Question: What Causes Crime? Left Realism (LR) has the most convincing argument in what causes crime, by focusing on the socioeconomic circumstances of crime causes in comparison to Right Realism’s (RR) narrow individualistic narratives, LR creates a theoretical methodology which focuses more on the victims and the wider social structures. However, although LR is a good start for understanding the causes of crime, LR fundamentally fails to highlight the problematisation of the concept of crime itself, accepting its definition by the state, whilst providing a weak analysis of the causes of corporate crime (CC). The theory of LR arose in the rhetoric to take crime more seriously, highlighting the importance of the social structures of society for crime causality. LRs methodology of the ‘square of crime’, shows that the causes of crime can only be understood ‘in the context of interaction with the criminal justice agencies … the victim, the community and the offender’.1 Thus, the square is used as starting point for the critical analysis of crime to ‘locate the offender and their motivation within a complex of social relations’. 2 Hence, in deconstructing the square, LRs are able to ‘place together these fragments of the shape of crime in their social context’, capturing the ‘real forces behind the one-dimensional time-frozen images of conventional accounts’.3 Through this, LR use social structures to create a varied analysis of crime causation, unlike RRs who centre only on the offender strand. Drawing on RRs, they emphasize individualistic causes of crime, arguing that certain individuals are predisposed to criminal behaviour due to biological factors, alongside positivistic factors of the rational choice, whereby individuals are rational actors, who actively choose criminality. RRs are criticised by Young as being ‘born again’ Lombrosians, highly reductionist in their theory, as there may be circumstances where an individual may have no choice but to commit crimes due to their socio-economic status, alongside the shaky presumption that all humans can be accurately considered rational (i.e. the mentally ill/children). Hence the LR approach is more favourable as it pays attention to importance of categories of power, class, gender, race, and ethnicity in delineating the factors which cause crime, providing a more comprehensive analysis. One of the central explanations of crime causality for LR is the idea of relative deprivation (RD), this is when people ‘experience a level of unfairness in their allocation of resources’ thus their ‘reaction to the experience of injustice’ is what leads to crime.4 Although Young emphasises that crime can occur anywhere within the social structure, LRs focus more on the crimes of the working class, as it is among the poor who are typically excluded from the ‘glittering prizes’ of society, thus more likely to be pushed to crime than elsewhere in the social structure.5 This account of crime causation is more plausible than RR, as LRs understand the reality that criminal acts are more accurately assessed within a determined social context, instead of as a simple determined pathology. Much of the social structures LR is based on originates in the criticism of capitalism, which is seen to cause the inequalities that fuel RD. LRs provide the metaphor of a racetrack, whereby certain individuals start at the finishing post, succeeding ‘through the right connections rather than through genuine effort’.6 Hence, the nature of capitalism ‘in its unequal class structure’ results in the ‘core values of a competitive individualism which shape and guide people’s anger’ in their realisation of RD.7 Furthermore, in drawing on ideas of RD, LRs also uses other theories, such as anomie and subcultural. These theories by itself are insufficient in the analysis of criminality, however LRs are convincing in their approach to incorporate them to create a more exhaustive argument. Therefore, Merton’s anomie theory slots neatly into ideas of RD, arguing that ‘some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons … to engage in nonconformist’ conduct.8 Hence, the emphasis upon the accumulation of wealth becomes a ‘culturally induced success-goal’, achieved through illegitimate means due to RD.9 Moreover, subcultures evolve when certain social groups experience common problems (i.e. RD) create a shared solution of delinquency, banding together to strengthen achievement of such goals.10 However, despite LRs ability to incorporate the social structures that interplay in crime causation, they have not adequately provided enough analysis on the causes of CC, but instead focus more on the crimes of the working-class, particularly street crime. LR argue that the effects of CC crime are generally widespread, while those of direct crime are concentrated.11 While it is valuable to acknowledge that such crimes are the larger proportions of crimes prevalent in society, CC can have far reaching detrimental effects, therefore this gap in theoretical explanation limits the value of LR. LRs have tried to reconcile this by arguing that the ‘frustration of inability to meet expected goals … is diffused throughout all social classes’.12 Lea gives the example of a young middle-class businessman who would still ‘take out his failings in the competitive arena by