"What are the causes of such large increases in crime? In What Is To Be Done? we gave great emphasis to the role of relative deprivation. We argued that crime is not caused by levels of absolute poverty or unemployment but by people’s perception of unjustified inequalities, and of being excluded from the ‘glittering prizes’ of capitalist society — be they material wealth or individual status and prestige — and marginalization from legitimate channels for redressing the balance. This emphasis on the centrality of relative deprivation as a cause of crime was important to our argument on two counts.
First of all, it provided an explanation of the continually rising crime rates during the post-war boom when income levels and employment generally were rising. With the welfare state and mass education spreading a mythology of ‘equality of opportunity’ and the mass media broadcasting a message of generalized wealth and lifestyles to match, the sense of frustration and failure on the part of those sizeable numbers of people left behind could only increase. In this sense relative deprivation is endemic in modern capitalist society. The development of the consumer culture and at the same time the relentless breaking down of older community values, which to some extent shielded traditional working-class communities from relative deprivation, are a result not of deviations but of the core dynamics of capitalism.
Secondly, relative deprivation fitted into our understanding of the innovative character of criminal subcultures. Rather than crime being the response of automatons to material conditions, the unemployed and deprived young people in the inner cities, in turning to lifestyles and activities which involved crime, were adapting to situations as they found them with the materials at hand. In deploying these ideas we were following in the footsteps of such classical accounts as that of Cloward and Ohlin in their study Delinquency and Opportunity (1960).
Since What Is To Be Done? our views on the explanation of crime have developed and taken on a more integrated perspective, of which relative deprivation and the exclusion from legitimate channels of achievement form only one component. We understand the level of crime as resulting from the interaction of potential offenders, potential victims, actions of the state and criminal justice system, and levels of informal community and family social control (Lea 1992, Young 1992)."
- John Lea and Jock Young, What Is To Be Done About Law & Order? Crisis in the Nineties. London: Pluto Press, 1993. (originally 1984) p. ix, x.
