Class, Power and Crime

Question 1

In what way do Marxists agree with labelling theory?

Answer 1

The law is enforced disproportionately against the w/c and therefore the official crime stats cannot be taken at face value.

Question 2

In what way do Marxists criticise labelling theory?

Answer 2

Fails to examine the wider structure of capitalism within which law making, law enforcement and offending take place.

Question 3

Briefly explain how Marxists view capitalist society.

Answer 3

Divided into two classes:

• Ruling class (bourgeoisie) who own the means of production.
• W/c (proletariat), whose labour the bourgeoisie exploit to produce profit.

Question 4

Explain what is meant by criminogenic.

Answer 4

Causing or likely to cause criminal behaviour.

Question 5

Briefly outline three ways in which capitalism may lead to working-class crime.

Answer 5

• Poverty may mean that crime is the only way the w/c can survive.
• Crime may be the only way they can obtain the consumer goods encouraged by capitalist adverts, resulting in utilitarian crimes e.g theft.
• Alienation and lack of control over their lives may lead to frustration and aggression, resulting in non-utilitarian crimes e.g violence and vandalism.

Question 6

According to Gordon, why is crime found in all social classes in capitalist society?

Answer 6

Crime is a rational response to the capitalist system and hence it’s found in all social classes even though official stats make it appear to be a largely w/c crime.

Question 7

According to Marxists, whose interests do law making and law enforcement serve?

Answer 7

Capitalist class. For example, Chambliss argues that laws to protect private property are the cornerstone of capitalist society.

Question 8

Use the example of East African colonies to explain the Marxist view of law.

Answer 8

At the time, the local economy wasn’t a money economy so to force reluctant African pop. to work for them, British introduced a tax payable by cash, non-payment was punishable offense. Cash to pay taxes was only available by working on plantations therefore law served economic interests of capitalist plantation owners.

Question 9

According to Snider, what laws is the state reluctant to pass?

Answer 9

Laws that regulate the activities of businesses or threaten their profitability.

Question 10

According to Marxists, who is criminalised by the justice system?

Answer 10

W/c and ethnic minorities.

Question 11

According to Pearce, why are some laws passed that seem to benefit the working-class?

Answer 11

They benefit r/c too. E.g by giving capitalism a ‘caring’ face, such as laws also create false consciousness among the workers.

Question 12

Why are some laws not rigorously enforced? Give an example.

Answer 12

Despite a new law against corporate homicide being passed in 2007, in its first 8 years there was only one successful prosecution of a UK company - despite large numbers of deaths at work estimated to be caused by employers’ negligence.

Question 13

What is the impact of selective law enforcement?

Answer 13

Crime appears to be a w/c phenomenon which divides w/c by encouraging workers to blame the criminals in their midst of problems, rather than capitalism.

Question 14

How do the media and criminologists contribute to the portrayal of criminals?

Answer 14

They portray criminals as disturbed individuals, thereby concealing the fact that it’s the nature of capitalism that makes people criminal.

Question 15

Briefly explain the positive aspects of Marxists theory.

Answer 15

Shows link between law making and enforcement and interests of the capitalist class.

By doing so, it puts into a wider structural context the insights of labelling theory regarding the selective enforcement of the law.

Question 16

Briefly outline the five criticisms of Marxist theory.

Answer 16

• Largely ignores relationship between crime and non-class inequalities e.g ethnicity and gender.
• Too deterministic and over-predicts amount of crime in w/c: not all poor people commit crime, despite pressures of poverty.
• Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates: e.g homicide rate in Japan + Switzerland is roughly 1/5 of that in the US.
• CJS does sometimes act against interests of capitalist class e.g prosecutions for corporate crime do occur. (However, Marxists argue that such occasional prosecutions perform an ideological function in making system seem impartial).
• Left realists argue Marxism ignores intra-class crimes such as burglary and ‘mugging’, which cause great harm to victims.

