Book Review, The Politics of Informal Justice. Vol. 1: The American Experience. Vol. 2: Comparative Studies (original) (raw)

THE NEW MYTH OF CLASS AND CRIME

Criminology, 1980

concluded that the presumedinverse relationship between class and crime is a myth. We discuss six problems in their evaluation:paucity of evidence: lack of specijkation of theoretical relationships; faulty specijlcation and measures of class; inadequate operational dejinitions of "crime"; faulty analysis of evidence; and failure to examine all evidence. We conclude that the empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that low class position is a source of serious crimes against persons and property.

Agency in Policing the Poor: Protecting Social Status and Fortifying Punishment

Our fascination with the "New Jim Crow" thesis 1 is not without warrant. It challenges most scholars to critically analyze the ways in which the criminal justice system systematically reaped havoc upon poor, minority communities across the nation. And while it vividly depicts how the system has decimated the lives of many, it left questions around how and why?

Poverty, Power, White-Collar Crime and the Paradoxes of Criminological Theory

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 1991

Sutherland 's aspiration for a general theory of both white-collar and common crime can be pursued by [ocusing on inequality as an explanatory variable. Powerlessness and poverty increase the chances that needs are so little satisfied that crime is an irresistible temptation to actors alienated from the social order and that punishment is non-credible to actors who have nothing to lose. It may be theoretically fruitful to move away from a positivist conception of need to needs socially constructed as wants that can be satisfied (contrasted with greed -socially constructed as insatiable wants). When needs are satisfied, further power and wealth enables crime motivated by greed. New types of criminal opportunities and new paths to immunity from accountability are constituted by concentrations of wealth and power. Inequality thus worsens both crimes ofpoverty motivated by need for goods for use and crimes of wealth motivated by greed enabled by goods for exchange. Furthermore, much crime, particularly violent crime, is motivated by the humiliation of the offender and the offender's perceived right to humiliate the victim. Inegalitarian societies, it is argued, are more structurally humiliating. Dimensions of inequality relevant to the explanation of both white-collar and common crime are economic inequality, inequality in political power (slavery, totalitarianism), racism, ageism and patriarchy. Neither 0/ these lines of explanation is advanced as the whole story on crimes ofthe powerless or crimes ofthe powerful; but they mdy be a theoretically interesting and politically important part of the whole story.

The Myth of Social Class and Criminality Reconsidered

Four recent contributions to ASR on the relationship between social class and criminality are evaluated against a more comprehensive review of the evidence. It is concluded that class is one of the very few correlates of criminality which can be taken, on balance, as persuasively supported by a large body of empirical evidence. Self-report studies, however, fail to provide consistent support for a class-crime relationship. Yet even here more studies show significant class differences than would be expected on the basis of chance. Studies of official records consistently show notable class differences in criminality. While there is a considerable literature which has failed to demonstrate widespread class biases in official records, there is neglected evidence which suggests that self-reports exaggerate the proportion of delinquency committed by the middle class.

Crime, Urban Poverty, and Social Science

Du Bois Review, 2009

In recent years, sociologists have conducted enormously important research on the intersection of urban poverty, crime, and the racial divide. Quantitative stratification sociologist Bruce Western provides a meticulous tracing of the emergence of mass incarceration, tracking its steady development and identifying how and why-both economically and politically-this trend has fallen so heavily on low-income Black communities~Western 2006!. Quantitative stratification sociologist Devah Pager carries out remarkably innovative and compelling field experiments showing the terrible toll incarceration takes on the employment prospects and, therefore, the greater life chances of former felons, particularly those who are Black~Pager 2007!. And the combined efforts of quantitative criminologist Chris Uggen and quantitative political sociologist Jeff Manza reveal the extraordinary distortion of our local and national politics that results from the practice of felon disfranchisement~Manza and Uggen, 2006!. To be sure, theoretical sociologists also have made some significant entries regarding the intersection of crime, poverty, and race. David Garland makes a provocative argument about how the challenges of modernity and an array of sociopolitical currents~e.g., the victim's right movement, apprehensions about maintaining order-social control-in an age of extraordinary mobility of people and resources! ushered in the turn to mass incarceration~Garland 2001!. Likewise, theorist and ethnographer Loic Wacquant developed a trenchant sociohistorical argument about