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Marxist perspectives of punishment
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Marxist Perspectives onpunishment
Karl Marx
According to Karl Marx:
Capitalist societies are ‘criminogenic’.
Like other institutions (education, family, etc.) punishment benefits the
ruling class
The role of the prison is a ruling class tool, used either materially or
symbolically to legitimate and maintain class inequality.
However, Karl Marx himself never wrote extensively on punishment, the
emergence of criminal law and punishment from a Marxist perspective
emerged during the 1970s.
The laws are made and enforced by the state to represent the ruling
classes; this maintains class inequality. Therefore, from a Marxist
perspective criminal laws and punishments are created by the ruling class
to benefit the ruling class. For example, Hermann Mannheim (1960) wrote:
‘the history of criminal legislation in England and many other countries,
shows that excessive prominence was given by the law to the protection of
property.’ Therefore, as a result, punishment will also reflect this social
class-based inequality.
As suggested by Garland (1991:128)
‘Penal institutions are to be viewed in their interrelationship with other
institutions and with non-penal aspects of social policy. In effect, penal
policy is taken to be one element within a wider strategy of controlling the
poor; punishment should be understood not as a social response to the
criminality of individuals but as a mechanism operating in the struggle
between social classes’. Thus, when we strip away the act of punishment
itself, underlying this from a Marxist perspective are the ideologies of the
ruling classes – the underlying economic relationships that really determine
penal policy and forms of punishment.
Chambliss (1976) argues that most laws in the US and the UK are property
law, and this primarily protects people who own property. His argument was
that the criminal justice system was not there to catch them; nominally
universal laws were applied selectively to control the working-class while
protecting the rich, the content of the criminal law will expand as the gap
widens between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Snider’s (1993) concluded that such laws were not enforced epically
strongly anyway; those laws appearing to be in the interests of the working
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