Question 17

Briefly outline three ways in which Taylor et al agrees with Marxists.

Answer 17

• Capitalist society’s based on exploitation + class conflict + characterised by extreme inequalities of wealth + power. (Key to understanding crime)
• The state makes + enforces laws in the interests of capitalist class + criminalises members of w/c.
• Capitalism should be replaced by a classless society. This would greatly reduce the extent of crime for even rid society of crime completely.

Question 18

According to Taylor et al, in what way is Marxism deterministic?

Answer 18

It sees workers as driven to commit crime out of economic necessity.

Question 19

Briefly explain what is meant by a voluntaristic view.

Answer 19

Voluntarism is the idea that we have free will - the opposite of determinism.

Question 20

Briefly outline the two main sources of this theory.

Answer 20

• Marxist ideas about the unequal distribution of wealth and who has the power to make and enforce the law.
• Ideas from interactionism and labelling theory about the meaning of the deviant act for the actor, societal reactions to it, and the effects of the deviant label on the individual.

Question 21

Briefly outline the six aspects of a fully social theory of deviance.

Answer 21

• The wider origins of the deviant act: in the unequal distribution of wealth + power in capitalist society.
• The immediate origins of the deviant act: the particular context in which the individual decides to commit the act.
• The act itself: and the meaning for the actor e.g was it a form of rebellion against capitalism?
• The immediate origins of societal reaction: the reactions of those around the deviant, such as police, family and community, to discovering the deviance.
• The wider origins of societal reaction: in the structure of capitalist society - especially the issue of who has the power to define actions as deviant and to label others, and why some acts are treated more harshly than others.
• The effects of labelling: on the deviant’s future action e.g why does labelling lead to deviance amplification in some cases but not others?

Question 22

In what way do the following perspectives criticise critical criminology?

• Feminists
• Left realists

Answer 22

Feminists:

• ‘Gender blind’.
• Focuses excessively on male criminality and at the expense of female criminality.

Left realists:

• Critical criminology romanticises w/c criminals as ‘Robin Hoods’ who’re fighting capitalism by re-distributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Reality: these criminals mostly prey on the poor.
• Taylor et al don’t take such crime seriously + ignore its effects on w/c victims.

Question 23

Briefly outline Walton and Young’s defence of ‘The New Criminology’.

Answer 23

• Calling for greater tolerance of diversity in behaviour, the book combated ‘correctionalist bias’ in most existing theories - assumption that sociology’s role is simply to find ways of correcting deviant behaviour.
• Book laid some of the foundations for later radical approaches that seek to establish a more just society such as left realist and feminist theories.

Question 24

According to Reiman and Leighton, how are crimes committed by higher classes treated in comparison to ‘street’ crimes?

Answer 24

The more likely a crime is to be committed by higher-class people, the less likely it is to be treated as an offence. Higher prosecution rates for crimes committed by poor people. However, CJS takes a more forgiving view towards crime committed by higher class.

Question 25

What did Sutherland aim to do by focusing on ‘white collar crime’?

Answer 25

Challenge the stereotype that crime is purely a lower-class phenomenon.

Question 26

Explain the differences between occupational crime and corporate crime.

Answer 26

Occupational crime:
- Committed by employees simply for their own personal gain, often against the organisation for which they work e.g stealing from the company or its customers.

Corporate crime:
- Committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals e.g deliberately mis-selling products to increase company profits.

Question 27

Give an example of something which is a harm but which does not break the criminal law.

Answer 27

Some may be administrative officers such as a company failing to comply with codes of practice laid down by government regulators

Question 28

In what way is Pearce and Tombs’ definition of white collar crime different from Sutherland’s?

Answer 28

‘Any illegal act or omission that is the result of deliberate decisions or culpable negligence by a legitimate business organisation and that is intended to benefit the business.’

Question 29

According to Tombs, why does corporate crime do more harm than street crime?

