Left Realism

What is Left Realism?

• Left realists believe we need explanations of crime that will lead to practical strategies for reducing it now, rather than waiting for a revolution and a classless society to abolish crime.

Taking Crime Seriously (Left Realist)

• Left realist criticise other theories for not taking crime seriously.

• Marxists : Focus on only corporate crime; ignoring working class crime and its impact on victims. Left realists agree but argue w/c crime needs to be addressed also.

• Neo-Marxists: Romanticise w/c criminals as ‘robin hoods’, Ignores that w/c people are the primary victims.

• Labelling Theorists: Criminals are victims of labelling, left realists argue that this does not focus enough on the victims who are w/c.

Left Realism Causes of Crime:

• Relative Deprivation

• Subcultures

• Marginalisation

Left Realism: Relative Deprivation

• For Lea & Young (1984), crime has its roots in deprivation. They identify how deprived someone feels I relation to others, or compared with their own expectations.

• This can lead to crime when people feel resentment that others unfairly have more than the, and resort to crime to obtain what they feel they are entitled to.

• Leo and Young also identified that even though people’s living standards may have improved, the media makes them more aware of what other people have.

• Young argues that the dangerous combination is relative deprivation and individualism. Individualism means putting your own needs, wants and success before the needs of others .

• Left realists argue that increasing individualism weakens families and communities.

Left Realism: Subcultures

• For Left Realists, a subcultures is a group’s collective solution to the problem of relative deprivation.

• However different groups may produce different subcultures solutions to this problem some can be positive.

• For Left Realists, criminal subcultures still subscribes to the values and goals of mainstream society such as materialism and consumerism.

Left Realists: Marginslisation

• Marginalised groups lack both clear goals and organisations to represent their interests.

• Groups such as workers have clear goals and organisations that can put pressure on employees and politicians. As such, they have no need to resort to violence to achieve their goals.

• By contrast, unemployed youths are marginalised. They have no organisation to represent them and no clear goals, just a sense of resentment and frustration.

• Being powerless, to use political means to improve their position, they express their frustration through criminal means such as violence.

Tackling Crime: Left Realists

• Left Realists argue that we must both improve policing and control, and deal with the deeper structural causes of crime.

• Kinsey, Lea and Young argues that police clear-up rates are too low to act as a deterrent to crime and that police spend too little time actually investigating crime.

• The police depend on the public to provide them with information about crime. But if the information dries up the police then have to rely on military policing. This alienates communities who see the police as victimising local youth.

• Young criticises the record of governments. He argues that they have largely only addressed the symptoms such as anti-social behaviour. They have been tougher on crime than on tackling is underlying causes.

Criticisms of Left Realism:

• Henry & Milanovich (1996): Left Realists accepts official definition of crime as street crime committed by the w/c should be more focus on corporate crime.

• Relative deprivation cannot fully explain crime, as not all who experience it commit crime.