Crime & Delinquency

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Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America

David M. Gordon
Crime Delinquency 1973; 19; 163
DOI: 10.1177/001112877301900204
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Capitalism, Class,

and

Crime in America*

DAVID M. GORDON
Research Associate, Center for Educational Policy Research, Harvard University
Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1971-72
B.A., 1965, Harvard College; Ph.D. (Economics), 1971, Harvard University

Conventional public analyses ofcrime, both conservative and

liberal, begin with the assumption that crimes are committed by
irrational individuals who constitute a threat to a rational social
order. Sharing that initial assumption, conservatives and liberals
diverge in their policy approaches to deterring criminality. Some
recent orthodox economic analyses of crime, having begun to relax the assumption, view crime as a process ofrational choice by
criminals; they offer the possibility of"optimal" crime prevention policies through the application ofconventional economic
models.
A radical economic analysis of crime, which this paper tries to
formulate, suggests that the present character ofcrime in America flows almost inevitably from the structure of our social and
economic institutions. Many kinds ofcrime represent perfectly
rational responses to the conditions ofcompetition and inequality fostered in capitalism; examples of this rationality are whitecollar crime, organized crime, and ghetto crime. Many of the
most important differences among crimes flow from the duality of
our systems of justice and law enforcement, and that
duality in
turn reflects the biases of the State in capitalist societies. It seems
unlikely that we shall be able to solve the problem of crime in
this country without first effecting a radical redistribution of
power in our basic institutions.
IKE

BRUSH

FIRE,

all been drawn into the fight. With

slogans and occasional compassion,
with weapons, courts, prisons, and patrols, especially with perplexity and
confusion, we have probably served in
the end to frustrate our own good

crime in the

L United States has seemed recently

to

be

raging out

of control. The

pub-

lic, the government, and the experts

have all raced to cool the blaze.
In one way or another, we have
*This paper was originally written as
&dquo;Class and the Economics of Crime&dquo; to
appear in J. Weaver, ed., Political Economy:
Radical and Orthodox Approaches (New
York: Allyn and Bacon, 1973) . A few changes
have been made from that original version. It
appeared in an abridged form under the

title in Review of Radical Political

Economics, Summer 1971, and it draws on

same

some material in David M. Gordon, ed.,

Problems in Political Economy: An Urban
Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath,
1971) . Permission has been granted by both

publishers.

163
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164
to fan the flames rather
than douse them. We seem to have as
much trouble understanding the problem of crime as we do effecting its
solution.
Weanwhile, amidst the confusion,
orthodox economists have been striding elegantly to our rescue. Cool, fearless, the perfect picture of professionalism, they have been promising to
guide us toward &dquo;optimal&dquo; crime prevention and control. Off with our
silliness! Off with our psychological

intentions,

muddle-htadednessl Gary Becker, a

sort of guru among them, explains
how easily we can understand it all:
A useful

theory

of criminal behavior

dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits and simply extend
the economists usual analysis of choice.&dquo;1
can

As I have read and thought recently

about she problem of crime in the
United States, Ive found myself returning over and over to the same
conclusions-that the publics understanding of the problem is mistaken,
that the governments policy responses are misguided, and that the recent
orthodox economic analyses have
been misleading. This paper attempts
to amplify those impressions. I have
not tried to present a detailed brief
against the conventional wisdom and
the orthodox economic view. Instead,
I intend to articulate my differences
with those positions by formulating an
alternative, radical analysis of criminal behavior and by evoking an alternative normative view of an appropriate social response to crime.
The paper has five sections. The
first offers a brief descriptive summary
of the nature and extent of crime in
1.

Gary Becker, "Crime and Punishment:

Approach," Journal of Political
Economy, March-April 1968, p. 170.
An Economic

the United States. The second surveys

conventional public perspectives
on the problem of crime, while the
third outlines recentt orthodox economic approaches to the problem.
In the fourth section, I sketch the
framework of a radical economic analysis of crime in the United States. In
the final section, I amplify an alternative normative view of the appropriate social response to criminal behavsome

ior.2
1. Crime in America

To compare analytic approaches to

the problem of crime, one must first
clarify its empirical dimensions. Several useful summaries of the nature and
extent of American crime are easily
available, especially in the summary
report by the Presidents Crime Commission and in Ramsey Clarks recent

book.3
2. I

Relying primarily

am not an

expert

on

on

the basic

crime and I have

pursued extensive research about the

problem. The thoughts in this paper draw
mainly on some limited elementary reading;
the field, I offer these
as a layman in
thoughts with considerable hesitation, which
has especially affected my style of argument.
Since I do not speak with authority, I have
tried wherever possible to include quotes
from respected and respectable "authorities"
not

to

support my arguments.

