CHAPTER SIX: CRITICAL THEORIES: MARXIST, CONFLICT, AND FEMINIST

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Chapter 6 Critical Theories Marxist, Conflict
Feminist
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Chapter Summary

• Chapter Six is an overview of the critical
  theories of crime. The Chapter begins with an
  evaluation and analysis of Karl Marx.
• From neo-Marxism came the more popular conflict
  theory of crime. The Chapter then discusses post
  modernism and peacemaking criminology, and
  explains why these theories are recognized in the
  critical framework.
• After reading this chapter, students should be
  able to
• Explain critical criminology.
• Chapter Six then explains feminism, the
  gendered problem of crime.

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Chapter Summary

• The chapter concludes with an analysis and
  evaluation of each of the critical theories, as
  well as the policy implications that arise from
  the critical theories.
• Understand Marxism and neo-Marxism
• Explain the conflict perspective of crime
• Understand postmodernist peacemaking
  criminology.
• Discuss feminist criminology.
• Analyze and critique the critical theories.
• Discuss policy implications.

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The Conflict Perspective of Society

• Critical theorists see society riddled with
  dissension, inequality, and conflict.
• Any apparent consensus in society is maintained
  by overt and covert coercion.
• Critical criminology An umbrella term chosen for
  variety of theories united only the above
  assumption that conflict and power relations
  between various classes of people best
  characterize the nature of society.

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Karl Marx Revolution

• The core of Marxist is the concept of class
  struggle.
• In Marxs time the oppressors were the wealth
  owners of the means of production (the
  bourgeoisie) and the oppressed were the working
  class (the proletariat).
• The ruling class always develops ideologies to
  justify and legitimize their exploitation.
• Marx called the workers acceptance of ideologies
  that ran counter to their interests false
  consciousness.

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Karl Marx Revolution

• In time, false consciousness would be replaced by
  class consciousness that is, the recognition of
  a common class condition and the development of a
  common unity in opposition to capitalist
  exploitation.
• This would set the stage for revolution.

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Karl Marx Revolution

• According to Marx and Engels, criminals came from
  a third class in societythe lumpenproletariatwho
  would play no decisive role in the expected
  revolution.
• Crime was the product of an unjust, alienating,
  and demoralizing social condition that denied
  productive labor to the masses of unemployed.

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Karl Marx Revolution

• The origin of crime has come to be known as the
  primitive rebellion.
• Capitalist societies pass laws that criminalize
  any action that jeopardizes private property and
  tend to overlook many socially injurious
  activities viewed as economically beneficial for
  the ruling class.

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Willem Bonger The 1st Marxist Criminologist

• Willem Bonger Criminality and Economic
  Conditions (1969) supported the view that the
  roots of crime lay in the exploitative and
  alienating conditions of capitalism.
• The social sentiments that concerned him were
  altruisman active concern for the well-being of
  othersand its opposite, egoism, a concern only
  for ones own selfish interests.

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Willem Bonger The 1st Marxist Criminologist

• According to Bonger, all individuals in
  capitalist societies are infected by egoism
  because they are alienated from authentic social
  relationships with their fellow human beings, and
  all are thus prone to crime.

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Willem Bonger The 1st Marxist Criminologist

• The root cause of crime is the capitalist mode of
  production.
• Poverty was the major cause of crime, but the
  effects of poverty can be traced to the family
  structure and on parental inability to properly
  supervise their children.

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Modern Marxist Criminology

• Neo-Marxist criminology is little more than
  maudlin sentimentality for criminals.
• Many neo-Marxist criminologists appear to view
  the class struggle is the only source of all
  crime and to view real crime as violations of
  human rights, such as racism, sexism,
  imperialism, and capitalism.

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Modern Marxist Criminology

• Other neo-Marxists are faithful to Marxs view
  and are critical of common street crime as an
  activity preventing the formation of proletarian
  class consciousness.

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Left RealismTaking Crime Seriously

• Left realist criminologists believe that the path
  of least resistance is to work within the system.
• People make choices for which they must be held
  accountable, but there are a variety of
  conditions that make some choices more probable
  and understandable than others.

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Conflict Theory Max Weber, Power Conflict

• Max Weber had an interest in the social change
  wrought by the industrial revolution and in
  social conflict.
• Weber viewed the various class divisions in
  society as normal, inevitable, and acceptable.
• Criminality exists in all societies and is the
  result of the political struggle among different
  groups attempting to promote or enhance their
  life chances.

