- Causing or leading to crime.
- It produces poverty, so the poor turn to crime to meet their basic needs; advertising fuels the desire for goods that people cannot afford; capitalism encourages success at all costs among capitalists; it produces alienation among workers, which may be expressed in violent or anti-social behaviour.
- By showing how the law was used to coerce the population into working on the British colonists’ plantations.
- Blame is attached to working-class criminals and so divides the working class; some laws (e.g. health and safety) appear to benefit the working class, giving capitalism a ‘caring face’; occasionally prosecuting capitalists makes it seem as if there is not one law for the rich and one for the poor.
- A deterministic view of behaviour suggests that crime is caused by external factors, such as subcultures or poverty. A voluntaristic view of behaviour sees the criminal as having free will and their crime is therefore the result of choice.
- Because it romanticises working-class crime as revolutionary, ignores the victims and does not suggest useful ways to tackle crime.
- The assumption made by some theories that the purpose of the sociological study of crime is to find ways of correcting criminal or deviant behaviour.