3. Presidents Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, The

Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1967) ; Ramsey Clark, Crime in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).
For some useful summaries of the basic data,
see the first two reading selections in the
chapter on crime in David M. Gordon, ed.,
Problems in Political Economy: An Urban
Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath,
1971). Another useful summary of information about "urban crime" can be found in
Marvin E. Wolfgang, "Urban Crime," in
James Q. Wilson, ed., The Metropolitan
Enigma (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). For much more detailed
information, see the appendices to Presidents

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165
facts documented in those sources, I
have tried in the following paragraphs
to outline the most important questions about the problem of crime
which any analysis must try to resolve.
It seems important to emphasize,
first of all,,that crime is ubiquitous in
the United States. Our laws are so
pervasive that one must virtually retire to hermitage in order to avoid
committing a crime. According to a
national survey conduoted in 1965 by
the Presidents Crime Commission, 91
per cent of all adult Americans &dquo;admitted that they had committed acts
for which they might have received
jail or prison sentences.&dquo;4 The Crime
Commission also found that in 1965
&dquo;more than two million Americans
were received in prisons or juvenile

training schools, or placed on

probation&dquo;-well over 2 per cent of
the labor force. Criminal behavior, it
appears, is clearly a norm and not an
aberration.5

ubiquity, it seems equally important to emphasize our extraordinary selectivity in our attention to the problem of crime. We
focus all our nearly paranoid fears
Given that

about &dquo;law n order&dquo; and &dquo;safe

streets&dquo; on a limited number of crimes
while we altogether ignore many
other kinds of crime, equally serious

op. cit. supra, Corrections

The Courts (1967) , and Crime and
Its Impact—An Assessment (1967). For some
interesting comments on the Crime Commission Report, see James Q. Wilson, "Crime in
the Streets," The Public Interest, No. 5, Fall
1966.
4. Presidents Commission, Challenge of
Crime, op. cit. supra note 3, p. v.
5. One should add, of course, that these
figures refer only to those harmful acts which
actuallyviolate some law. Many other tangibly harmful acts, like faulty manufacture of
automobiles or certain kinds of pollution,
have not yet been declared illegal.
Commission,

(1967),

and of much greater economic

impor-

tance.

One can sketch the dimensions of

this selectivity quite easily. The crimes
on which the public does concentrate its fears and cannons are often
lumped together as &dquo;urban&dquo; or &dquo;violent&dquo; crimes. These crimes can be
usefully summarized by those for
which the FBI accumulates a general
statistical index. Seven &dquo;Index Crimes&dquo;
are
traced in the Bureaus periodic Crime Report: willful homicide,

forcible rape,

aggravated assault,

rob-

bery, burglary, larceny (of more than

$50), and motor vehicle theft. Together, these seven crimes encompass
the raging fire in fear of which we
hide inside our homes.
Some basic facts about these seven
fearsome crimes are well known. The
measured incidence of the Index
Crimes has been increasing rapidly in
the United States in the past ten to fifteen years. The Index Crimes occur
twice as frequently in large cities as
they do on average throughout the
country. Within large cities, they occur

most

frequently

in

ghetto

areas.

The threat and tragedy of violent

crime notwithstanding, almost all of
these crimes are economically motivated ; as Clark notes quite simply,
&dquo;their main purpose is to obtain money or property.&dquo;7 Seven-eighths of them
are crimes against property; only oneeighth are crimes against the person,
and many of the relatively few &dquo;violent&dquo; crimes actually occur inadvertently in the process of committing
crimes against property.
6. Clark also notes, op. cit. supra note 3,
that the increase may be misleading, simply
because many kinds of crime are much more
likely to be reported these days than were

comparable crimes,

say,

7. Id
., p. 38.

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thirty years ago.

183

Juvenile Hall witli me were

again. They arrived there soon

also there
after I got
there, or a little bit before I left. They
always seemed to make the scene. In the
California prison system, they carry you
from Juvenile Hall to the old folks colony, down in San Luis Obispo, and wait
for you to die. Then they bury you there.
...I noticed these waves, these generations
graduating classes moving up
from Juvenile Hall, all the way up.65
...

