Conflict Theory

Conflict theory is sometimes thought of as an alternative theory of crime and delinquency. In the 1960s and 1970s, conflict theorists such as George Void, Austin Turk, and Richard Quinney began to call attention to the role of social structure and the distribution of political and economic resources in influencing who became enmeshed in the criminal justice system. Such theories were considered radical or outside the mainstream of well-established criminological theories (e.g., strain theory, social disorganization theory, differential association theory). It was radical to argue that theorists, researchers, and criminal justice public policymakers alike should turn their attention to the competition in society for sometimes scarce resources. It was even more radical to ask the question, “Who gets to say what is a crime and what the punishment will be for those who break the law?” Conflict theorists saw a plethora of evidence suggesting that those with the most power and money had the wherewithal to ensure that their group traditions, mores, and identified acceptable behaviors remained those to which all other groups must subscribe. Through the years, conflict theorists have been able to demonstrate, through scientific research, that early conflict theorists were correct in their assumptions. This [Page 143]entry reviews the contributions of Void, Turk, Quinney, and others to an understanding of criminal behavior and discusses the relationship between the public policies and the conflict theory approach to criminology.

The basic underlying assumption of conflict theory is that every society is organized around tension among competing interest groups. At any given time, any one of these groups can gain control of the resources associated with the major political and economic institutions of society. The group that is able to garner a majority of these institutions' resources will decide under which laws the rest of society will live and what will be done to those individuals who break those laws.

In 1969, George Void argued that groups form because of an underlying common interest that is in direct opposition to other groups. Void argued further that the groups in power control institutions of control, such as the police, the courts, and other components of the justice system. This pendulum of control swings back and forth and has a major impact on those groups who continually find themselves at the bottom of the social order: the poor and those from historically disenfranchised populations.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Austin Turk wrote about the process through which crime is defined. Mirroring the arguments associated with labeling theories of crime, Turk argued strongly that crime is defined by those in power; these controlling groups are able to subjugate individuals who lack the resources of the majority in the political machinery of society. Turk suggested that through interactions with each other, people acquire either a superior or inferior status and, as a result, assume either a dominating or submissive role.

The evolution of conflict theories of criminology continued with Richard Quinney's 1970 book The Social Reality of Crime. Like Turk, Quinney saw criminal behavior as behavior that is defined by authorized agents in a politically organized society. Like his fellow conflict theorists, he believed that criminal behavior is that behavior that is in conflict with the interests of those groups with the power and the resources necessary to affect public policy. Further, Quinney argued that under capitalism, individuals engage in two types of crime: (1) crimes of accommodation, such as property or violent offenses, often directed at people within their own social or ethnic group, and (2) crimes of resistance, such as those acts committed by workers as a revolt against a system. For Quinney, crimes of accommodation are the result of false consciousness among individuals within a capitalist system. In other words, when brutalized by a capitalist economy, with more and more people having very little in material goods, individuals may turn to crime in order to survive or to become more like the ruling classes. Loss of opportunities to succeed often leads to psychological maladjustment coupled with actions that are destructive to themselves and the greater society in general.

...