Why Is Criminalization Significant to Victims Research Paper

Why Is Criminalization Significant to Victims - Research Paper Example The supremacy of judges to formulate fresh law and criminalize behavior with hindsight is discouraged, as well. In a less explicit manner, where laws have not been firmly implemented, the acts barred by those laws might also endure de facto criminalization by a more efficient or committed legal implementation. There has been some doubt as to the extent and nature of the role to be played by the victims of crime. However, as critics argue, the relationship between criminology and victimology has become more challenging. The main issue is that, in the dialectic of Left Realism and Right Realism, a spotlight on the victim encourages rights selectively for specific victims, and promotes the theory that some victim rights and freedom are more significant compared to competing values or rights in society. Keeping in line with this topic, this paper will evaluate criminalisation with regards to the new criminology, Howard Becker's claim that 'there is no such thing as a deviant act, it is m erely behavior that people so label', the main arguments relating to crime and race and finally present the key arguments within critical criminology.According to critics, modern (new) criminology is under threat of being confined by its own liberation (Radical Criminology n.d, p. 1). These critics’ despairing prediction was occasioned by what they considered to be insufficient developments in the way where criminologists were choosing and approaching their job. The liberation they talked about is that which had restricted criminology to behavioral thoughts; the confinement is that which at the moment limits a new account of criminology only to political thoughts (Jewkes & Letherby 2002, p. 45). By picking out power devoid of analyzing its class basis, as well as the state nature, labeling theorists, together with the sociologists of deviance, changed the behaviors of the influential into a random flexing of ethical muscle (Jewkes & Letherby 2002, p. 45). In general, the labe ling process was to be identified as class-based, but the failure to do this granted the state free power to control people from countercultures and lower classes through labeling them as deviants. Therefore, what was needed was a study of all the processes concerned in the development of deviant action comprising of the structural and political dimensions that earlier theories had not considered. The arguments incorporated in the new criminology were derived from a Marxist study of social associations being rooted in class. Marx proposed that society was structurally split between the middle-class people who own the factories, land, and machines, as well as the wage owning classes, referred to as the proletariat. The middle class is able to use the lower classes thus securing power and material wealth for themselves. Marx's study of exploitation and power was applied by the new criminologists to reveal the truth about the institutional organizations of a capitalist society. Through applying Marxist scrutiny of class, new criminologists provide a majestic theory, a theory, which is globally used as a study of crime, law and the state. Certainly, they try to provide a fully social theory of deviance that concerns analyzing deviant actions, as well as its reaction together, putting them in a political economy of crime.