Crime and Deviance: Marxist Perspective PDF

**Crime and deviance:** **Marxist, social class and crime** **Marxism** The Marxist analysis of crime is that capitalism is **criminogenic**. This means the competitiveness, the divisiveness and the conflicts of interest in capitalist societies generate criminality. David Gordon argues that most...

**Crime and deviance:** **Marxist, social class and crime** **Marxism** The Marxist analysis of crime is that capitalism is **criminogenic**. This means the competitiveness, the divisiveness and the conflicts of interest in capitalist societies generate criminality. David Gordon argues that most crimes are pre-meditated and rational. Crimes are carefully made decisions to overcome poverty and disadvantage. But it also happens among the rich. In the case of **corporate crime**, rational decisions are made by businesses to commit crime in order to increase profits and/or to gain advantage over competitors. While capitalism creates crime in all classes, David Gordon argues that the capitalist state engages in **selective law enforcement**. The repressive state apparatus, that includes the criminal justice system and the police, selects working class law-breaking (or 'street crime') to investigate, arrest and prosecute the offenders, but they are less likely to enforce the laws that deal with corporate crime. The result is that the prison population is overwhelmingly made up of working class men. Reiman and Leighton's study of the American criminal justice system shows how the wealthy are able to use the best accountants to manipulate their finances and employ the best lawyers to defend them. They're therefore less likely to be convicted. By contrast the courts treat working class offenders far more harshly resulting in the vast majority of prisoners in prisons throughout the Western world being from poor, low-income backgrounds. Very few corporate criminals are given **custodial sentences** (time in prison). Hence Reiman and Leighton's phrase, the rich get richer the poor get prison. Stephen Box argues that the media help with this downplaying of corporate crime through what he calls the **mystification of corporate crime**. This is the news reporting of 'insider-trading' or 'false accounting' or 'financial malpractice' being made to sound complicated and mysterious so that audiences are **desensitised**, and so corporate crime is perceived to be less serious. It's also argued that there is deliberate **de-labelling** of corporate crime. Rather than highlighting and emphasising the problem as usually happens with the labelling of deviance, corporate crimes are ignored and played down as unimportant. So, the public are being conditioned to think that crime is a street problem, a working class problem and that the capitalist-class are indeed responsible and law-abiding. Not only is it argued that the law is enforced selectively but even the creation of those laws in the first place are designed to serve the interests of capitalism. Marxists such as William Chambliss argue that most laws in capitalist societies are concerned with the protection of private property. Many laws have little to do with protecting people from violence and abuse but are designed to maintain capitalism e.g. **anti-union laws** to prevent strike action and laws such as the Compulsory Purchase Act which allow for the **compulsory purchase** or acquisition of private land. There is also what some Marxists call **non-decision making**. This is the argument that while the law makers could make a decision to prevent tax avoidance or extortionate rents or excessive bonuses to chief executives, they choose not to. The idea that corporate crime is just not as important as street crime is challenged by Marxists such as Laureen Snider. She argues that corporate crime costs more than street crime in both financial terms and in human lives. She estimates the total cost of corporate crime in the U.S. to be over \$100Billion a year and Steve Tombs makes the point that thousands of human lives are lost or become critically ill due to workplace accidents, repetitive strain injuries and exposure to toxic materials. Public services such as healthcare and welfare lose funding due to tax evasion by corporations and consumers have been victims of products marketed by corporations that damage their health e.g. carcinogenic foods, addictive substances such as tobacco and harmful medicinal drugs such as opioid painkillers. **Neo-Marxism** Neo-Marxism is an approach that rejects **deterministic theories** and recognises the extent of human **free will**. Taylor, Walton and Young tried to use this approach by combining Marxism with interactionism in their study *The New Criminology*. They argue that the decision to commit a crime is not determined by capitalism (by poverty or inequality) but is a conscious act of free will or **agency**. The offender is responding to his or her material circumstances. For example, an attempt to steal the property of the rich or to steal money from an employer is a conscious attempt to redress the imbalance in society. The working class criminal is effectively **re-structuring society** by achieving the **redistribution of wealth** in favour of the working class. Each crime should be understood in firstly its immediate and wider **social origins** e.g. economic problems resulting in personal hardship. And secondly the immediate and wider **societal reaction** e.g. a heavy police response to street crime due to wider **moral panics** in the media about such crime. Critics argue that the problems with all these approaches is that they ignore the impact on the victim and effectively **romanticise** the working class criminal. The evidence shows that most crime is **intra-class**, that is the victims of working class crime are most often themselves working class. The argument that corporate crime costs more in money and lives than street crime ignores the fact that street crime is the primary concern in working class areas and the main fear of crime is fear of working class crime. Other neo-Marxist approaches include Frank Pearce's take on law creation by the ruling-class. Neo-Marxists argue that the ruling-class maintain **hegemony** (power by consent) by winning over the working class through ideological conditioning by also by providing **concessions**. For example, over the last hundred years most developed economies have passed laws to protect the working class e.g. sick pay if a worker can't work and unemployment benefits if they lose their job. But these benefits are paid for by tax and the wealthy, the corporations and the major property owners pay a lot of this tax. So why agree to these costly legal reforms? Because, according to neo-Marxists, it wins the consent of the working class, creates **false consciousness** and prevents rebellion and possible revolution. Stuart Hall's study examined the extent that the police and criminal justice system deliberately targets the working class especially **ethnic minorities**. The study tried to show that whenever capitalism enters a crisis the state will try and create a distraction by criminalising minorities. This is done to divide the working class and preserve the **hegemony** (power) of the ruling class. The example Stuart Hall focused on was the economic crisis in the 1970s. The media and politicians all avoided examining the failings of the capitalist economy and instead created a **moral panic** about street muggings by young black men who therefore became **scapegoats**. So, police numbers were increased, and more and more arrests were made, contributing to a belief that working class black men were the main cause of crime. What this achieved for the ruling class was it divided the working class and distracted attention from the crisis of capitalism helping to create **false consciousness**; society's problems were seen as the result of immigration rather than the failings of capitalism.