Why/Not Study
October 19, 2025
Crime Prevention Policy
October 19, 2025
Critical criminologists
Surplus population
This surplus population or economic underclass lives under social, economic, and political conditions which can be described as devastating (Time Magazine, 1977, Auletta, 1982).
It is here in the marginalized, demoralized, and super exploited sector of the working class that traditional crime often takes root and flourishes. It has long been noted by criminologists that there is a strong relationship between social class and criminality (as measured in official statistics).
Despite the attempt of some American criminologists to prove that this relationship is a myth (Tittle, Villemez, and Smith, 1978), the bulk of the evidence continues to show that lower class people do commit traditional crime at a much higher rate than other classes.
As Braithwaite (1981:38) points out, “… it has been demonstrated, with a degree of consistency which is unusual in social science, that lower class people, and people living in lower class areas, have higher official crime rates than other groups.”
Critical criminologists argue that predatory crimes, such as burglary, robbery, drug dealing, and hustling, are often pursued by the members of the surplus population out of the need to survive. As Platt (1978:30) notes, “For this population the economic conditions of life are unusually desperate and degrading.
The high level of property crime and petty hustlers cannot be separated from the problems of survival.” The surplus population is also heavily involved in intra-class acts of interpersonal violence, as well as increasingly cross-class acts of violence.
Rape, assault, child and wife beating, and homicide result from the brutalization and demoralization of life conditions for the surplus population. As Quinney (1980:61) observes, these “…conventional criminal acts … are pursued by those who are already brutalized by the conditions of capitalism.”
Conditions
While the life conditions of the surplus population under advanced capitalism are undoubtedly related to criminal behaviour, there are other, more specific, factors to be considered if we are to deepen our understanding of the relationship between social order and traditional crime.
Structural Unemployment One of the most significant of the adverse conditions facing the surplus population is a deep rooted and pervasive level of structural unemployment.
Structural unemployment, of course, also increasingly affects millions in the skilled working class and service oriented middle class as well. High levels of unemployment have a very strong relationship to as variety of social problems, including, of course, traditional street crime.
As Michalowski (1983:16) notes, “One of the most enduring pieces of data about street crime is that they are overwhelmingly committed by the unemployed and underemployed.” The evidence linking traditional crime to unemployment is impressive.
In a series of brilliant studies, M. Harvey Brenner (1975, 1976) has shown that between 1920- 3.940 and 1947-1973, in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, and Scotland, there has been a significant direct relationship between unemployment and a wide variety of measures of criminal activity. Brenner’s research is not limited to an examination of the relationship between unemployment and crime.
He has also demonstrated, in a study of New York mental patients over a period of 127 years, that the only significant factor accounting for the rise and fall in admissions to mental hospitals is employment (Brenner, 1973).
In addition, he has shown that such diverse phenomena as cardiovascular disease, suicide, and child abuse are correlated most highly with unemployment rates. Brenner, however, makes the strongest claims regarding the existence of significant causal impacts of the economy on traditional crime.
In a report to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Brenner (1975) argued that a 1.4% rise in unemployment during 1970 was “directly responsible” for 7,660 state prison admissions and 1,740 homicides. Later in the same study, he concludes that a 1%increase in unemployment sustained over six years would be associated with. Approximately 3,340 admissions to state prisons.
Other recent studies corroborate Brenner’s findings, for example, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has reported a correlation of.77 between their inmate population and the unemployment rate for 15 months earlier over a 20-year period.
Criminal violence
They analysed the United States for the period1949-1970 and found that “…fluctuations in crime rates are generated by changes in the level and distribution of income in the manner predicted by the theory” (1975:113).Loftin and Hill (1974) present evidence to show that economic inequality is the most important predictor of homicide rates when American states are compared.
Both Eberts and Schwirian (1968) and Braithwaite (1979) demonstrate that United States Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) with a high level of income inequality have high crime rates. In a more recent study, Blau and Blau (1982:121) present data on the 125 largest American SMSAs which show that “…income inequality in a metropolis substantially raises its rate of criminal violence.”
They conclude (1982:126) “High rates of criminal violence are apparently the price of racial and economic inequalities. These studies add an important dimension to our understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and crime.
It is the distribution of income which appears to be the primary variable which explains this relationship. Poverty, per se, does not explain traditional crime. It is the degree of inequality, which is the important factor here, not the size of the poverty population.
The crimes of the poor, therefore, may be less a matter of survival than of relative deprivation. As Braithwaite (1979:216-217) notes this is a finding of some theoretical significance: The finding that the size of the gap between the average income earner and poor families is correlated with crime, but not the number who, are poor, is of considerable theoretical importance.