And those who succeed finally in understanding the trap and in pulling
themselves out of it, like Malcolm X,
Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, and

George Jackson, seem to succeed precisely because they understood how

debilitating the cycle becomes, how
totally dehumanizing it will remain.
Another black ex-con has perfectly
expressed the sudden insight which
allowed him to pull out of the trap:
It didnt take me any time to decide I
wasnt going back to commit crimes. Because its stupid, its a trap, it only makes
it easier for them to neutralize you. Its
hard to explain, because you cant say its
a question of right and wrong, but of

being free or [being] trapped.66

If the system did not effect this neutralization, if so many of the poor
were not trapped in the debilitating
system of crime and punishment, they
might gather the strength to oppose
the systems that reinforces their misery. Like many other institutions in
this country, the system of crime and
punishment serves an important function for the capitalist class by dividing
and weakening those who might potentially seek to overthrow the capitalist system. Although the capitalists
have not created the system, in any
65. Cleaver,
154-55.

. cit. supra
op

66. Bell Gale

note

35, pp.

Chevigny, "After the Death

Jail," Village Voice, July 10, 1969; partially
reprinted in Gordon, op. cit. supra note 3.
of

direct sense, they would doubtlessly

hate to have to do without it.67
The third and perhaps most important functionally supportive role of
the current patterns of crime and
punishment is that those patterns allow us to ignore some basic issues
about the relationships in our society
between institutions and individuals.
By treating criminals as animals and
misfits, as enemies of the state, we are
permitted to continue avoiding some
basic questions about the dehumanizing effects of our social institutions.
We keep our criminals out of sight, so
we are never forced to recognize and
deal with the psychic punishment we
inflict on them. Like the schools and
the welfare system, the legal system
turns out, upon close inspection, to be
robbing most of its &dquo;clients&dquo; of the
last vestiges of their personal dignity.
not underestimate the
effect for quantitative as
well as qualitative reasons. In July 1968, for
instance, an estimated 140,000 blacks were
serving time in penal institutions at federal,
state, and local levels. If the percentage of
black males in prison had been as low as the
proportions of white men (by age groups),
there would have been only 25,000 blacks in
jail. If those extra 115,000 black men were
not in prison, they would likely be unemployed or intermittently employed. In addition, official labor force figures radically
undercount the number of blacks in the
census because many black males arc simply
missed by the census-taker. In July 1968,
almost one million
black males were
"missed" in that way. On the conservative
assumption that one-fifth of those "missing
males" were in one way or another evading
the law, involved in hustling, or otherwise
trapped in the legal system, a total of 315,000
black men who might be unemployed were it
not for the effects of the law were not
counted in "measured" unemployment statistics. Total "measured" black male unemployment in July 1968 was 317,000, so that the
total black unemployment problem might be
nearly twice as large as we "think" it is were
it not for the selectiveeffects of our police,
courts, and prisons on black men.

67. One

should

importance of this

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184

Each
own

of those institutions, in its

way, helps us forget about the
one

responsibilities we might alternatively

assume for providing the best possible
environment within which all of us
could grow and develop as individuals. Cleaver sees this &dquo;role&dquo; of the

system quite clearly:

in prison could be
process of real rehabilitation before their release.... By rehabilitation I mean they would be trained for
jobs that would not be an insult to their
dignity, that would give them some sense
of security, that would allow them to
achieve some brotherly connection with
their fellow man. But for this kind of
rehabilitation to happen on a large scale
would entail the complete reorganization
of society, not to mention the prison
system. It would call for the teaching of a
new set of ethics, based on the principle
of cooperation, as opposed to the presently dominating principle of competition.
It would require the transformation of
the entire moral fabric .... 68

Those who

put through

are now

By keeping

its victims

hidden and

rendering

ently inhuman,

our

so

thoroughly

them

so

appar-

system of crime

and
how

punishment allows us to forget

sweeping a &dquo;transformation&dquo; of
our social ideology we would
require
in order to begin solving the problem
of crime. The more we forget, the
more protected the capitalists remain
from a thorough re-examination of
the ideological basis of the institutions upon which they depend.
It seems useful to summarize briefly
the analysis outlined in this section,
in order both to emphasize the connections among its arguments and to
clarify its differences with other
&dquo;models&dquo; of crime and punishment.
Most crimes in this country share a
68. Cleaver,
182.

op.

cit.