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From Individual Violators to Group Struggles

• George Vold moved conflict away from an exclusive
  emphasis of value and normative conflicts to
  include conflicts of interest.
• Social life is a continual struggle to maintain
  or improve ones own groups interest in a
  constant clash of antagonistic actions.

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From Individual Violators to Group Struggles

• Volds conflict theory concentrates entirely on
  the clash of individuals loyally upholding their
  differing group interests, and has no interest in
  explaining crime unrelated to group conflict.
• Conflict is a way of assuring social change, a
  way of generating group solidarity, and a way of
  assuring social stability.

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The Social Reality of Crime

• The ultimate cause of crime is the law.
• Conflict criminologists differ from neo-Marxist
  criminology in that it concentrates on the
  processes of value conflict and lawmaking rather
  than on the social structural elements underlying
  them.

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The Social Reality of Crime

• Conflict theorists make no value judgment about
  whether crime is socially harmful, the actions of
  revolutionaries, or violations of human rights.
• Conflict theorists tend to share neo-Marxisms
  fondness for research illustrating some principle
  of their perspectives rather than formulating
  hypotheses from it and putting them to the test.

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Table 6.1 Comparing Marxist and Conflict Theory
on Major Concepts Concept
Marxist
Conflict
Origin of conflict The powerful oppressing the powerless (e.g., the bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat under capitalism). It is generated by many factors regardless of the political and economic system.
Nature of conflict It is socially bad and must and will be eliminated in a socialist system. It is socially useful and necessary and cannot be eliminated.
Major participants in conflict The owners of the means of production and the workers are engaged in the only conflict that matters. Conflict takes place everywhere between all sorts of interest groups.
Social class Only two classes defined by their relationship to the means of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat are parasite classes that will be eliminated. There are number of different classes in society defined by their relative wealth, status, and power.
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Table 6.1 Comparing Marxist and Conflict Theory
on Major Concepts Concept
Marxist
Conflict
Concept of the law It is the tool of the ruling class that criminalizes the activities of the workers harmful to its interests and ignores its own socially harmful behavior. The law favors the powerful, but not any one particular group. The greater the wealth, power, and prestige a group has, the more likely the law will favor it.
Concept of crime Some view crime as the revolutionary actions of the downtrodden, others view it as the socially harmful acts of class traitors, and others see it as violations of human rights. Conflict theorists refuse to pass moral judgment because they view criminal conduct as morally neutral with no intrinsic properties that distinguish it from conforming behavior. Crime doesnt exist until a powerful interest group is able to criminalize the activities of another less powerful group.
Cause of crime The dehumanizing conditions of capitalism. Capitalism generates egoism and alienates people from themselves and from others. The distribution of political power that leads to some interest groups being able to criminalize the acts of other interest groups.
Cure for crime With the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production, the natural goodness of humanity will emerge, and there will be no more criminal behavior. As long as people have different interests and as long as some groups have more power than others, crime will exist. Since interest and power differentials are part of the human condition, crime will always be with us.
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Postmodernist Theory

• Postmodernist criminology is firmly in the
  critical/radical tradition in that it views the
  law as an oppressive instrument of the rich and
  powerful, but it rejects the modernist view of
  the world.
• All knowledge is socially constructed and has no
  independent reality apart from the minds of those
  who create it.

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Postmodernist Theory

• All worldviews are mediated by language.
• The dominant language of society is the language
  of the rich and powerful, and by virtue of owning
  the dominant language their point of view is
  privileged.

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Peacemaking Criminology

• Peacemaking criminology has the philosophy of
  peace on crime.
• Punishing criminals escalates violence.
• In place of imprisoning offenders, peacemaking
  criminologists advocate restorative justice,
  which is basically a system of mediation and
  conflict resolution.

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Feminist Criminology

• Feminism is a set of theories strategies for
  social change that take gender as their central
  focus in attempting to understand social
  institutions, processes, and relationships.
• Mainstream feminism holds the view that women
  suffer oppression discrimination in a society
  run for men by men who have passed laws and
  created customs to perpetuate their privileged
  position.
• Gender power rather than class power.

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Feminist Criminology

• Female crime has been virtually ignored by
  mainstream criminology.
• Generalizability problem Do traditional
  male-centered theories of crime apply to women?
• Gender ratio problem What explains the universal
  fact that women are far less likely than men to
  involve themselves in criminal activity?

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The Generalizability Problem

• Anomie theory This theory cannot be applied to
  women because women are socialized to be
  successful in relationships, to get married, and
  to raise families, not for financial success.
• Subculture theories This theory cannot explain
  why women who have achieved their relationship
  goals commit crimes.
• Differential association This theory is better
  for explaining why females commit less crime than
  men.