It may be that, when there are only a small number of poor ‘families in a city, these families feel a far more acute sense of missing out on the benefits of the Great Society than do poor families who are in cities where they are surrounded by many other families in exactly the same plight. Policies that reduce the number of poor people should certainly reduce the propensity to crime of those people lifted out of poverty, but do they at the same time create even greater despair, frustration, and criminality amongst those who remain poor?
The importance -of the concept of relative deprivation in explanations of the relationship between economic factors and crime was recognized as far back as the time ofQuetelet and Guerry (Messner, 1980).
Marxian criminologists have made use of the concept too. Bonger (1916:91) pointed out that, “it is not the total amount of wealth, but the manner of its distribution that bears most importantly upon criminality.” In summary of Bonger’s work, Austin Turk (19’69.11) commented: “
The potency of economic want as a factor in crime causation is mainly determined by whether or not poverty is experienced as relative deprivation, in a social context(capitalism) wherein people are taught to equate economic advantage with intrinsic superiority and disadvantage with inferiority.”
Much of the literature on relative deprivation and crime suggests that this formulation can best be used to explain property crime. And indeed, there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence to support this proposition (Chester, 1976).
However, many of the studies reviewed above demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between income inequality, relative deprivation, and rates of violent crime too.
Ethnic inequality
As Blau and Blau (1982:122) point out “…the relative deprivation produced by much inequality rather than the absolute deprivation produced by much poverty provides the most fertile soil for criminal violence.” The social process inferred by Blau and Blau is that inequality creates alienation, despair, and pent-up aggression which is often expressed in acts of criminal violence.
As they note (1982:119): Ascriptive socioeconomic inequalities undermine the social integration of a community by creating multiple parallel social differences which widen the separations between ethnic groups and between social classes, and it creates a situation characterized by much social disorganization and prevalent latent animosities.
Pronounced ethnic inequality in resources implies that there are great riches within view, but not within reach of many people destined to live in poverty. There is much resentment, frustration, hopelessness, and alienation. From the critical perspective, these structured inequalities which result in perceptions of relative deprivation are rooted in the political economy of capitalist society.
Thus, only radical social structural change can reduce the level of inequality and hence reduce the lovelified. Before this suggestion and other crime prevention policies which flow from a Marxist analysis of crime can be discussed, however, it is important to examine one final dimension of the perspective’s approach to crime causation.
The Destruction of Cooperative Social Relationships and Community The structural level forces we have been examining must be the starting point for any analysis of crime, as the critical perspective rightly insists.
There are, however, other levels of analysis that must also be considered. Paul Friday (1981:191) argues that theories of crime tend to focus on one of three possible levels: The structural level, the system level, and the individual level. Structural level theories, such as Marxism, attempt to explain crime as -a product of forces external to the individual and beyond his or her control.
Developmental damage
“The same developmental damage” argues Currie (1982:22) “is equally likely to take place in two parent families plagued b% severe internal conflict or abuse.” The family, in other words, is being buffeted and often ripped apart by larger structural conditions such as unemployment, inequality, and alienation.
And the impact of such forces is not confined to the family, but affects peer relationships, schools, and community organizations, as well. Under monopoly capitalism, cooperative social relationships within these social institutions are destroyed.
As Tony Platt (1978:31) points out: Monopoly capitalism emirates increasingly larger portions of the working class and proletarianizes the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie, degrades workers’ skills and competency in the quest for higher productivity, and organizes family and community life based on its most effective exploitability
it consequently makes antagonism rather than reciprocity the norm of social relationships. Under the political economy of advanced capitalism, Platt (1978:31) goes on to argue, “…family and peer relationships become even more brutal and attenuated.”
All individual, family, and social needs become subordinated to the market and reshaped to serve the needs of capital. Capitalist development results in the atomization of social life and human cooperative relationships are increasingly replaced by impersonal market transactions (Braverman, 1974).
These conditions exert enormous pressures and strains on the family, and they are profoundly hostile to all feelings of community in general Delinquency, violence, and other forms of social pathology are the direct result of the material foundations of cooperative social relations capitalist society° As Micha lows i LJA ) notes.
The frustration, alienation, and sense o competitiveness generated by socially-structured innerve laity most often turns the less powerful against one another either in emulation of the predatory, exploitive, and apparently rewarding practices of the more powerful, or simple expression of impotent fury with their lives.
Conventional
economics
The Bureau’s report (1975) argues that unemployment can be shown to be an effective predictor (if not cause) of the crime rate. Phillips, Vote, and Maxwell (1972:503) have demonstrated through the methods of econometrics that a”…labour force/not-in the-labour force formulation has greater explanatory power than the not working formulation, demonstrating the importance of participation rates relative to unemployment rates in explaining crime rates.” This is because unemployment rate underestimates the actual number of people out of work.
