NCJ Number
84140
Date Published
1981
Length
21 pages
Annotation
The dynamics of the current capitalist economic crisis have influenced the emergence of the justice model in criminal justice, which deemphasizes expenditures for social services while increasing punishments for crimes generally committed by the unemployed.
Abstract
Capitalist societies are organized so that the accumulation of value is necessarily at someone else's expense. Greater profits require outdoing competitors and holding down wages. In periods of growth, there is enough to go around so that accumulation can proceed without major dislocation, except at the very bottom of society. The pressures of competition lead to shrinking the surplus produced (difference between cost of production and price to the consumer), which leads to driving competitors out of business or taking them over and laying off workers until real wages are low enough and production profitable enough to start up again. In times of crisis, the competition to accumulate values at the expense of others heats up as the available value decreases. In this struggle, people resort to the means available to them to grab what they think they need to survive. Those who succeed in making their survival tactics legal (corporate survivors) are not labeled criminal, while those who can only obtain enough to survive by illegal activity are labeled criminal. As those who can survive by using or staying within the law feel threatened by the unemployed who seek survival by property crime, the pressure for more extreme social controls increases, while the disposition to pay for rehabilitative social services decreases. The current justice model is the resulting policy. A total of 20 notes is listed.