Summary Of Radical Criminology

So far we have discussed many theories that try to help us understand and explain why crime occurs. In their article, Lynch and Groves advocate the approach known as radical criminology. Radical criminologists believe crime is linked to a society’s political and economic conditions especially in capitalist cultures like the United States (p. 372). Deriving their position from Marx, radicals believe that four conditions relate to occurrence of crime:
a) capitalism is based on inequalities between those who own and those who work
b) because of the inequality between labor and capital, society becomes stratified into social classes characterized by differences in wealth, status, power, and authority
c) because of these differences, persons in different social classes have very different opportunities in terms of life chances and choices
d) among these opportunities are the chances of becoming criminal (p. 373) Ultimately, radicals think that social stratification accounts for the unequal distribution of chances and opportunities available to different persons at different levels in a class structure (p. 373). Radicals stress the causal association between political economy, inequality, and crime in three areas: the working world, how workplace conditions affect familial life, and women and crime. For the purposes
By not even mentioning adolescents in their piece, they disregard the fact that at some point in time, individuals have to learn criminal behavior somewhere and from someone (and it is usually in adolescence when such behavior is learned). It is very possible that through the social interaction of individuals in low income settings that criminal behavior is learned, but this is very unlikely because it is proven that most criminal activities are learned in adolescence from close, personal