In criminology Left Realism is the polar political opposite of Right Realism. It grew out of Marxist Criminology, Conflict Criminology, and Radical Criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the Left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, leaving it to the Right Realists to monopolise the discourse on law and order. Now both sets of Realists seek to educate the public about the 'facts' of crime, but all these 'facts' are politically contested.

Discussion

---

The Left has traditionally been a broad church, accepting contributions from Marxism, socialism, anarchism, feminism, and postmodernism. So-called "Left Idealism" has drawn on symbolic interactionism, anomie, and subcultural theory but always within the framework of a capitalist society directly affected by class and other elements of conflict based on patriarchalism and race. Crime as a mechanism of social control is perceived as being ideological in its intent, aimed at establishing and maintaining class hegemony. Their interests focus on white-collar crime, corporate crime, state crime, state-corporate crime and political crime. In one sense, this focus is appropriate. Most societies lose more in economic terms from behaviour arising from these forms of crime than from violent street crime. More people are injured and killed through unsafe working conditions than through murder. But the vulnerable working class people do not fear major corporations with the same intensity as the local neighbourhood gang who are usually of the same social class as their victims. Left Realists diverge from an idealised analysis of crime because it appears to deny the role of the individual, characterising everything as aspects of a structural process. Their research focuses on establishing an accurate picture of crime and its victims, seeking evidence of the causes of crime in the relationships between offenders and their victims. These Realists therefore match the Right Realists in accepting the necessity of social order, but they ask whose order and for what purpose? Realism adopts the language of reason. That to control crime, one must understand where the phenomenon has come from and its nature. Only then can one propose specific progressive and humane policies for the reduction of crime from a Left perspective. This has presented voters with a more balanced debate. For too long, the Right had had an uncontested run on the "anti-crime" ticket allowing radical policies for long-term incarceration and, in the United States, the death penalty to go unanswered.

The substance of realism

---

Left Realism set down a marker in the United Kingdom with the work of Lea and Young (1984) as representative of a group of academics: Richard Kinsey, John Lea, Roger Matthews, Geoff Pearson, and Jock Young. Data is collected through victim surveys, recognising the validity of personal experience, and their work is rooted in empiricism and rationality as opposed to the moral panic often inspired by the media and politicians. The Realists assert that most victims are victimised twice: personal injury and/or economic loss resulting from a personal attack upon them, and through their continuing poverty and social marginalisation. They seek to dispel the media stereotypes of crime, criminals and their victims, and to offer more accurate reports of the harm caused by crimes such as theft, robbery, burglary, rape, and other assaults. Their policy proposals include:

• demarginalisation where the government works to improve the opportunities for working class people to escape from poverty. The difficulty in such proposals, however, is that the structural inequalities implicit in the capitalist system which create "winners" and losers", do not favour altruistic adjustments to the opportunity systems and the housing market. When comparing themselves to others, the disadvantaged will always feel relatively deprived until the social competitiveness that drives the system of power generally, and political economy in particular, is toned down;
• democratic control over policing to shift the policies of social control and enforcement closer to the values of the community to be policed, and to give the community a greater sense of ownership over the responses made by the police to each incident of reported crime. At present, the community may identify differences in the predisposition of the police to arrest when confronted by different types of crime and different types of alleged offender. These differences may foster a genuine sense of injustice and grievance among those who feel that they are targeted.

Young (1994) argues that there is an aetiological crisis, i.e. there is a lack of explanation for the fact that reported crime rises during both economic good times and bad times. Aetiology assumes fundamental importance. If the cause of crime is injustice, then its solution must lie in this direction. If poor conditions cause crime, it must be impossible to prevent crime without changing these circumstances. Furthermore, it follows that it must be wrong to punish the offender for conditions beyond his or her control. This would be punishing the criminal and blaming the victim. The social democratic brand of positivism, although sensing that injustice was the root cause of crime, either deflected its attentions to purely individual deprivation (e.g. maternal deprivation, broken homes, etc.) or made the fundamental mistake of believing that ameliorating deprivation quantitatively in an absolute sense (e.g. raising standards of education, housing, etc.) would solve the problem of relative deprivation. Young distinguishes the structural approach of other Left-wing theorists, and posits that most crime is minor, amateurish, sporadic, and intra-class, i.e. committed by working class offenders on working class victims. He rejects the positivist view that unemployment or poverty causes crime, but prefers Merton's theory of anomie and Subcultural Theory which focus on the lack of opportunity to achieve social status and economic expectations: a lack most commonly felt by the most disadvantaged sections of the community. He believes that the majority of criminals hold conventional social values, reflecting the need to achieve material success or social status in a competitive society where sexism, racism, machismo and other ideological forms affect outcomes. Indeed, criminal behaviour could be characterised as the operation of capitalist principles, i.e. the investment of labour for a return, but in an illegitimate form.