violence towards his wife’.13 However, this seems stretched in giving a comprehensive argument towards white-collar crime overall. Lea, however, emphasizes that the square of crime responds to such issues through the solutions of clearly identifying the victims of CC in order to enhance the power of communities against corporations.14 Nonetheless, although it is viable to propose that higher visibility of victims will aid in CC prevention, its unsatisfactory in accurately describing the adequate causality of such crimes. Through this omission, LR does not aid in diffusing the dominant powers such individuals can commit against society overall. Moving onto the methodology, LR emphasize that activity must be taken upon all sides of the square if crime is to be combatted. Hence, the facilitation of building effective relationships with the public through local victim surveys is central in order to create a democratic instrument that allows the ‘experience of people’ to be heard and ‘differentiate the safety needs of different sectors of the community’.15 For LRs, using a geographically focused surveys produces ‘a source of information independent from the police’ constituting a ‘resource for the construction of local policing plans’.16 Therefore, by incorporating the need for an accurate victimology, LR is more finely tuned to the reality of crime, with the public voice being playing a significant voice in formulating a policy response. Despite this, LRs assume that humans are in a position to know the true reality of crime.17 Surveys only capture the responses ‘made by individuals to the particular questions at a particular moment of time’.18 Hence, the LR argument that surveys reveal the underlying structural processes would inevitably ‘reduce agents to the bearers of structures’.19 Despite the fact that victim surveys do give the public a better voice, ‘social reality is not simply the sum of these voices’.20 Lea argues that surveys are important in its formulation of a ‘process of public democratic debate’, avoiding the ‘conservative dependent on ‘the expert’ … as the ultimate arbiter of reality’.21 However, this does not address the fact that surveys assume that human beings are in a position to know social reality. Although this does not discredit the fact that LR has a commitment to understanding the societal structures by age, class, gender, and ethnicity, it seems that the methodology is not yet strong enough to interpret how these variables interact with each other.22 Drawing back to the use of the square, Lea demonstrates that acts of deconstruction are used in order to take the phenomenon of crime apart, placing together the fragments into the ‘shape of crime in their social context over time’.23 This process reveals that LRs do not believe that crime has no ontological reality, but instead ‘that reality is built up out of concrete social relations’.24 Lea reveals that the square of crime recognises crime as a complex social construction, however the focus is not on problematising whether such concepts have ‘ontological reality’, instead the central narrative is to understand the capitalistic divisions of labour and associated power relations in society.25 This is problematic as the project of LR ignores the fact that crime is a social construction of the elite, and is thus not real. This can be seen through the LR criticism of Left Idealism, whereby Left Idealism neglects the causes of crime as it is an artefact of the state’s need to criminalise in order to sustain itself.26 It is clear that the project of LR falls to the problem of essentialism, working on the ‘presumption that there is some steadfast and easily identifiable empirical referent out there called “crime”’.27 To conclude, LR has a more convincing argument in bringing forth the many variables that interplay the causes of crime through the “square of crime” analysis, particularly in attributing the wider social structures of society that can have heavy impacts on a person’s inclination to criminality, particularly when compared to their contemporaries of RR. However, this theory of crime cannot be considered wholly complete due to the patchy analysis of corporate crime, alongside the problematic essentialism LR falls into. Bibliography: - Burke, R J. ‘An Introduction to Criminological Theory’, (2013), 3rd edn, Willan Publishing Cohen, A. ‘Delinquent Boys’, (1957) Glencoe: Free Press. Corrigan, P., Jones, T., Lloyd, J. & Young, J. ‘Socialism, merit and efficiency’ (1988) The Fabian Society. Lea, J. ‘The analysis of crime’ In J. Young & R. Matthews (Eds.), ‘Rethinking criminology: The realist debate’ (1992) SAGE. Lea, J. ‘Left realism: A radical criminology for the current crisis’, (2016) International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5(3): 53‐65. Mooney, J. ‘Left Realism: “Taking Crime Seriously”’, (2022) Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Criminology. Merton, R K. ‘Social Structure and Anomie’, (1938) American Sociological Review Vol. 3, No. 5, pp. 672-682. Outhwaite, W. ‘New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory’ (1987) London: Macmillan. Walklate, S. ‘Understanding criminology: Current theoretical debates’, (2007) McGraw-Hill Education. Young, J. ‘The tasks facing a realist criminology’ (1957) Contemporary Crises 11(4): 337‐356.
