Marxism Theories

• Marxism:

  Strengths:

  • shows how poverty and inequality can cause working-class crime, and how capitalism promoted greed and encourages upper-class crimes
  • shows how both law-making and law enforcement are biased against the working class and in favour of the powerful. For example, corporate crime is rarely prosecuted.
• Marxism:

  Limitations:

  • focuses on class and largely ignores the relationship between crime and other inequalities, such as gender and ethnicity.
  • over-predicts the amount of working- class crime: not all poor people turn to crime.
  • Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates; Japans homicide rate is only about a fifth of the USA’s. However Marxists point our that capitalist societies with little welfare provision, like the USA, have higher crime rates.