1. Left RealismLeft Realism
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2. Introduction
• 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.

3. IntroductionIntroduction
• 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.

4. Introduction
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 worst kind due to
its real, symbolic and growing impact on society
in general and working class communities in
particular.

5. A real problem
• 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 victimisation surveys indicate that
people see crime as a major problem and
regard as serious crimes which others may
see as minor or trivial, e.g. so-called petty
theft.
• In this way left realism attempts to bring the
victim on to the centre stage of criminological
study.

6. A losing battle
• 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.

7. A Losing Battle
• 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.

8. Explaining CrimeExplaining Crime
• 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 are particularly vulnerable.

9. Explaining Crime
• 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.

10. Explaining Crime
• Like right realists, left realists do not
see unemployment and poverty as
sufficient conditions for a growth in
crime.

11. Explaining 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.

12. Subcultural Explanations
• 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).

13. Relative Deprivation
• 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.

14. Relative Deprivation
• 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.

15. Evaluation
• 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.

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