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Topic Three: Class, Power and Crime (Marxism, class and crime…
Topic Three: Class, Power and Crime
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Marxism, class and crime
- Marxists agree that the law is enforced mainly against the working class and that official statistics are flawed
- They criticise labelling theory for ignoring the structure of capitalism within which law making, enforcement and offending take place
- Marxist explanations of crime flow from their analysis of the nature of capitalist society
- Marxism sees capitalist society as divided into the ruling capitalist class, who own the means of production, and the working class, whose labour capitalists exploit for profit
- Marxism is a structural theory: society is a structure whose capitalist economic base determines the superstructure, i.e. all other institutions, including the state, the law and the CJS
- Their function is to serve ruling-class interests. For Marxists, the structure of capitalism explains crime
Criminogenic Capitalism
- Crime is inevitable in capitalism, because capitalism is criminogenic - its very nature causes crime
Working class crime - capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class for profit. As a result:
- Poverty may mean crime is the only way some can survive
- Crime may be the only way of obtaining consumer goods encouraged by capitalist advertising, resulting in utilitarian crimes, e.g. theft
- Alienation may cause frustration and aggression, leading to non-utilitarian crimes, e.g. violence or vandalism
Ruling class crime - capitalism is a win-at-all costs system of competition, while the profit motive encourages greed. This encourages capitalists to commit cooperate crimes, e.g. evasion, breaking health and safety laws
- As Gordon argues, crime is a rational response to capitalism and thus is found in all classes
Evaluation - Marxism is too deterministic and over-predicts working class crime: not all poor people commit crime, despite poverty and alienation. Furthermore, not all capitalist societies have high crime rates, e.g. Japan has much less crime than America
The State and Law Making
- Marxists see law making and enforcement as serving the interests of the capitalist class. Chamblis argues that laws to protect private property are the basis of the capitalist economy
- The ruling class also have the power to prevent the introduction of laws harmful to their interests. Few laws challenge the unequal distribution of wealth
- Marxism shows the link between the law and the interests of capitalism. This puts labelling theory's insights on selective enforcement of the law into a wider structural context
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Selective enforcement
- While all classes commit crime, there is selective enforcement of the law
- Reiman shows that crimes of the powerful are much less likely to be treated as criminal offences and prosecuted. Carson, in a sample of 200 firms, found all had broken health and safety laws, yet only 1.5% of cases were prosecuted
- By contrast, there is a much higher rate of prosecutions for the crimes of the poor
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- Although the criminal justice system does sometimes act against the capitalist class, Marxists interpret this as an ideological function to make the system appear impartial
- Slapper and Tombs apply the traditional Marxist view to corporate crime, which is under-policed and rarely prosecuted. This encourages companies to use crime as a means of making profit
- Laws and social policies reflect and support ruling class ideology