supra

note

35, pp. 179,

single important similarity-they

reprational responses to the competitiveness and inequality of life in

capitalist societies. (In this emphasis
on the rationality of crime, the analysis differs with the &dquo;conventional public analyses&dquo; of crime and resembles
the orthodox economic approach.)
Many crimes seem very different at
the same time, but many of their
differences-in character and degree
of violence-can usefully be explained by the structure of class institutions in this country and the duality
of the public system of the enforcement and administration of justice.
(In this central deployment of the
radical concepts of class and the classbiased State, the analysis differs fundamentally with both the &dquo;public&dquo; and
the orthodox economic perspectives.)
That duality, in turn, can fruitfully
be explained by a dynamic view of the
class-biased role of public institutions
and the vested interests which evolve
out of the States activities. For many
reasons, finally, it seems unlikely that
we can change the patterns of crime
and punishment, for the kinds of
changes we would need would appear
substantially to threaten the stability
of the capitalist system. If we managed
somehow to eliminate ghetto crime,
for instance, the competitiveness, inequalities, and racism of our institutions would tend to reproduce it. And
if, by chance, the pattern of ghetto
crime was not reproduced, the capitalists might simply have to invent some
other way of neutralizing the potential opposition of so many black men,
against which they might once again
be forced to rebel with &dquo;criminal
acts.&dquo; It is in that sense of fundamental causality that we must somehow
change the entire structure of institutions in this country in order to eliminate the causes of crime.
resent

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185
5. A Normative View of Crime

Strangely enough, I find it easiest to

evoke an alternative normative view
of crime and to compare it with our
current social responses to the problem by drawing on a recent exchange
in the legal literature.
In a widely heralded article written
in 1964, Herbert Packer, a leading
American legal expert on criminal
process, argued that most legal discusinvolves a
sion of criminal
conflict (or dialogue) between two
different models of the criminal procHe called one of these the
ess.
&dquo;Crime Control Model&dquo; and the other
the &dquo;Due Process Model.&dquo; The emphases embodied in each model closely resemble the difference in emphasis
between the general conservative and
liberal views of crime, respectively, as
described in the second section of this

procedure

article. The Crime Control Model,

according to Packer, &dquo;is based on the
that the repression of
criminal conduct is by far the most
important function to be performed
by the criminal process.&dquo; The Due
Process Model, on the other hand,
derives from the &dquo;concept of the primacy of the individual and the complementary concept of limitation on

proposition

official

power.&dquo;189
reply to Packers article, John
Griffiths argued that Packers two
models represent qualitatively similar
views of the relationship between the
criminal and society, deriving from
some
common
ideological assumpIn

tions about the law.70 Griffiths calls

69. Herbert Packer, "Two Models of the
Criminal Process," University of Pennsylvania
Law Review, November 1964.

70. John Griffiths, "Ideology in Criminal

Procedure, or a Third Model of the Criminal Process," Yale Law Journal, January
1970.

this set of shared assumptions the

&dquo;Battle Model of the Criminal Process.&dquo; He argues that both the &dquo;conservative&dquo; and &dquo;liberal&dquo; views derive
from a common vision of conflict and
hostility between the aberrant, deviant individual on the one hand and
the social &dquo;order&dquo; on the other. To
illustrate the communality of the two
models proposed by Packer, Griffiths
suggests a third &dquo;model&dquo; which closely
resembles what I presume to be the
radical vision of how society should
respond to its &dquo;criminals.&dquo; He calls
this the &dquo;Family Model of the Criminal Process,&dquo; suggesting that societys
treatment of criminals could easily be
patterned after the treatment by
families of those family members who
betray the family trust. The Family
Model begins from an assumption,
Griffiths writes, of &dquo;reconcilableeven

mutually supportive-interests,

of love.&dquo;71 In contrast to the

Battle Model, the Family Model
would propose that &dquo;we can make
plain that while the criminal has
transgressed, we do not therefore cut
him off from us; our concern and
dedication to his well-being continue.
We have punished him and drawn
him back in among us; we have not
cast him out to fend for himself
against our systematic enmity.&dquo; As in
the best families, society would work
actively, supportively, and lovingly to
restore the state of trust and mutual
respect upon which the family and
society should both be based. Rather
than forcing the criminal to admit his
failure and reform himself, we would
all admit our mutual failures and seek
to reform the total community-in
which effort the criminal would play
an important, constructive, and educative role.
state

71.

., p. 371.
Id

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186

The Battle Model, as Griffiths describes it, obviously reflects not only
&dquo;liberal&dquo; and &dquo;conservative&dquo; views of
crime but the manifest reality of our
social treatment of criminals in this
country; it is reflected exactly in a
psychiatrists recent description of the
ideology underlying the California

prisons:
The people who run these places ...
believe that the way to get a mans behavior to change is to impose very strict
controls and take away everything he
values and make him work to get it back.
But that doesnt make him change. It just
generates more and more rage and hostil-

ity.72

Family Model, in contrast, illusthe fundamentally different priorities which might motivate instituThe

trates

tional responses to criminal behavior

in a radically different kind of society,
one in which human needs were
served and developed by social institutions rather than sacrificed to the interests of a single dominant class.
That vision of social response may
seem like a very distant dream in this
country, but it seems like a dream
worthy of all our most determined

pursuit.
72.

7,

Quoted
1971, p. 64.

in the New York Times, Feb.

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