Left Realism

2 Pages 463 Words

Introduction
Left Realism in Britain originated as a call to socialists to 'take crime seriously' (Lea and Young 1984, Young 1986) under conditions in which criminality and other social problems facing the working class were worsening, while many radical criminologists remained obsessed with a social constructionist view of crime as simply a reflection of media orchestrated moral panics or political diversion (Hall et al. 1976). However such an inspiration to take a problem seriously does not of itself constitute a new or an adequate theorization of the problem. The survival of Left Realism as a coherent criminology is dependent on its capacity to elaborate a body of theory which distinguishes it from other perspectives.

The development of theory in Left Realism in Britain in recent years has been largely concerned with the elaboration of a framework in which crime is analyzed in terms of the interaction between four key variables: the state, social structure, offenders and victims. This framework has enabled Left Realism to establish a relationship with existing traditions of criminological theory by seeing much of the latter as partial perspectives focusing on particular elements of the interaction rather than the process as a totality. Thus labelling theory tends to focus on the activities of the criminal justice system or society in labelling activities as criminal, classicism on the deterrent effects of the criminal justice system, much conservative theory on the efficacy of informal social control, positivism on the offender, and victimology on the characteristics of the victim. Each of these approaches may pose as a self sufficient criminology whereas each of them starts from an abstraction: one element of what is a more complex multi-faceted process. (Young 1987).

Such a framework is not presented as some theoretically neutral process of 'synthesis' of existing theory. The partiality of the latter is obviously only es...