Social Class

Social Class, Crime, and Criminal Justice

The criminal justice system overwhelmingly processes individuals who are marginalized and who occupy a low socioeconomic status. The types of crime processed by the criminal justice system mainly consist of so-called street crime: property offenses, which constitute the majority of all custodial sentences, and violent crime. Prisoner populations in Western, industrialized countries are overwhelmingly young, male, and socially and economically disadvantaged. It seems that the police often target the most easily identifiable and vulnerable people. Prisoners are disproportionately of a low socioeconomic status. Moreover, at least one-third of the most persistent offenders have been in care as children, and three-quarters are unemployed with little or no legal income. Taking a look at the educational achievement of prisoners, it becomes clear that many of those incarcerated have little, if any, educational qualifications. Social class itself constitutes an oppressive social structure, since an individual's class position influences the extent to which he or she is criminalized. It seems that criminal offenders are the victims of an economic system that instills in them a desire for material wealth but which deprives them of the means to achieve that wealth. Street crimes can be considered to be the actions of people who have been disadvantaged by a capitalist system and, when caught within the net of the criminal justice system, are punished.

While the punishment of street criminals has steadily become more punitive, white-collar deviance continues to be treated differently by governments and state enforcement agencies. In Western societies, white-collar offenses are more likely to be tackled by regulatory agencies than by the police, and these agencies [Page 1523]use civil actions more often than criminal sanctions against offenders. Many white-collar offenses have been decriminalized and deregulated, and as a result of the general lack of regulation, there are a large number of “sites of trust” potential offenders can exploit. Limited resources also restrict the level of enforcement. For example, in Britain factories are inspected for health and safety law violations approximately once every four years.

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