Read and make notes!. Emerged in the early 1980s in Britain as a reaction to ‘law and order’ politics and to the perceived vacuum in radical left thinking.

Read and make notes!

Emerged in the early 1980s in Britain as a reaction to ‘law and order’ politics and to the perceived vacuum in radical left thinking on crime and crime control.

This theory has been generated by Jock Young (1988).

Left realism aims to avoid what it sees as the worst excesses of both the ‘right realist’ and ‘left idealist’ approaches to the problem of crime in modern society.

The right is accused of both over-dramatising and distorting the nature of the problem with the talk of sick societies, moral decay and crime rates out of control.

The left is accused of not taking the, issue of crime seriously, of reducing it to a form of ideological distortion on behalf of the capitalist state, seeing for

Example ‘mugging’ as little more than a moral panic induced by the problems of British capitalism.

Left realism claims to take crime seriously, particularly street crime, but without the moral hysteria of the right.

Crime committed by working class people against other working class people is viewed by left realists as a

problem of the first order due to its real, symbolic and growing impact on society in general and working class communities in particular.

Like right realism, left realism see crime as a real problem and much of the public’s fear of crime as rational and justified.

Local surveys indicate that people see crime as a major problem and regard as serious crimes which others may see as minor or trivial, eg so-called petty theft.

In this way left realism attempts to bring the victim on to the centre stage of criminological study.

Such surveys also provide support for left realist claims that the police are losing the ‘fight against crime’, especially in the inner cities. While seeing structured inequality and perceptions of injustice as the major causes of crime, left realism seems at times to suggest that better policing is a crucial means of reducing crime.

Left realism calls for greater democratic control of the police.

It argues that a genuinely more accountable police force will be more efficient since the flow of information from the public, on which the police rely heavily, will be restored.

Left realism accepts the picture presented by official statistics that there has been a growth in working class crime.

It explains this growth with reference to changes in the class structure in particular the working class.

It argues that increasing numbers of the working class particularly vulnerable.

Lea and Young (1984) point to a ‘growing army of young unemployed’ for whom a collective violence and the temporary control over their territory through riot is a substitute for organised politics.

For left realism, the growing unrest and criminality of sections of working class youth has to be located in the context of wider structural processes associated with capital industrialisation.

Like right relalists left realists do not see unemployment and poverty as sufficient conditions for a growth in crime.

Lea and Young suggest that culture and subjective meanings also need to be analysed.

In order to explore this dimension, left realism draws on American subcultural theory and the concept of relative deprivation.

Subcultures are seen as creative adaptations to changing material and historical circumstances.

Left realism characterises the criminal adaptation as ‘part of a series of individualistic adaptations which promote the notion of the hard individual’ (lea and Young, 1984).

Left realists believe that young Afro-Caribbean men are the group most at risk from being criminalised in the 1980s and 1990s.

Part of the explanation for this is relative deprivation.

There is a lack of fit between what they feel they should reasonably expect in terms of jobs and material rewards.

Also in terms of what they experience – high levels of unemployment and low paid jobs which are seen to result from blocked opportunities and racial discrimination.

This is part of the explanation for what left realists see as the growth in street crime and public disorder among young working class inner-city Afro-Caribbean men – the most relatively deprived section of the working class.

The emergence of left realism has been greeted by two opposed responses within sociology.

1. Many in mainstream sociology and criminology have been favourably impressed by Young et al’s ‘realistic’ and policy-orientated concerns with the problems of street crime, victimisation and policing.

2. ‘Radical’ criminology has reacted with outright condemnation and moral indignation over what has been alleged to be the anti-working class and even racist tendencies of the left realist agenda.

Radical criminologists reject what they as left realism’s naïve hope that social injustice can be solved within the framework of liberal democracies.