Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory of Crime

Last Updated on September 11, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Charles Murray argued that a distinct underclass had formed in Britain by the late 1980s — long-term workless, welfare-dependent, and raising children who would repeat the pattern. His claim is that this group is cut off from mainstream norms and therefore produces disproportionate crime.

It is the most politically contested theory on the crime and deviance specification, and the evidence against it is unusually strong and unusually specific, which makes it excellent evaluation material.

Underclass theory is usually taught at the end of subcultural theories of crime in the crime and deviance module, and it reappears as part of right realism.

Murray’s argument

Murray, an American political scientist, first developed the concept in the United States and then applied it to Britain in an essay for The Sunday Times in 1989, expanded into an Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet the following year.

His claim runs in three steps.

First, a group has emerged that is not simply poor but different in kind from the rest of the working class. Murray was explicit that he was distinguishing between the poor — who work, or want to — and the underclass, who in his account do not.

Second, three markers identify it: long-term worklessness among men of working age, high rates of births outside marriage, and high rates of violent crime.

Third, and this is the mechanism, the pattern is transmitted through socialisation. Children raised without a working parent and, in Murray’s account, without a father, are not socialised into the norms that hold everyone else in place. They grow up outside the value system rather than in rebellion against it.

Murray’s explanation for why the group formed is the welfare system itself. Benefits, he argued, made worklessness and lone parenthood economically viable, and so produced more of both — the classic New Right argument that state provision creates the dependency it is meant to relieve.

Underclass theory is a subcultural theory. Its logic is the same as Miller’s focal concerns: a group with its own values, whose members offend by living those values out rather than by rebelling against anyone else’s.

The underclass has had many names

Murray coined the term in 1989, but the idea long predates him. The historian John Welshman traced it back to the 1880s, and what he found is that Britain has produced a new name for the same alleged group roughly every twenty years.

The sequence runs like this.

The social residuum, 1880s. Charles Booth’s survey of London distinguished the respectable poor from a residue below them, characterised less by low income than by disorder and irregular work.

The unemployables, early 1900s. Social reformers and politicians argued that a portion of the jobless were not merely out of work but unemployable, and some proposed labour colonies to deal with them.

The social problem group, 1929–30s. The Wood Report, produced jointly by the Board of Education and the Board of Control in 1929, identified a “social problem group”, and the idea was pushed hard by the Eugenics Society — which drew the conclusion that the group’s defining features were hereditary. E. J. Lidbetter’s investigations in the East End of London (1933) were funded in that tradition.

Problem families, late 1940s and 1950s. After the Second World War the language shifted from heredity to household competence, and Eugenics Society-sponsored surveys of “problem families” became the standard instrument.

The culture of poverty, 1960s. Oscar Lewis, working with poor families in Mexico and Puerto Rico, argued in Five Families (1959) and then in his best-known statement of the idea (Scientific American, 1966) that poverty generated a self-perpetuating subculture passed on to children. The theory was applied to the United States in heavily racialised terms.

The cycle of deprivation, 1972. Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Social Services, gave a speech at Church House in Westminster on 29 June 1972 asking why deprivation persisted across generations despite rising national prosperity. He gave two further speeches on the theme over the following year, and the phrase entered British policy language.

The underclass, 1989. Murray warned that a plague had crossed the Atlantic.

Social exclusion and the hard core, from 1997. New Labour preferred the language of social exclusion, but the underlying claim survived: in 2006 Tony Blair spoke of a hard core underclass of around a million people, and policy focused on families described as high-risk, high-harm and high-cost.

NEETs and troubled families, 2000s onward. Which brings us to where this post started.

Why this matters for evaluating Murray

This is the strongest evaluation point available on the topic, and it is stronger than simply saying the underclass does not exist.

A scientific concept tends to get sharper as evidence accumulates. This one has done the opposite. It has been renamed roughly every generation, each time by people confident they had identified a real and newly emerging group, and each time the previous label has quietly been abandoned rather than confirmed. The explanation offered has swung between heredity, culture, household competence and welfare incentives, depending on what was politically available at the time — but the group being described has stayed remarkably constant.

Welshman’s argument is that the continuities matter more than the differences. Each generation rediscovers a residuum at the bottom of society, explains it in terms of the deficiencies of the people in it, and proposes to fix those people rather than the conditions producing them.

That pattern is what an ideological category looks like rather than an empirical one: the label changes, the evidence never firms up, and the policy conclusion arrives first. Set alongside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding that no three-generation workless family could be located at all, it is difficult to sustain the view that Murray identified something new in the 1980s.

The NEETs debate

By the mid-2000s British governments were monitoring young people not in education, employment or training — NEETs — and the category was widely treated as the underclass made measurable.

Government-commissioned research put a cost on it. Godfrey et al. (2002), for the Department for Education and Skills, estimated the lifetime cost of the 157,000 young people NEET at the end of 1999 at roughly £15 billion — £7bn in resource costs and £8.1bn in public finance costs — or about £97,000 per head.

On crime specifically, that study found:

• Twice as many offenders were NEET as non-NEET
• Three quarters of males aged 16–17 charged and appearing in youth court were NEET
• At ages 17–30, 29% of men who had been NEET at 16–18 were involved in crime, against 11% of men generally

A note on a figure you will see elsewhere. “NEETs are twenty times more likely to become criminals” circulates widely, including in press coverage of this research and on revision sites. It does not appear in the report and it is not supportable. What the report supports is roughly two to three times. It is also not a claim Charles Murray made — he was asked to comment on the findings by a journalist, which is how his name became attached to a number he had no part in producing.