Answer 29

• One estimate puts the cost of white collar crimes in the USA at over 10x that of ordinary crime.
• Corporate crime has enormous costs: physical, environmental and economic.

Question 30

Briefly outline the following corporate crimes:

• Financial crime
• Crimes against consumers
• Crimes against employees.

Answer 30

Financial crime
- Such as tax evasion, bribery, money laundering and illegal accounting. Victims include other companies, shareholders, tax payers and governments.

Crimes against consumers
- Such as false labelling and selling unfit goods. 2011: French government recommended that women w/ breast implants from manufacturer, Poly Implant Prothese, have them removed bc they were filled with dangerous industrial silicone rather than more expensive medical silicone.

Crimes against employees

• Such as sexual and racial discrimination, violations of wage laws and health and safety laws.
• Tombs calculates that up to 1,100 work-related deaths a year involve employers breaking the law. More than annual total of homicides.

Question 31

Briefly outline the following corporate crimes:

• Crimes against the environment
• State-corporate crime

Answer 31

Crimes against the environment
- Include illegal pollution of air, water and land, such as toxic waste dumping. 2015: Following investigation, Volkswagen admitted installing software in 11 mil of its diesel vehicles globally. Software could detect when engines were being tested + disguised emissions levels that were above US legal limit.

State-corporate crime
- Refers to harms committed when government institutions + businesses cooperate to pursue their goals. Private companies now work alongside government in many areas e.g in marketised or privatised public services such as education and the ‘war on terror’.

Question 32

Use one example to explain how those in high-status professions are able to use their position to commit crime.

Answer 32

Multinational accountancy firm KPMG admitted in the USA to criminal wrongdoing and paid a $456m fine for its role in a tax fraud.

Question 33

Briefly outline the following reasons for the invisibility of crimes of the powerful:

• The media
• Lack of political will
• The crimes are often complex

Answer 33

The media
- Very limited coverage to cc.
- Reinforcing stereotype: crime is w/c phenomenon.
- Describe cc in sanitised language (technical infringements not real crime).
E.g embezzlement becomes accounting irregularities.

Lack of political will to tackle corporate crime
- Politicians rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’ focused instead on street crime.
E.g While the Home Office uses crime surveys to discover the true extent of ‘ordinary’ crime, it doesn’t do so for cc

Question 34

Briefly outline the following reasons for the invisibility of crimes of the powerful:

• De-labelling
• Under-reporting

Answer 34

De-labelling

• At the levels of laws and legal regulation, cc is consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation.
• E.g offences are often defined as civil not criminal, and even in criminal cases, penalties are often fines rather than jail.
• Investigation and prosecution are also limited.

Under-reporting

• Often the victim is society at large, or the environment, rather than an identifiable individual.
• Individuals may be unaware that they’ve been victimised.
• e.g Not realising you’ve been duped into buying the wrong mortgage.
• Even when victim is aware, they may not see it as ‘real crime’ or may feel powerless against a big organisation therefore leave it unreported.

Question 35

Briefly outline why corporate crime may have become more visible since 2008.

Answer 35

Since the financial crisis of 2008, the activities of a range of different people may have made corporate crime more visible.
- E.g campaigns against corporate tax avoidance such as Occupy and UK Uncut.

Question 36

Briefly summarise each of the following explanations of corporate crime:

• Strain theory
• Differential association

Answer 36

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Question 37

Briefly summarise each of the following explanations of corporate crime:

• Labelling theory
• Marxism

Answer 37

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Question 38

Why can it be argued that strain theory and Marxism over-predict the amount of business crime?

Answer 38

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Question 39

Give an example of crime that is not carried out for the pursuit of profit.

Answer 39

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Question 40

Give an example of how it may be more profitable for a company to be law-abiding.

Answer 40

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Question 41

Define intra-class crime.

Answer 41

Where both the criminals and victims are w/c.

Question 42

How did Sutherland define ‘white collar crime’?

Answer 42

‘A crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.’