Thus, labour force participation may be a crucial element in “… explaining crime because participation rates capture long-term trends as opposed to cyclical, short-run fluctuations that are more likely to be reflected by unemployment rates” employment and traditional crime can also be linked to the notion of a structurally generated “surplus population” by way of “segmented Abor market theories.”
Conventional economics uses a “human capital” theory to explain labour market success and crime (labour market failure). This model, of course, hypothesizes that potential offenders behave like rational economic actors. That is, they choose between legal and illegal options after weighing the costs and benefits of each. This model also argues that labour market success is related to individual differences in productivity.
Productive workers, of course, are rewarded with jobs and high wages. Workers become more productive by acquiring a stock of human capital (education, training skills, work experience). In this pro-fondly individualistic view, workers who fail to “invest” their time acquiring human capital will be forced to settle for low wage jobs or unemployment.
Crime, then, is a rational economic decision which can be deterred by iDcreasing the costs (punishment) to the individual. Segmented labour market theories, on the other hand, argue that the source of structural unemployment and chronic poverty lies in the heavy constraints exerted on individuals by structural economic conditions.
As Doeringer and Piore (1975:72) point out, “…the problem of unemployment is rooted less in individual behaviour (the failure to acquire human capital) than in the character of institutions and the social patterns that derive from them.” Segmented labour market theories see capitalist economies as divided into two distinct markets.
The primary market offers jobs with high wages, good working conditions, stability, security, and opportunity for advancement. The secondary (Thompson, Sviridoff, and McElroy, 1981:52).
How can the empirical relationship between joblessness and crime be explained. First and foremost, critical criminologists point out that unemployment enhances the attractiveness of crime as a source of income.
As Michalowski (1983:16) notes, unemployment “…depresses wages to the level that some prefer crime over seeking out low-paying jobs, while increasing temptation to commit crime for those who are unemployed or able to find only sporadic part-time work.”
Second, Michalowski (1983:17) argues that unemployment: …tends to isolate individuals from full integration into the society, thus weakening the social bond between the individual and the society.
Thus, even where individuals are not in desperate economic situation, their marginalization provides fertile ground for the growth of criminal incentives. In addition, Michalowski notes that the expectations of unemployment among youth who have not yet sought jobs can produce the same sense of marginalization.
Crime and
violence
Finally, Michalowski (1983:17) points out: “…the loss of self-worth associated with being without work is often a basis for a generalized anger which can find its expression in crime and violence, when it is not turned inward through such things as depression, addiction, mental illness, and alcoholism.” At the theoretical level, these findings on the relationship between unhem-sector has jobs which are decidedly less attractive.
According to Piore (1977:94) “They tend to involve low wages, poor working conditions, considerable variability in employment, harsh and arbitrary discipline, and little opportunity to advance. The poor are confined to the secondary labour market.”
It is the existence of dual or segmented labour markets under advanced capitalism that generates the surplus population. The structural unemployment and under-employment of the secondary labour market breeds the social conditions conducive to traditional crime described by Michalowski.
Under such a view, crime prevention policies should not be directed toward individuals (increasing the costs of illegal behaviour), but instead toward the economic and political structure which generates illegal behaviour. As Thompson, Sviridoff, and McElroy (1981:19) point out:
Disagreement between conventional economics and the SLM theories is not so much over whether individual labour market participants, especially the poor, are acting “rationally” in committing crime, but over whether it is necessary to account for an array of structural, institutional, organizational features of the economy in order to arrive at satisfactory explanation of economic behaviour. Structured Inequality and Relative Deprivation Thus far, it has been argued that traditional crime is rooted in the political economy of advanced capitalist society.
The class structure
The class structure and segmented Labo market of capitalist society systematically generates a surplus population which is faced with structured unemployment and chronic poverty and turns to crime as either a means for survival or as a response to the brutalized social conditions of life experiences. While this theoretical statement constitutes a strong explanation for traditional crime, it remains incomplete.
To this statement we must now add the concepts of structured income inequality and relative deprivation. There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows a high correlation between income inequality and official rates of crime.
What is especially interesting to note about this research is that is reveals a direct relationship between income inequality and rates of violent crime, as well as rates of property crime. For example, Messner (1980), in cross national study, demonstrates a significant effect of income inequality on societal murder rates.
As he puts it (1980:193), “The data, in short, indicate that high murder rates tend to accompany high levels of inequality in the distribution of income. “Furthermore, when Messner entered a measure of the overall affluence or poverty of the population into the regression equation, the effects of the inequality variable did not disappear.
