Marxist Criminological Analysis
A Critique of Marxist Criminology
Author(s): Richard F. Sparks
Source: Crime and Justice, Vol. 2 (1980), pp. 159-210
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147414 .
Accessed: 23/04/2013 06:31
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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. …show more content…
The importance of criminal justice is that it moves us dialectically to reject the capitalist order and to struggle for a new society. We are engaged in socialist revolution" (p. 165).
Sandwiched between those apocalyptic pronouncements is a set of assertionswhich, taken together, provide something which might, with a minimum of charity, be called a contemporary marxist theory of crime. Paraphrased-to save the reader 's patience and mine-this theory goes approximately as follows. In capitalist societies, the state arose, and exists, in order to protect
14As Steinert (1978) has pointed out, several of Quinney 's figures do not add up; they are moreover uncorrected for inflation.
This content downloaded from 149.171.67.164 on Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:31:19 AM
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174
Richard F. Sparks
and promote the interests of the dominant class, namely the class that owns and controls the means of production. The state thus is a device for controlling the exploited class, namely the …show more content…
But Quinney 's work is widely read; and it is not exactly unrepresentative of marxist criminology, at least as it was in the late middle 1970s. Many of his theoretical claimsand much of his revolutionary rhetoric-can be found in a more diffuse form, in the writings of others of the marxist school (see,
e.g., Werkentin, Hofferbert, and Bauermann 1974; Platt 1974;
Chambliss 1976; Hepburn 1977). In any case, despite all of the claptrap and cant which he uses to express his views, Quinneylike the other writers to whom I have so far referred-calls attention to a number of serious and important questions which until recently had been largely neglected by criminologists; and he, and they, make a number of claims to which attention must be paid.
The questions by and large concern the origins of criminal laws and the relations between social structures and economic systems and the criminalization of certain forms of behavior.
Instead of asking why individuals or groups obstinately behave in ways that break rules of the criminal law, the writers we have been considering tend to ask: why were those forms of
Author(s): Richard F. Sparks
Source: Crime and Justice, Vol. 2 (1980), pp. 159-210
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147414 .
Accessed: 23/04/2013 06:31
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. …show more content…
The importance of criminal justice is that it moves us dialectically to reject the capitalist order and to struggle for a new society. We are engaged in socialist revolution" (p. 165).
Sandwiched between those apocalyptic pronouncements is a set of assertionswhich, taken together, provide something which might, with a minimum of charity, be called a contemporary marxist theory of crime. Paraphrased-to save the reader 's patience and mine-this theory goes approximately as follows. In capitalist societies, the state arose, and exists, in order to protect
14As Steinert (1978) has pointed out, several of Quinney 's figures do not add up; they are moreover uncorrected for inflation.
This content downloaded from 149.171.67.164 on Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:31:19 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
174
Richard F. Sparks
and promote the interests of the dominant class, namely the class that owns and controls the means of production. The state thus is a device for controlling the exploited class, namely the …show more content…
But Quinney 's work is widely read; and it is not exactly unrepresentative of marxist criminology, at least as it was in the late middle 1970s. Many of his theoretical claimsand much of his revolutionary rhetoric-can be found in a more diffuse form, in the writings of others of the marxist school (see,
e.g., Werkentin, Hofferbert, and Bauermann 1974; Platt 1974;
Chambliss 1976; Hepburn 1977). In any case, despite all of the claptrap and cant which he uses to express his views, Quinneylike the other writers to whom I have so far referred-calls attention to a number of serious and important questions which until recently had been largely neglected by criminologists; and he, and they, make a number of claims to which attention must be paid.
The questions by and large concern the origins of criminal laws and the relations between social structures and economic systems and the criminalization of certain forms of behavior.
Instead of asking why individuals or groups obstinately behave in ways that break rules of the criminal law, the writers we have been considering tend to ask: why were those forms of