the previous factors help remove corporate crime from the dominant definitions of crime and the law and order agenda, rendering it largely invisible. 

-However, since the financial crisis of 2008, the activities of a range of different people may have made corporate crime more visible. These include campaigns against corporate tax avoidance such as occupy and uk uncut, investigative journalists, whistleblowers inside companies and the media.

-Similarly, neoliberal policies such as the marketisation and privatisation of public services mean that large corporations are much more involved in peoples lives and thus more exposed to public scrutiny.

-Often these are general theories of crime that sociologists have applied to this particular type of crime. In some cases, sociologists have combined different theories in their explanations. 

-Strain theory: Mertons strain theory argues that deviance results from the inability of some people to achieve the goals that society's culture prescribes by using legitimate means. For example, where opportunities to achieve the goal of material wealth by legal means are blocked, individuals may innovate. 

-Others have used this to explain corporate crime. Box argues that if a company cannot achieve its goal of maximising profit by legal means, it may employ illegal ones instead. Thus, when business conditions become more difficult and profitability is squeezed, companies may be tempted to break the law. 

-For example, in the most wide ranging study of corporate crimes, Clinard and Yeager found law violations by large companies deteriorated, suggesting a willigness to innovate to achieve profit goals. 

-Sutherland sees crime as behaviour learned from others in a social context. The less we associate with people who hold attitudes favourable to the law and the more we associate with people with criminal attitudes, the more likely we are to deviate ourselves. Thus, if a company's culture justifies committing crimes to achieve corporate goals, employees will be socialised into this criminality. For example, Geis found that individuals joining companies where illegal price fixing was practiced, this was socialised. We can link this idea to deviant subcultures and techniques of neurtralisation. 

-Deviant subcultures are groups of people who share norms and values that are different to those of wider society. They offer deviant solutions to their members shared problems. Company employees face problems of achieving corporate goals and may adopt deviant means to do so, socialising new members into these. The culture of business may also favour and promote competitive, aggressive personality types who are willing to commit crime to achieve success. 

-Techniques of socialisation- Sykes and matza argue that individuals can deviate more easily if they can produce justifications to neutralise moral objections to their misbehaviour. For example, white collar crinimals may say they were carrying out orders from above, blame the victim or claim that everyone is doing it. These techniques are essential in socialisation. 

-Delabelling- Sociologists have applied this to white collar and corporate crime, in an approach that Nelken calls delabelling. Unlike the poor, businesses and professionals often have the power to avoid labelling. For example, they can afford expensive experts such as lawyers and accountants to help them avoid activities they were involved in, or to reduce charges. Likewise, the reluctance or inability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute also reduces the number of offences recorded. 

-This means that sociologists who reply on official statistics will underestimate the extent of the offences.