ABSTRACT
Fifth, in response to an apparent substantial increase in crime rates and a general perception among vast sections of the population that crime levels were at an unacceptable level, a great deal of popularism came to infiltrate criminological debate. We saw in Chapter 3 that the conservative populists – or ‘right’ realists – came to take seriously the problems that ordinary people, notably working class people, had experienced, and in doing so managed to capture much of the electoral ground that the political left had always regarded as their natural constituency. We shall see in Chapter 16 that in an effort to recapture the issue of crime from the political ‘right’, the populist socialists – or left realists – influentially came to reconsider radical criminology. This second contemporary variant of the radical tradition recognises that capitalism may well be responsible for the relative inequality and absolute poverty that shapes so much of British culture and provides the root cause of crime. On the other hand, the bulk of that crime is predatory on the very people that they would wish to defend, the working class and the poor.