Young argues that relative deprivation is the most probable cause of criminality because people whose progress towards fulfilling expectations has stalled grow more aware of the injustice and unfairness in a society that allows inequality to arise, and this in turn breeds political disenchantment. At a societal level, this disenchantment may lead to rioting. At an individual level, theft and burglary may seem an appropriate means to redress the balance. The Idealists might see this as an appropriate means of furthering the "just cause" to throw off oppression. But the Realists refuse to see crime as some form of "revolutionary" challenge to the ruling class' right to profit from the labour of the masses. Rather, crime is a reactionary form of behaviour which demonstrates the absence of real political solutions to the experience of degradation and exploitation suffered by the working class. This would deny that individual offenders have a political agenda: a persuasive argument given that so much crime is intra-class. But it does not deny that crime in general has a political dimension. The majority fear crime regardless of social class and wish to find ways of eliminating it so that they can feel safe as they go about their everyday business. This creates a "problem of order" for a government which has the political responsibility to maintain an orderly society, and is accountable to an electorate likely to find disorder and chaos high on their political agenda. Nevertheless, the State is not neutral. The State intends to preserve the status quo including the hierarchy of all classes and groups within society. This includes protecting the right of a capitalist class to accumulate wealth privately which cannot be achieved safely unless private property is protected from theft, and citizens are discouraged from assaulting and murdering each other.

External links

---

• John Lea's website. ^*
• Jock Young's articles. ^*

References

---

• DeKeseredy, W; MacLean, B & Schwartz, M. (1997). "Thinking Critically About Left Realism" in Thinking Critically About Crime. MacLean, B & Milovanovic, D. (eds.). Vancouver: Collective Press.
• Kinsey, Richard; Lea, John & Young, Jock. (1986). Losing the Fight Against Crime. London: Blackwell. ISBN 0631137211
• Lea, John. (1987). Left Realism: A Defence
• Lea. John. (1993). Criminology and Postmodernity.
• Lea, John. (2002). Crime and Modernity: Continuities in Left Realist Criminology. London: Sage. ISBN 0803975570
• Lea, John & Young, Jock. (1984). What Is To Be Done About Law and Order — Crisis in the Eighties. Harmonsworth: Penguin. (Pluto Press revised edition: 1993). ISBN 0745307353
• Lowman, J & MacLean, J (eds.). (1992). Realist Criminology: Crime Control and Policing in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto.
• Matthews, Roger & Young, Jock. (2003). The New Politics of Crime and Punishment. Willan Publishing. ISBN 1903240913
• Matthews, Roger & Young, Jock. (eds.). (1992) Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate. (Sage Contemporary Criminology). London: Sage. ISBN 0803986211
• Matthews, Roger & Young, Jock (eds.). (1992) Issues in Realist Criminology. Sage Contemporary Criminology Series. London: Sage. ISBN 0803986246
• Merton, Robert K. (1938). "Social Structure and Anomie". American Sociological Review 3, 672-682.
• Taylor, Ian. (1982). Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism.
• Taylor, Ian. (1999). Crime in Context. A Critical Criminology of Market Societies.
• Young, Jock. (1987). The increase in crime in England and Wales during the present government 1979-1986 with comparisons with the 1975-1978. Middlesex Polytechnic Centre for Criminology.
• Young, Jock. (ed.). (1994). The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity. London; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. ISBN 0803981511
• Young, Jock. (1997), "Left Realism: The Basics" in Thinking Critically About Crime. MacLean, B & Milovanovic, D. (eds.). Vancouver: Collective Press.

Criminology