1. Why do people commit crimes?
Marxist approach to understanding
why people commit crimes.

2. Why are crimes committed?
• Marxism would state that crime happens
because of social class differences. Working
class crime is a lot more common as much of
the middle class crime falls into the category
of the dark figure of crime, which is the
percentage of crimes which go unreported.

3. Working Class Crime
• Some suggested reasons as to why working class
people make commit crime are:
• To afford necessities
• Bad family life/home background and upbringing
• Jealousy
• Peer pressure from getting involved with the
wrong groups of people
• Lack of education, discipline, home resources etc

4. • People who fall into the working class social
group are more likely to commit violent crimes,
such as robbery, murder and rape. This is for
many reasons, a main one being money in cases
such as robbery and mugging. However, some
other reasons may be a lack of norms or a lack of
parental influence. Because they are more likely
to commit violent crimes, they are more likely to
be detected and reported to the police rather
than crimes such as drug abuse.

5. Middle Class Crime
• Middle class people are more likely to commit
crimes for different reasons:
• Greed
• Addiction
• Boredom

6. • Working class people are also more likely to commit
different types of crimes compared to the working
class. The most frequent is white collar crime carried
out in a business or fraud. Because most of the time it
is done on a smaller scale, it is harder to detect when
the crime is being committed. However, when it is
caught out, a lot of the time the criminal isn’t punished
as harshly. Reasons for this could be that the crime
isn’t as serious as violent crimes or to save the
reputation of the company that the person has been
stealing from whilst working there. However, in larger
scale situations, the crime is more than likely to be
reported.

7. • Working class people are also more likely to commit
different types of crimes compared to the working
class. The most frequent is white collar crime carried
out in a business or fraud. Because most of the time it
is done on a smaller scale, it is harder to detect when
the crime is being committed. However, when it is
caught out, a lot of the time the criminal isn’t punished
as harshly. Reasons for this could be that the crime
isn’t as serious as violent crimes or to save the
reputation of the company that the person has been
stealing from whilst working there. However, in larger
scale situations, the crime is more than likely to be
reported.