In an earlier, less sophisticated cross-national study, McDonald (1976) also found a positive association between income inequality and the murder rate. Research on income distribution and crime rates within the United States supports the proposition that income inequality is a significant determinant of serious criminality.
Danziger and Wheeler (1975:113) used an econometric model to test the hypothesis that “…shifts toward a greater degree of inequality in the distribution of income and increases in the absolute level of income when the distribution is constant, are both accompanied by more crime.”
Political economy
Political economy, structural unemployment, and income inequality are examples of structural level forces. System level theories explain crime as a function of social institutions such as the family, peer groups, community organizations, and schools.
As Friday (1981:191) points out: “Each of the system forces are directly related to structural conditions., but the individual has some interaction with a unit of each system, and has some impact on that unit in turn.”
The final level is the individual level, which consists of theories which focus on the conditions surrounding the act itself. An adequate theory of crime, and one that will have the greatest policy implications, is one which succeeds in integrating these levels, demonstrating the linkages between them.
As Friday (1981:192) notes “Explanations which have been restricted to only one level of analysis have limited utility.” The Marxist explanation of crime, therefore, cannot remain forever on the structural level. The theory must explain how larger political and economic structures impact on systems level institutions and on individuals.
While the structural forces discussed above are the centrepiece of a Marxist theory of crime, we need to understand how these forces are mediated through other social institutions and the processes by which these forces differentially shape the conditions surrounding the individual act.
For as Friday (1981:194) points out: The individual act cannot be explained directly by the urban industrial structural conditions. These conditions, none the-less, contribute indirectly to it by differentially affecting the institutions responsible for developing commitments to conformity: the family, school community groups, and work.
Forces affecting the criminal act at the institutional level reflect the fact that all societies have norms and expectations which are learned through socialization in the family, in school, and through voluntary and neighbourhood groups in the community. Critical criminologists, in general, have been slow to address this issue. They are content to remain at the level of the political and economic structure since the social formation as a whole is so often ignored in criminological theory.
A few critical criminologists, however, have started to explore the relationships between the larger structures of society and its “soft” institutions, and the implicit- tons of these relationships for criminality. For example, Elliott Currie (1982) has noted the relationship between economic conditions, family life, and developmental disturbances.
One parent (usually female) families, according to Currie (1982:22)”…produce a disproportionate amount of aggression and violence in children not because they have one parent of because that parent is a woman, but because thetically lack enough outside resources, human and material, to insure an adequate development environment.”
The developmental disturbances that result in crime, according to Currie, are not attributable to the absence of the father, but to the stresses and lack of support systems that alter family functioning.
Inequality
Humans do not generally attack the person or property of those with whom they feel a sense of community. Inequality, however, tends to destroy community, thus making almost anyone fair game to exploit for personal ends This propensity is fuelled by both ideological and material forces which tend to weaken or even prevent the emergence of any real sense of solidarity with the working class,
Another dimension to this analysis is added by T, Ryong (1978). He argues that the loss of social standing or social. significance individualism under capitalism is the key to understanding traditional crime (1978:11):
Itis not the poverty of the surplus population which is the interesting dynamic in crime poor people in Japan and China don’t commit crime. The important variable is the loss of social standing (social honour, social significance, social status, Stand or social relationships) which is the central dynamic.
One does not rape, rob, or assault those who have social standing in the eyes of the aggressor. As Young (1978:11) goes on to note: It is intrinsic to the nature of capitalism that- social relationships and community be destroyed in a society.
If one has nothing to exchange in a capitalistic society, one is not provided goods and services. Social standing depends upon funds – without cash or credit one is denied standing by virtue of the rule of capitalism: exchange for profit. Community is destroyed as well.
In folk society, the surplus value of labour is used to provide community in the form of ceremonies, festivities, games, and other collective endeavour. In capitalism, the surplus value of labour is appropriated to the capitalist or this/her agent for private use rather than communal use. …
With the loss of social relationship and community; with the individualism of the capitalist mode; with the use of every social good or service as commodity, the self-centred quest for material wealth we call crime proliferates.
As these writings suggest, Marxist or critical criminologists are beginning to come to grips with the question of how structural forces impact on systems level institutions as part of a complex process of crime causation.
The political and economic structures of capitalist society are viewed as undermining cooperative social relationships within the family, peer groups, and the community. These structural forces, thus, differentially affect the ability of these institutions to effectively socialize the young and develop role relationships conducive to non-criminal behaviour.
It is at this point that mainstream criminological theory might be able t be integrated into a Marxian theory of crime. And, it is also at disappoint, t vow critical criminal log sits may be able 0 develop more specie Ice ire 0 t0’ri Pro1~ C i. Ittai is to this issue of:( control, p oily that we now turn
