Marxist*

• Marxists - Crime 


  police recorded crime figures used as ‘a weapon’ to control the working class - to scare us and justify more policing, justifying their control and oppression.
• Conflict Theory - Marxism

  • focuses on power dynamics and social inequalities
  • drug cartels exploit and perpetuate social inequalities
  • drug cartels thrive in environments where the state is weak
  • drug cartels capitalise on the lack of legitimate opportunities for the lower classes
• Network society (Marxist)

  allow for decentralisation of control, the lowest of the network are excluded, often with low social mobility
• White collar crime

  • financially motivated
  • non-violent
  • eg. fraud
• Sutherland (1949) - White collar crime

  • crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation
  • more likely to go unpunished compared to street crimes

  2 types

  1. occupational crime - by employees, eg. theft from employer
  2. corporate crime - by businesses with motive of profit
• State Crime

  illegal or deviant activities by state agencies (eg. police) to achieve government policies

  examples -

  • torture
  • human rights abuse
  • corruption, abuse of power for personal gain(eg. Trump)
• Marxist view on WCC

  • the legal system favours the powerful
  • crimogenic capitalism, capitalism breeds crime
  • the pursuit of profit, greed and competition by those in power
• Box (1983)

  ideological mystification - the CJS downplays the severity of WCC, protecting the interests of the powerful
• Tombs (1999) - corporate crime

  have greater social and economic impacts
• Gastraw - White (2010)

  • in-depth interviews with 41 WCC offenders
  • studied motives and opportunities
• Marxist view on crime

  the rich get away with crime due to abuse of power
• Gordon - social class

  • capitalism is responsible for crime committed by working-class people
  • the ideology that underpins Capitalist societies is crimogenic (capitalist values cause criminal behaviour)
  • capitalism is characterised by class inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income
  • crime committed by the poor is a rational response to the inequalities they experienced daily
  • capitalism encourages a “dog eat dog” system of ruthless competition
• Chambliss

  social class shapes the way that the police react to delinquency, eg. middle class men use their status to negotiate their way out of trouble
• Croall

  • WCC - those with high status commit crime for financial gain, eg. fraud
  • Corporate crime - committed by those who run companies to benefit their business, eg. managers
• Pourtney

  state crime could be considered a third type of WCC
• WCC

  has no obvious victims because people are often ignorant of the fact that they are victims
• Cons of Marxist approach

  • ignores connections between crime and social inequalities, eg. age, ethnicity and gender
  • it fails to explain why not all poor people commit crime
• Neo-Marxists (such as Taylor)

  • individuals have free will thus most people choose not to commit crime
  • criminals choose to commit crime for political reasons, eg. working-class crime as a form of protests against the unjust nature of capitalism
  • vandalism and criminal damage as political attacks on the most potent symbol of capitalism - property
• Taylor, Walton and Young (neo-marxists)

  • see modern working-class criminals, such as burglars, as the equivalent of the hero Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and re-distributing wealth to the poor
  • working-class crime is not the product of evil but instead a conscious decision by the working-class to alter capitalism and change society for the better
  • working-class criminality is a form of revolutionary political action
• Gilroy (neo-marxists)

  young black boys feel alienated by their everyday experiences of a racist white society, they commit crime as a form of protest against a racist capitalist society
• Hall (neo-marxists)

  the mass media works on behalf of the capitalist class by stereotyping working-class and black people as members of a criminal underclass and creating moral panics around them to justify the government bringing in more laws to control them
• Evaluating neo-marxism

  it is difficult to see how crimes like murder, rape and child abuse can be described as political