SOCIAL PROCESSES AND CRIME

Social Processes and Crime

Social Processes and Crime

Introduction

Interactionist approaches opened up a concern with the process of criminalisation, but failed to explore this process in the context of the social, political and economic organisations of society. Nor did they ask why some acts were defined as deviant whereas others were not. This issue became a central theme of Marxist criminology.



Discussion

While Marx did not write at length about crime, Marx argued that the laws were generally the codified means by which one class, the rulers, kept another class, the rest of us in check.

Marxists recognise that for a society to function efficiently, social order is necessary. However, apart from communist societies, they consider that in all societies one class - the ruling class - gains far more than other classes. Marxists agree with functionalists that socialisation plays a crucial role in promoting conformity and order. However, unlike the latter, they are highly critical of the ideas, values and norms of capitalist society, which they term 'capitalist ideology'. Modern Marxists point to education and the media as socialising agencies, which delude or 'mystify' the working class into conforming to a social order, which works against its real interests.

Local community levels of violence cannot be adequately explained by internal conditions such as the socio-economic composition of place. Instead, spatial analyses have demonstrated that violence in one area is dependent upon the level of violence in other areas. The precise nature of the underlying processes through which places are linked, socially as well as geographically, remains an open question. The standard approach of conceptualizing "space" when modeling the impact of spatial effects crime has been to rely on contiguity or distance-based measures of space. In recent years, some attention has been paid to moving beyond geographic space to ...