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Assess Different Marxist Views of the Relationship Between Crime and Social Class

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Assess different Marxist views of the relationship between crime and social class
Marxism is a structural theory and says we live in a capitalist society which is divided into 2 classes, the ruling class who own the means of production and the working class who are exploited by the RC in order to create profit. There are 3 types of Marxism, traditional Marxists, neo-Marxists and new left realists, each of these believe that the capitalists society is partly to blame to crime but different views as to why and how and to what extent. I will look at the link between what they say about class and crime.
According to traditional Marxists such as Chamblis and Pearce, everyone commits crime but it is only the working class that gets caught. Traditional Marxists argue that the working class are over represented in crime statistics because of selective policing. The police choose to pursue working class street crimes rather than trying to catch corporate or white collar crimes that are usually committed by ruling or middle classes. As these ruling class crimes are not caught, the working class appear to be more criminal than other social groups. The neo-Marxist Box estimated while in one year 20,000 people were murdered, 14000 died in industrial accidents and 30,000 died as a result of unsafe consumer products. While the death toll for these corporate crimes is much higher than that of street crime, the number of convictions for corporate crime was much lower so the working class street crimes were seen as more common thanks to selective policing. The public also fear street crimes more that corporate crime because the media is controlled by the ruling classes and they divert the attention away from them and keen to condemn and divide the working class. For example Neo-Marxist Hall et al explains how the media makes up terms that scare the public and they created moral panic

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