In this Essay, I chose the question “Outline what “social classes” mean. Explain links between class and Crime”
I’m going to outline mostly the lower-class links between class and crime but also briefly about crimes that are more linked to the middle and upper class.
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I want to find out if people with lower socioeconomic backgrounds really just are more criminal than the rest of the society or if there is a link between regulations and the way society is built up that puts people from the lower society at more risk of being overrepresented in the system and statistics around crime.
Class is something you can’t avoid seeing in your everyday life if you live in the U.K. The British class system is essential to British Culture/History and has been for centuries. Originally Karl Marx a Sociologist from Germany defined Class. He described 2 main categories as “the owning class” and “the working class”.
This means that one group owns properties, owns businesses, and basically controls the other group in the form of labor and has power over most assets in society, etc.
Marx believed that crime was fuelled by capitalism and the whole capitalist system is built on the exploitation of the lower/working class by the upper classes, which leads to increasing endless wealth for the rich and decreasing endless poverty for the poor. (University of Regina, 1999)
Different classes provide different opportunities and for the poor that typically means that they have less access to education, good jobs and a have bad health, and a higher level of mental illnesses in the communities.
The typical offense for lower-class people is crimes like theft or violence compared to middle-class crime, which is typically white-collar crimes such as fraud, money laundering, etc.
When you look at class and crime a tendency is also that specific crimes typically belong to specific social classes and the crimes that are committed reflect the social disadvantages or social advantages of the social class that people belong to. However, it can be difficult to determine the scale of it.
What we can do is we can look at the different areas' average household income and compare it to the crimes that have been committed in the area, since we typically wouldn’t record crimes based on individual income and job positions.
Today’s society is a little more flexible from when Marx defined classes and other theories about class and crimes are being discussed. However, Marx's theory is fundamentally still relevant. Where Marx is focused mainly on the two groups (Owner/Worker) that have different accessibility to the means of production other Sociologies have researched the link between class and job/income
Marx argues that upper-class people are less likely to be convicted of a crime compared to lower-class people because of upper-class people’s ability to hire good lawyers and are less likely to be investigated or even suspected, to begin with, as well as it is the upper-class that makes the regulations.
Most Sociologists agree on the fact that there is a link between crime and poverty. In 2019 London City Hall published an analysis that confirmed strong links between poverty and bad mental health to the violent youth crime that’s been terrorizing London. It showed that 75% of the Boroughs with the most crime are also the most deprived Boroughs and have a higher level of children living in poverty compared to the average Boroughs in London.
Major Khan addressed the link to crime and socio-economic factors -
“We have to face the reality that for some young people growing up today, violence has become normalized. And – with hope at rock-bottom, inequality higher than ever and absence of opportunities – turning to crime and gangs has become an all to easy route to satisfy the lure of gaining respect and money” (Gov. UK, 2019)
That backs’s up Marx theory, that while the capitalist society is getting more unequal and the gap dividing the classes increases crimes, as we can see in London where violent crimes started to peak in 2012 according to City Hall, and is still very serious today.
Crime gives the opportunity to obtain material wealth or goods they can’t get in a legitimate way and it often includes violent acts to threaten or use force to receive the material goods. Status frustration is when people are not satisfied with their classes and strive to move up the ladder in this case to move away from the lower class.
Research suggests that poor people are not only more likely to commit a crime they are also more likely to be a victim of crime. In fact, it is estimated that low-income households are more likely to be attacked by both people they know and strangers, they are twice as likely to be victims of burglary, six times more likely to be victims of domestic violence, and three times more likely to be victims of attempted rape or rape.
Furthermore, low-income families' fear of being a victim of a crime is 3 times higher than the upper class. According to the study, this can be justified by the fact that there are 3.5 times more criminal people living in the 20% most deprived areas than in the 20% least deprived areas. The lower-income population experiences 62% more personal crime than the upper class and the crimes committed against them are often the most damaging crimes (Cuthbertson, 2018)
The lower class society seems to battle with the kind of crimes that relate strongly to material goods and improving opportunities for wealth that can seem almost impossible for them to achieve by doing hard legitimate work or social difficulties such as mental illnesses and drug abuse that can cause them to be more vulnerable to commit crimes.
When we look at the middle/upper-class population, it is typically another range of crimes that we see being committed.
According to Edwin Sutherland, one of the most influential criminologists in the 20th century, the ability to commit a crime does not lay in people’s social classes but rather in learned behavior and norms that create the ability to commit a crime. He defines “White-collar crimes” as crimes committed by people of high status. Other criminologists have worked further on his theory by including some middle-class people into the calculation, instead of only people from the higher society.
They argue those opportunities to commit crime as based on the position of employment. (Oxford Bibliographies)
For example, if a middle-class worker has access to private computer systems they could commit crimes in their own favor, or doctors for example have the ability to write prescriptions.
White-collar crimes are often seen as “less serious” since its often non-violent crimes, whose purpose is to enrich the perpetrators and people can falsely think that white-collar crimes are “victimless” even though that’s not true.
Examples of white-collar crimes are corporate fraud, embezzlement, falsification of financial information, money laundering, etc.
These cases are extremely hard to solve compared to individual personal crime because the crimes often are committed on the Internet, which can be hard to trace but also because police investigators are mostly trained to investigate personal crime and solving a corporate crime or a “white-collar” crime would require the police to get expert help from outside the police department. This makes it even harder for investigators to build a case and find usable evidence for court that would lead to a conviction.
To conclude, there is definitely a class culture and also class cultures regarding crimes in the UK. Regulations are often structured, so that the crimes that are mostly committed by lower-income people are seen as “more dangerous” and “disturbing for society” than the crimes committed by the middle class even though all offenses are criminal offenses.
It tells me that it is extremely important to consider the credibility of some crime statistics and their accuracy as well.
If lower-class people are more likely to commit crimes, I believe that it's partially because they are criminalized by the system and the way regulations work. The regulations and the societies seem to criminalize some offenders without bearing in mind what led them to offend in the first place and this causes an effect of constantly labeling and victimizing low-income people.
According to the FBI white-collar crimes are way more costly to society than street crimes. The annual cost of white-collar crimes was $1 trillion compared to $15 billion for street crimes. The white-collar offenders rarely get punished because they might have political influence, status, or relative power and often have help available for them that street criminals don’t have (Psychology Today, 2017)
It can cause a misleading image of reality and keep up the consequent stereotyping of classes if we just assume that low-income people commit more crime by looking at misleading statistics and then we won't learn how to regulate in the future.
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