The media reaction to NEETs was classic moral panic material — the 2012 Daily Mail article describing “a lost generation” is a good example. One policy response was the Troubled Families Programme.

Positive evaluations of underclass theory

The theory identifies something real. Long-term worklessness is concentrated in particular neighbourhoods and particular families, and that concentration is not random.

It correctly predicted that youth worklessness would become a persistent policy problem rather than a temporary one — and on the raw numbers, that prediction has aged well. There were 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 NEET in April to June 2026 (13.0%), according to the House of Commons Library, having passed a million in the first quarter of 2026 for the first time since 2013. The government launched an independent review into rising youth inactivity in November 2025.

It has also been enormously influential on policy, which makes it worth understanding regardless of whether it is right. Welfare conditionality, benefit sanctions and the Troubled Families Programme all rest on underclass reasoning.

Criticisms of underclass theory

The central mechanism has been tested and it failed. Shildrick, MacDonald, Furlong, Roden and Crow (2012), for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, set out specifically to find families in Middlesbrough and Glasgow where three generations had never worked. They could not find a single one. Even two generations of sustained worklessness in the same family proved extremely rare.

What they found instead directly contradicts Murray. Workless parents were strongly committed to conventional work values and actively helped their children look for jobs. Their children were determined to avoid repeating their parents’ experience. There was no evidence of values or attitudes discouraging employment. The long-term worklessness they did find was the result of chronic ill health, caring responsibilities and cycles of low-paid insecure work — structural causes, not cultural transmission.

This is the strongest single evaluation point available on this topic, because it targets the mechanism rather than the conclusion.

The crime trend does not fit. Murray’s theory predicts that a growing underclass produces growing crime. NEET numbers have been rising since 2021 and passed a million in early 2026. Over the same period, the ONS recorded homicide at its lowest since 2003, knife-enabled offences down 8%, and firearms offences down 8%. Since the mid-1990s peak, theft is down 77% and violence down 78%. The two lines move in opposite directions.

Young people’s behaviour has moved the wrong way for the theory. Drug use among 16–24 year olds has halved since 1997, from 31.8% to 15.1%. Binge drinking among 16–24 year old men fell from 37% in 1998 to 17% in 2022. If an unsocialised underclass were growing, this is not what its behaviour would look like.

It blames the victims of structural change. Marxists and left realists argue Murray describes the effects of deindustrialisation and then presents them as causes. The areas Murray identifies are the areas where the industries went.

It is ideological. The theory reached policy influence far ahead of its evidence base, and it has always been more useful politically than sociologically — which is itself the criticism interactionists and Marxists make of it.

It ignores elite crime entirely, like every subcultural theory. The largest financial crimes in Britain are not committed by the underclass.

Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my crime and deviance revision notes bundle — which contains the following:

1. Revision notes covering all fifteen topics on the crime and deviance specification
2. Mind maps in pdf and png format
3. Short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
4. Essay plans and model answers for the 30-mark questions

Signposting / Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, examined on Paper 3.

Underclass theory is the last of the Subcultural Theories of Crime and shares their logic and their weaknesses.

It reappears later in the course as part of Right Realist Criminology.

For the policy response to the NEETs panic, see The Troubled Families Programme.

For the theory Murray’s argument is ultimately a version of, see The Functionalist Perspective on Crime and Deviance.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

ources used to write this post

The theory

Murray, C. (1990) The Emerging British Underclass. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. First published as an essay in The Sunday Times, 1989.

Welshman, J. (2013) Underclass: A History of the Excluded Since 1880. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury. First published as Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880–2000 (Continuum, 2006).

Lewis, O. (1959) Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. The best-known short statement of the idea is Lewis, O. (1966) ‘The Culture of Poverty’, Scientific American, 215(4), pp. 19–25.

Board of Education and Board of Control (1929) Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (the Wood Report). The origin of the ‘social problem group’.

Lidbetter, E. J. (1933) Heredity and the Social Problem Group. London: Edward Arnold.

Joseph, K. (1972) Speech to the Pre-School Playgroups Association conference, Church House, Westminster, 29 June. The ‘cycle of deprivation’ speech.

The evidence against it

Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Furlong, A., Roden, J. and Crow, R. (2012) Are ‘Cultures of Worklessness’ Passed Down the Generations? York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Godfrey, C., Hutton, S., Bradshaw, J., Coles, B., Craig, G. and Johnson, J. (2002) Estimating the Cost of Being ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ at Age 16–18. DfES Research Report RR346. Social Policy Research Unit, University of York.

Statistics

Office for National Statistics (2026) Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026. Accredited official statistics, released 23 July 2026.

Office for National Statistics (2025) Drug misuse in England and Wales: year ending March 2025.

House of Commons Library, Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), Research Briefing SN06705.

NHS England, Health Survey for England. The source for the binge drinking figures. [LINK NEEDED — insert the direct release URL]

Media coverage discussed in the post

Daily Mail (2012) ‘A nation of NEETS’, 22 February. Cited here as an example of the moral panic, not as a source of evidence.