Chapter 8: Social Power, the Construction of Crime and Conflict Theory

Conflict theories focus attention on:

• Struggles between individuals and/or groups in terms of power differentials

• Who has the power?

Forerunners of conflict theory include:

• Marx and Engels

• Simmel

• Bonger

• Sutherland and Sellin

• Vold

Theory in Context: The Turmoil of the 1960s

• 3 factors explain the rise of conflict theory:

  1. The impact of the war in Vietnam on American society

  2. The growth of the counterculture

  3. The rising political protest over discrimination and the use of the police power of the state to suppress political dissent

Varieties of Conflict Theory

• 4 factors behind the shift to new conflict theory:

  1. Profound skepticism toward any theory that traced crime to something about the individual

  2. Shift from the assumption that the inadequacies of the CJS were traced to corrupt individuals

     • These problems were inherent in the system

  3. Older assumptions that criminal law represented the collective will of the people was rejected

  4. Became clear that the official crime rate figures did not reflect the amount of criminal behavior actually present in society

     • But more often reflected the labeling behavior of the authorities

Turk (1969): The Criminalization Process

• Focused on Culture Conflict

• Social conflict as a basic fact of life

• Explaining crime lay in explaining criminalization

  • The process of assignment of criminal status to individuals

  • Assignment of criminal status has less with the behavior of that person than his or her relationship to authorities

• Distinguished between two types of norms:

  1. Cultural Norms:

     • Norms dealing with what is expected

  2. Social Norms

     • What is being done rather than what is being said

     • Because cultural and social norms might not agree

     • Existence of a difference between authorities and subjects in their evaluation of a particular attribute logically implies four situational possibilities

1. High agreement between what is said and what is done

2. No agreement between what is being stated and what is being done

3. The authorities talk and behavior were congruent, but little agreement with the words and actions of the subjects

4. The subjects talk and behavior were congruent but little agreement with the words and actions of the authorities

• The conflict with authorities grows with the extent to which those having the illegal attributes or engaging in the illegal activities are organized

• The probability of conflict increases as the authorities confront norm resisters who are less sophisticated

• The logical possibilities resulting from the combination of organization and sophistication were set forth as follows:

  1. Organized and unsophisticated (most probable)

  2. Unorganized and unsophisticated

  3. Organized and sophisticated

  4. Unorganized and sophisticated (least probable)

• Comes down to the level of power of authorities and working together against the resistors

Chambliss (1971): Crime, Power and Legal Process

• “The Saints and the Roughnecks”

  • Impact of the justice system on life trajectories

• Law on the book vs law in action

• The complexity of society influences the need for formal institution to sanction

  • Low complexity vs high complexity

• Developing sanctions tends to be enforced through bureaucratic organizations

• 5 fundamental propositions concerning the relationship between social stratification and the law

• Treat those of lower social class position more harshly for the same offense committed by the middle-class and upper-class

  1. The conditions of ones life affect ones values and norms

  2. Complex societies are composed of groups with widely different life conditions

  3. Complex societies, therefore are composed of highly disparate and conflicting set of norms

  4. The probability of a groups having its particular normative system embodied in law is not distributed equally, but rather is closely related to the political and economic position of that group

  5. The higher a group’s political or economic position, the greater is the probabililty that its view will be reflected in the laws

• The Criminal Justice System tended to treat those of lower social class position more harshly for the same offense committed by middle-class and upper-class

  • Lower class have little to offer in return for lenience and were in no position to fight the system

• Goal Displacement

  • Process by which the goals of bureaucratic efficiency and avoidance of trouble displace the official goal of impartial law enforcement

A bureaucratic organization might be expected to take the easy way out under three conditions:

1. The members have little motivation to resist the easy way out

2. They have a great deal of discretion in how they actually will behave

3. Adherence to the official goals is not enforced

Lack of commitment to due process

Content and Operation of Criminal Law

1. Acts are defined as criminal because it is in the interest of the ruling class

2. Ruling class will be able to violate the laws with impunity, subject class will be punished

3. Advancement increase the gap between the bourgeoisie and the proletariate widens

   • Penal law will expand in an effort to coerce the proletariat into submission

Consequences of Crime for Society

4. Crime reduces surplus labor by creating employment

5. Crime diverts the lower classes’ attention from the exploitation

   • Directs it towards other members of their own class rather than toward the capitalist class or the economic system

6. Crime is a reality which exist only as it is created by those in the society whose interest are served by its presence

7. Criminal and noncriminal behavior stem from people acting rationally that is compatible with their class position

8. Crime varies from society to society depending on the political and economic structure

9. Socialist countries should have much lower rates of crime because of the less intense class struggles

Quinney: Social Reality, Capitalism and Crime

• Focused on the sociology and conflicting interest

  • Began with social jurisprudence

• Defined law as the creation and interpretation of specialized rules in a politically organized society

• Politically organized society is based on an interest structure

  • This structure is characterized by unequal distribution of power and conflict

• Law is formulated and administered within the interest structure

  • Whenever a law is created or interpreted the values of some are necessarily assured and the values of others are ignored or negated

The Problem of Crime and the Social Reality of Crime

• Crime must be considered in relative terms as a legal status that is assigned to behaviors and persons by authorized others in society

• Social differentiation and social change tended to produce complex societies with different and often conflicting conduct norms prevailing in different segments

The Social Reality of Crime consist of 6 propositions:

1. Crime: A definition of human conduct that is created by authorized agents in a politically organized society

2. Criminal definitions describe behaviors that conflict with the interest of segments of society that have the power to shape public policy

3. Criminal definitions are applied by the segments of society that have the power to shape the enforcement and administration of criminal law

4. Behavior patterns are structured in segmentally organized society in relation to criminal definitions, and within this context persons engage in actions that have relative probabilities of being defined as criminal

5. Conceptions of crime are constructed and diffused in the segments of society by various means of communication

6. The social reality of crime is constructed by the formulation and applications of criminal definitions, the development of behavior patterns related to criminal definitions, and the construction of criminal conceptions.

Class, State and Crime

• Capitalism generates a surplus population made up of unemployed laborers

• The general problem of the capitalist state was seen as providing support for the growth of capitalism while trying to manage the resulting problems by mechanisms such as the welfare state and criminal justice system

  • Nearly all rimes among the working class in capitalist society are actually a means of survival

  • Crime was considered an unsatisfactory form of politics

Crimes of Dominance:

• Crimes of control, the government, economic domination

Crimes of Accommodation/Resistance

• Predatory crimes, personal crimes, crimes of resistance

Answer to the human predicament is a salvation achieved through the overcoming and healing of the disparity between existence and essence

• Emphasis on the religious nature of the goal

Justice is more than a normative idea

• What was necessary was a “prophetic understanding” of reality

The socialist struggle in our age is a search for God at the same time that it is a struggle for justice in human society

Believed that it becomes possible to transform oneself and the social order in the pursuit of greater justice

Conflict Theory and the Causes of Crime and Implications

• Central theoretical problem still is to understand the nature of social conflict

  • Crime is an outcome of definitions imposed as part of the consequences of conflict among various segments of society

• Chambliss’s Policy Implications

  • The Warren court understood the distinction between the law in the books and law in action

  • Extended the legal rights of convicted offenders as well as suspects and private citizens

• Quinney’s Policy Implications

  • His approach had more impact on both criminological thought and deviant behavior

  • The concept of crime as a result of the “social construction of reality” is broader than labeling theory, and the general perspective has become extremely influential in the larger field of the “social problems” as well as in the newer “postmodern criminologies”