Explaining yhe differences in offending

Lea and young

Relative deprivation

Marginalisation

Subcultures

Left realism

• Media & consumerism create material goals that minorities can’t achieve due to discrimination, leading to frustration.

• Unemployed Black youths may turn to:

  • Utilitarian crime (to cope with deprivation).

  • Non-utilitarian crime (violence, from frustration).

• Racist policing leads to unjustified criminalisation, but:

  • Most crimes are reported by the public (over 90%), not just found by police.

  • To explain higher Black conviction rates, police would have to be selectively racist (against Black but not Asian people).

Ao3

• Statistics show real differences in offending.

• Differences are due to relative deprivation and marginalisation.

Neo Marxism

• Reject the idea that statistics reflect reality → crime stats are a social construct.

• Black criminality = a myth, created by racist stereotypes.

• Minority groups are no more criminal than others.

• The CJS acts on stereotypes, leading to greater criminalisation and overrepresentation in crime stats.

• Crime as political resistance:

  • Minority ethnic crime = resistance to racist society.

  • Roots in anti-colonial struggles against British imperialism/colonisation.

  • Many Black/Asian people in the UK came from former colonies, where resistance methods (e.g., riots, demonstrations) were learned.

Gilroy

• Ethnic minority crime seen as political resistance to racism and colonial oppression.

• But Lea & Young criticise Gilroy:

  • First-gen immigrants were mostly law-abiding, unlikely to pass on anti-colonial struggles.

  • Most crime is intra-ethnic (within groups), not resistance to racism.

  • Gilroy romanticises crime as revolutionary, ignoring similarities between Asian and White crime rates.

Hall

• 1970s crisis in British capitalism → high inflation, unemployment, strikes.

• A moral panic developed around ‘Black muggers’:

  • No real evidence of an increase in mugging.

  • Media exaggerated the issue, linking it to Black youth.

• Purpose of the moral panic:

  • Acted as a scapegoat, distracting from capitalism’s real problems (e.g., unemployment).

  • Presented Black youth as a threat, dividing the working class on racial grounds.

  • Weakened opposition to capitalism and justified authoritarian policing.

• Applied labelling theory in a Marxist framework: panic ultimately benefited capitalism.

• Criticism: Hall et al are inconsistent – they say Black crime was both not rising and rising due to unemployment.