ABSTRACT
Critical criminologists focus their attention on both the crimes of the powerful and those of the less powerful. Crime is viewed to be associated with broad processes of the political economy that affect both groups but in quite different ways. For the powerful, there are pressures associated with the securing and maintenance of state and corporate interests in the context of global capitalism. In the case of the less powerful, criminal behaviour is seen to be the outcome of the interaction between the marginalisation or exclusion from access to mainstream institutions and that of criminalisation by the state authorities with particular attention paid to the increasing racialisation of crime, in which the media and police, in the ‘war against crime’ and public disorder, target certain invariably ethnic minority communities. In short, critical criminologists link offending behaviour to a social context that is structurally determined by the general allocation of societal resources and by the specific nature of police intervention in the lives of its citizens.
