Explain Some of the Ways in Which Marxists Explain Crime

For traditional Marxists, the structure of capitalist society explains crime in society today. Their view of crime has a number of components, such as criminogenic capitalism, the state and law making, and ideological functions of crime and law.

Many Marxists believe that crime is inevitable in the capitalist system because capitalism is criminogenic; this is the idea that it just naturally causes crime. The idea that the working class are at a disadvantage, makes Marxists believe that this increases the crime rate. They believe this for many reasons, such as due a lack of control over the working class’ lives can lead to frustration, leading to non-utilitarian crimes such as vandalism, in an attempt to get noticed. However, they do point out that crime is not only committed by the working class, mentioning white-collar crimes commonly caused by the middle-class. Gordon furthers this, arguing that official statistics make it appear to be a working class phenomenon.

While Functionalists argue that law reflects the value consensus and represents the interests of society as a whole, Marxists believe that law making and law enforcement only benefits the ruling class. This is further argued with the fact that the ruling class have the power to prevent the introduction of various laws that could threaten their interests. Snider believes that the capitalist state is reluctant to pass laws that can threaten profits.

Marxists also argue that the police and courts tend to ignore the crimes committed by the middle class, instead focusing on the crimes of the working class and ethnic minorities. Reiman furthers this in his book (The rich get richer and the poor get prison), suggesting that ‘street crimes’, committed by the working class, almost always get punished while crimes such as tax evasion and health and safety violations have a very low prosecution rate.

Marxists also believe that law, crime and criminals perform and ideological function for capitalism. Pearce...