Class and Crime- Key sociologists and Stats

Key sociologists and theories and stats on social distribution of crime by social class.

2014

60% of 2,000 prisoners had claimed benefits

2005

60% of prisoners in Glasgow come from deprived council estates.

2002

67% of offenders were unemployed prior to prison, 32% homeless and 27% brought up in care.

2014

43% of adult prisoners had no educational qualifications

Marxism- Snider

The capitalist state is reluctant to pass laws that regulate the activities of businesses or threaten their profitability.

Pearce

False consciousness of an impartial judiciary that is profession allows this to go unchallenged as the law is seen as caring.

Chambliss

Laws safeguarding private property form the foundation of capitalist society.

Example- Bernie Ecclestone

Donated £1 million to the Labour Party in 1997, shortly before the government announced F1 would be exempt from a proposed ban on tobacco advertising.

Evaluation- Marxism

Ignores relationships between crime and other social factors.

Too deterministic in assuming all WC people commit crime.

Capitalism= criminogenic, doesn’t explain crime in communist societies.

CJS at times due punish corporate crime.

Cultural (Functionalism)- Cohen

Criminality wasn’t always about a lack of money, rather status frustration.

Cloward and Ohlin

Violence could be used to achieve status with peer groups.

Miller

WC Americans turn to criminality to met their focal concerns e.g. toughness and excitement which were restrained in the workplace.

Murray

Young men break the law to supplement benefits in their laziness and irresponsibility in a culture of welfare dependency.

Evaluation- Functionalism

Crime can be structurally embedded rather than choice of the individual.

The lack of cultural and material capital can create an impact.

Overlooks white collar innovation.

High Status Crime

Approximately 150 workers are killed in accident at work each year.

Air pollution is estimated to contribute to 24,000 deaths each year in the UK.

Over 32.4 million complaints were made for the PPI scandal.

Sutherland- White Collar Crim (WCC) and Corporate Crime (CC)

WCC is a crime committed by a person of respectability and high status in the course of their occupation.

Occupational Crime- committed by employees simply for their own personal gain often against the organisation for which they work.

CC- committed by employees for their organisation in pursuit of its goals.

This definition makes manty of the harms caused by powerful do not break criminal law.

Pearce and Tombs- WCC and CC

Corporate crime is 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.

Includes breaches of civil and administrative law, not just criminal law.

Tombs

Corporate crimes have enormous cists: physical, environmental and economic.

One estimate puts the cost of WCC in the USA at over 10 x that of ordinary crimes.

Tombs and Snider- CC

The culture of corporation leads to behaviours linked to criminality (greed).

Gordon

“Dog eat dog” nature of capitalism leads to businesses employing illegitimate methods to get ahead.

Merton

Strain can lead businesses to innovate in order to achieve the success of the American dream, using illegitimate means.

Tombs and Whyte- 2013

Decrease of over a 1/3 in health and safety inspections since 2000in the UK, allowing more corporations to put in their own regulations.

De-labelling of CC

Nestle has been involved in numerous scandals, notoriously the baby milk scandal in the 1970s/80s, but continues to be one of the largest transnational companies.