capitalist-system

  1. Causing or leading to crime.
  2. 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.
  3. By showing how the law was used to coerce the population into working on the British colonists’ plantations.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Because it romanticises working-class crime as revolutionary, ignores the victims and does not suggest useful ways to tackle crime.
  7. 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.