CRM 3301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Marxism, Consumerism, Positivism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRM 3301
• Professor: Baljit Nagra

Document Summary

During the 1960s, economies went from manufacture-based industries to service-based (2) marxist criminology industries. This caused an increase in inequality when it came to power and wealth. Marxist criminologists criticized mainstream criminology for not talking about how this led to crime and criminality. It utilized critical views about the origin of crime and deviance and traced these origins to the unequal and unjust social and economic order. This shifted the attention away from positivistic theories of crime that traced causality to the individual. Marxist criminologists believe that society is dominated by powerful groups and those that owned the means of production wanted to keep the status quo. The working class was forced to work in exploitive conditions while the ruling class exploited them in order to maintain their power. The structures in capitalism worked to advantage the ruling class and disadvantage the working class; the state was not neutral.