Marxism

• Marxism

  • Crime and deviance = negative role in society, positive for ruling class
  • Focuses on white collar crime and corporate crime committed by m/c
  • Argue police and CJS work on behalf of ruling class
  • Law = super structure of society
• Althusser

  Ideological state apparatus helps justify/hide social class inequalities

  • inequality starts in economic structure > law ensures w/c don’t challenge unjust organisation of capitalist society
• Difference of crimes committed by classes

  • Offences committed by m/c = not clearly defined as offences are selectively/weakly enforced
  • E.g. those who defraud the Welfare System are treated differently to those commit tax fraud
  • Those who commit “Benefit Fraud” = often poor > face court/prison
  • Those who commit tax fraud rarely face court = ‘invited’ to pay back what is owned without fear of being given a criminal record
• Box

  Ruling class has power to prevent laws being passed which are not in their interests

  • E.g. deaths of workers due to safety violations are defined as civil rather than criminal offences

  Powerful often kill/injure ordinary people but those acts are covered by criminal law, actions of ruling class are not defined as criminal

  • E.g. Epstein island
• Case Study, Grenfell

  • Council owned tower block caught fire
  • Many poor/ethnic minorities live there, made complaints but were failed for years
  • All health and safety violations were ignored
  • Firefighters were not trained to save victims from tower block
• Case study, Post office scandal

  • Computer glitch claimed 700 people owned thousands of pounds
  • If never repaid, wrongly prosecuted or forced to pay
  • Council owned property = disadvantaged and no power, couldn’t get justice
• Splitzer

  Argues deviants and criminals are ‘constructed’ when certain groups create problems for those who rule
• Bonger, notions of social conflict to the subject of crime:

  • The criminal law exists to protect interests of the powerful
  • Dynamics of capitalism encourage egoism and greed
  • Motivate both classes, prone to crime as they don’t care about each other
  • Poverty prompts crime to the extent it creates a desperate need for necessities
• Sutherland

  Defines white collar crime as ‘a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation’
• Social class and crime

  • Marxists argue law is made by ruling class to criminalise the deviant activities of the w/c but rarely labels deviant activities by m/c as criminal
  • Results in few deviant activities carried out by professionals and employers are labelled criminal
  • Goldstraw-White = those convicted of corporate crime rarely viewed themselves as criminals