ABSTRACT
If the ‘nothing works’ argument was becoming increasingly popular with politicians, critical criminologists nevertheless had their own answers to the aetiological crisis. They argued that an analysis of the processes and situations within which the labelling of certain individuals and groups takes place simply does not go far enough. It is necessary to examine the structural relations of power in society and to view crime in the context of social relations and political economy (Scraton and Chadwick, 1996, originally 1992) and it was at this point that much work was done from a Marxist perspective to identify the causal basis of crime, and to make the link between dominant institutions and ruling-class interests. There was, nevertheless, a tendency either to romanticise crime – as acts of rebellion or resistance – or to see the issue solely in economic terms. Later work was to explore in more detail the specific contexts and lived experiences of people involved with the criminal justice system (Hall and Scraton, 1981). The issues of racism, sexism and masculinity had been virtually ignored by much of academic Marxism while, at the other end of the spectrum, there was a perceived need to keep the focus on the actions of those in power, not only in relation to those marginalised in society but more generally in the area of what has come to be known as white-collar crime or crimes of the powerful.