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The Generalizability Problem

• Labeling The labeling perspective is not an
  explanation as to why people engage in deviance
  in the first place, and it lacks an analysis of
  the structures of power and oppression impinging
  on women
• Marxism This theory neglects gender issues,
  plus, working-class women experience the same
  capitalist exploitation as men, but they still
  commit far less crime

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The Gender Ratio Problem

• -Mainstream feminists have asserted that if
  females were socialized in the same way as males
  had similar roles and experiences, their rates
  of criminal offending would be roughly the same.
• -This assertion is denied by the biological
  sciences, as well as by radical feminists, who
  view gender difference in behavior as a function
  of differentially wired brains.

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Masculinization Emancipation Hypothesis Adler
Simon

• Freda Adler attributed the rise in female crime
  rates in the 1960s and 1970s to an increasing
  number of females adopting male roles, and by
  doing so increasingly masculinizing their
  attitudes and behavior (The Masculinization
  Hypothesis).
• Rita Simon claimed that increased participation
  in the workforce affords women greater
  opportunities to commit crime
• (The Emancipation Hypothesis).

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Masculinization Emancipation Hypothesis Adler
Simon

• More recently, it has been proposed that the
  gender ratio exists
• because gender differs in exposure to delinquent
  peers that males are more influenced by
  delinquent peers than females
• because of female greater inhibitory morality.

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Female-Centered Theory Criminalizing Girls
Survival Victim Precipitated Homicide

• Rather than developing general theories of female
  crime, feminist theories have developed a series
  of models cataloging the responses of girls and
  women to situations more or less specific to
  their gender that result in the committing
  specific criminal acts.

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Female-Centered Theory Criminalizing Girls
Survival Victim Precipitated Homicide

• Chesney-Lind Girls victimization their
  response to it are shaped by their status in a
  patriarchal society in which males dominate the
  family define their daughters stepdaughters
  as sexual property.

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Female-Centered Theory Criminalizing Girls
Survival Victim Precipitated Homicide

• Victim-precipitated homicide, which is a
  homicide in which the murder victim initiates the
  sequence of events that leads to his or her death.

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Radical Feminist Explanation

• Radical feminists argue that because the
  magnitude of the gender gap varies across time
  and space and yet remains constantly wide at all
  ties and in all places that biological factors
  must play a large part.
• The root of gender ratio lies in the fundamental
  differences between the genders.

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Radical Feminist Explanation

• Anne Campbell Staying alive hypothesisevolutiona
  ry logic is all about passing on genes that
  proved useful in the struggle for survival and
  reproductive success to future generations over
  the eons of time in which our most human
  characteristics were being formed.

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Radical Feminist Explanation

• Because offspring survival is so important to
  their reproductive success, females evolved a
  propensity to avoid engaging in behaviors that
  pose survival risks.
• When females engage in crime they almost always
  do so for instrumental reasons, and their crimes
  rarely involve risk of physical injury.

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Evaluation of Critical Theories

• It is often said that Marxist theory has very
  little that is unique to add to criminology
  theory.
• Much of Marxist criminology appears to be in a
  time warp in that it assumes that the conditions
  prevailing in Marxs time still exist in the same
  form today in advanced capitalist societies.
• Conflict theory does not attempt to explain
  crime it simply identifies social conflict as a
  basic fact of life and a source of discriminatory
  treatment.

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Evaluation of Critical Theories

• Postmodernism offers no viable alternative except
  to advance the notion that crime can be abated by
  changing the way people think and talk about it.
• Peacemaking criminologists never offer any notion
  as to how crime rates can be reduced beyond
  counseling that we appreciate criminals point of
  view and not be so punitive.

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Evaluation of Critical Theories

• According to feminist theory, maleness is without
  doubt the best single predictor of criminal
  behavior.
• This leaves feminist theorists without much left
  to explain in specific female terms about female
  offending.

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Policy Prevention Implications of Critical
Theories

• The policy implications of Marxism are to
  overthrow the capitalist system and crime will be
  reduced.
• Policy recommendations by left realists include
  community activities, neighborhood watches,
  community policing, dispute resolution centers,
  and target hardening.

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Policy Prevention Implications of Critical
Theories

• Conflict theorists favor programs such as minimum
  wage laws, sharply progressive taxation, a
  government controlled comprehensive health care
  system, maternal leave, and national policy of
  family support as a way of reducing crime.
• Feminists argue to reform our patriarchal society
  as well as push the plight of victims into the
  light of day.