Criminology



Criminology

Hostage Scene

A 42-year-old male kills his next door neighbor and holds his son, wife and a family friend hostage in his house. The subject demands immunity from the murder charge upon his surrender. Moreover, he also demands a case of beer and some fast food. If his demands are not fulfilled, he threatens, something will happen.

My Optimal Role

I, as a police psychologist, am a part of the hostage negotiation team. Upon reaching the crime scene, I am told that the location is a residential area about three blocks from a middle school and a public library. My optimal roles in this situation relate to negotiation with the perpetrator; and advising my team about how to deal with the situation. The category for the current hostage is 'mentally disturbed person'.

Different Approaches

Marxist approaches to crime cannot be separated from wider concerns in Marxist theory with political economy and historical change. Marx and Engels made few references to criminological issues and certainly produced no theory of crime. The latter effort was left to later interpreters and the interpretive effort sometimes over shadowed the criminological explanations that were being offered. Indeed, some Marxists proclaimed that (he effort to develop a 'Marxist criminology' was a doomed enterprise because Marxism was a philosophy and politics of the totality of historical relations. There could be no 'Marxist criminology' any more than there could be a 'Marxist sociology' or 'Marxist geography' since these independent disciplines represented the fragmentation of knowledge under capitalism into disconnected and competing areas of expertise.

As such, they were antithetical to the Marxist project as a whole which, according to Hirst (1975), treated criminology as a bourgeois discipline that (inevitably) fii1ed to grasp true circumstances of class conflict under capitalism. We make these preliminary remarks because Marxist criminology, more so than any other strand of criminological theory, represents less of a school, paradigm or perspective and more of a debate about how sociological, political and economic analyses ought to be applied to real world problems of crime and crime control. These debates are both intense and unresolved there is no definitive 'Marxist criminology' and there is a great deal of confusion over what such criminology might look like. Part of the reason for the confusion is that a key task of Marxism is to explain not only the existence of crime but the existence and the form of the criminal law. Why does the law criminalise some things and not others? Why is the criminal law applied to some groups of persons (invariably the poor and marginalised) with much greater regularity than others (invariably the rich and powerful)? An easy, and frequent, response is to propose that the laws are made by the rich and powerful to serve the interests of the rich and powerful.

Whilst Marx would, partially, have agreed with this claim it is not in itself a Marxist explanation. For Marx, the bourgeoisie (i.e. the rich and powerful law—makers) were as constrained in their actions as the proletariat ...