Traditional Contributions to Radical Criminology

Abstract

This article analyzes the causes of criminal behavior as portrayed in the three dominant models of traditional criminology—strain, cultural deviance, and social control—from the perspective of radical criminology. Specifically, we compare these traditional models to radical theory based on three derived criteria: (1) that social class plays an important role in the traditional theory in question, (2) that the theory employs a social-structural model of crime causation, and (3) that the theory offers a materialistic interpretation of the relationship between culture and social structure. Ranging from contributions that are fully compatible to those that provide fruitful possibilities for future research, we find that traditional theories—especially macro-level social control models—converge in crucial respects with radical criminology. We conclude that the ideological differences between radicals and traditionalists, in conjunction with the former's suspicion of positivism and the latter's narrow emphasis on individual-level explanations, have obfuscated the development of an integrated, structural model of crime causation.