What are the policy implications associated with labeling theory, conflict theory, feminist theory, and radical theory? What are the basic assumptions about crime and how would each policy address the crime problem? Are the policies pragmatic? Why or why not?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Labeling theory: rather than assuming that criminal behavior causes societal reaction, it posits that societal reaction causes criminal behavior.

Conflict theory: argues that stigmatizing shaming of offenders makes matters worse and increases crime. Such a process makes the offender an irredeemable outlaw, irreconcilable with the community. In a sense the person is made into a permanent persona non grata and has little choice but to associate with similarly stigmatized persons. Braithwaite calls for “reintegrative shaming,” efforts to reintegrate the offender back into the community of respectables.

Feminist theory: Crime is examined as it is related to gender-based inequality. criminology express an androcentric bias and exclude women from their analysis. Emphasizing various perspectives including Marxist, interactionist, and critical theory, feminist writers view dominant empirical positivism as failing to include gender as a central force, blind to its ideological bias, and ignoring females. Their view is that much nonfeminist research is sexist due to cultural beliefs and to a preponderance of perspectives that assume traditional gender roles. This bias expressed itself in the past, particularly on topics such as rape and domestic violence.

Radical theory: the crime problem could be resolved only by the establishment of a socialist state. U.S. society is based on an advanced capitalist economy.

The state is organized to serve the interests of the dominant economic class, the capitalist ruling class.
Criminal law is an instrument of the state and the ruling class to maintain and perpetuate the existing social and economic order.

Crime control in capitalist society is accomplished through a variety of institutions and agencies established and administered by a governmental elite, representing ruling class interests, for the purpose of establishing domestic order.

The contradictions of advanced capitalism, the disjunction between existence and essence, require that the subordinate classes remain oppressed by whatever means necessary, especially through the coercion and violence of the legal system.

Only with the collapse of capitalist society and the creation of a new society based on socialist principles will there be a solution to the crime problem.