Left Realist Criminology

Last Updated on September 13, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Left Realism explains crime as a product of inequality, but insists that something practical must be done about it now rather than after the revolution. Left Realists argue that:

1. The three main causes of working class street crime are relative deprivation, marginalisation and subculture
2. The victims of working class crime are overwhelmingly working class, so criminology must take that crime seriously
3. Crime has multiple causes and must be understood through the square of crime — offender, victim, state and public
4. The answer is social and community intervention plus better relations between the police and the public, not tougher policing alone

Left Realism is taught immediately after Right Realism within the A-level sociology crime and deviance module, and the pair are usually examined together.

What Makes Left Realism ‘Realist’ and ‘Left’

Left Realism was developed by Jock Young, John Lea and Roger Matthews, principally in Lea and Young’s What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? (1984). It is a fusion of anomie theory, radical criminology and symbolic interactionism.

It is realist because it focuses on practical ways of reducing crime. Left Realists regarded Interactionism and Marxist criminology as idealistic: the first treated crime as a label rather than a problem, the second treated it as a symptom of capitalism to be cured by abolishing capitalism. Neither helped anyone being burgled this year.

It is left wing because it locates the roots of crime in structural inequalities of class, race and gender, and because it insists the burden of crime falls hardest on the poor, on ethnic minorities and on women.

This is the part students most often miss. Left Realism is a criticism of Marxism as much as it is a criticism of Right Realism. Left Realists point out that the victims of working class street crime are overwhelmingly working class themselves, and that it is exactly this ‘ordinary crime’ that worries working class people. Criminology which focuses only on elite crime abandons the people most affected by the crime that actually happens to them. Marxist criminology, in the left realist view, romanticised the offender and ignored the victim.

Left Realism: The Causes of Crime

Young argued that you have to be tough on crime, but that this does not just mean being tough on criminals. It means being tough on the social factors that drive crime rates over the long term, and ensuring the criminal justice system promotes social justice rather than undermining it.

Lea and Young began from a puzzle. Since the Second World War, rising living standards and the expansion of welfare provision had gone hand in hand with a rising crime rate. If poverty causes crime, this makes no sense — people were getting better off and committing more crime. Their answer uses three linked concepts.

Relative Deprivation

Crime has its roots in deprivation, but deprivation by itself does not directly cause crime. Living standards rose after the 1950s while crime rose too, so absolute deprivation cannot be the explanation.

Left Realists instead draw on Runciman’s (1966) concept of relative deprivation — how deprived someone feels in comparison with others, or in comparison with their own expectations.

This resolves the paradox. People today are better off in absolute terms but feel poorer, because media and advertising have raised everyone’s expectations of what they should have. The gap between what people expect and what they can legitimately obtain has widened even as living standards have risen, and it is that gap, not poverty as such, which generates crime.

This is a genuinely useful idea beyond criminology, and it is worth carrying into essays on the family, education and the media. What matters sociologically is not what people have, but what they think they should have.

Subculture

Left Realists see subcultures as a group’s collective response to relative deprivation, drawing on Cohen’s theory of status frustration to explain how they form.

There are many possible subcultural adaptations to blocked opportunity and most do not result in crime — religious groups and political movements are also collective responses to the same conditions. Criminal subcultures develop where a group continues to subscribe to mainstream values of material success but lacks legitimate means of achieving it. The values are conventional; only the means are not.

Marginalisation

Marginalised groups lack both clear goals and organisations to represent their interests.

Workers, by contrast, are not marginalised even when they are badly paid. They have clear objectives — better pay, better conditions — and organisations such as trade unions to pursue them. They have no need to resort to violence because there are legitimate channels available.

Unemployed young people have neither. They have no organisation to represent them and no clearly defined goal, which produces resentment and frustration with no legitimate outlet. Frustration with no channel can find expression in violence and crime.

Multiple Aetiology and the Square of Crime

Left Realists argue that crime has several causes at once, which they call multiple aetiology. Crime is a product of formal and informal rules, the actions of offenders, and the reactions of victims, the state and its agencies.

The square of crime sets out the four elements that have to be understood together:

1. The offender — why people offend
2. The victim — what makes some people and places more vulnerable
3. The state and its agencies — how the police and courts respond, and how that response shapes offending
4. The public — informal social control, and public attitudes to crime and to the police

The point of the square is that no single one of these explains crime. A theory which looks only at the offender misses the fact that policing shapes who becomes an offender; a theory which looks only at labelling misses the fact that victims are real. Understanding crime means understanding the relationships between all four corners — and reducing crime means acting at all four, which requires different agencies in a community working together.

Left Realism: Solutions to Crime

Left realist solutions emphasise social and community crime prevention: strategies that address individual offenders and the social conditions that encourage offending, rather than simply making crime harder to commit.

There are three broad strands.

Early Intervention

Intervention means identifying groups at risk of offending and acting to limit that risk before it materialises.

Farrington’s (1995) longitudinal research, drawing on the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, compared offenders with non-offenders and identified a cluster of risk factors which correlate with later offending: low family income, poor housing, large family size, poor parental supervision, parental conflict, harsh or erratic discipline, low school attainment and impulsivity. Most intervention programmes are built on findings of this kind — the logic being that if you know the risk factors, you can target support at the children who carry them.

The best known intervention programme is the Perry Pre-School Project, which ran in Ypsilanti, Michigan in the early 1960s. 123 children aged three and four, all from low-income African American families, were randomly assigned either to a two-year programme of daily pre-school with weekly home visits, or to a control group. They have been followed up at ages 19, 27, 40 and 55.

The programme group did substantially better: more graduated from high school, more were in stable employment, and significantly fewer had been arrested. A cost-benefit analysis by Schweinhart and colleagues (2005) calculated a return of around seventeen dollars to the public for every dollar spent, mostly through reduced criminal justice costs.

HOWEVER, that figure is disputed, and the dispute is more useful in an essay than the figure itself. Heckman and colleagues (2010) reworked the calculation and arrived at a return of seven to twelve dollars per dollar — still a good return, but roughly half. The difference comes almost entirely from how you put a monetary value on crimes that did not happen. When the headline benefit of a programme depends on pricing hypothetical burglaries, the precision of the number should be treated with caution.

A second caution worth making in an essay: 123 children, in one American town, sixty years ago, all from one ethnic group. It is a genuinely rigorous randomised study and it is also a very slender basis for national policy in Britain today.

Community-Based Approaches

Community strategies involve the local community in reducing crime rather than doing things to it.

Young and Matthews (1992) argue that improving leisure facilities for young people, reducing income inequality, improving housing estates, raising the living standards of poorer families, reducing unemployment and creating jobs with genuine prospects will all help to cut crime. Long-term problems have to be addressed, but more immediate measures can be taken alongside them.

In practice this has meant local councils working with residents to expand opportunities for young people at risk of offending — training, youth provision, more engaging education. Left Realism also inspired some distinctly practical measures, including redesigned street layouts to make kerb crawling difficult and programmes to rehabilitate run-down housing estates.

For a fuller account of what the evidence says about which community interventions actually reduce offending, see Crime Prevention and Control Strategies.

Improving Policing

The third strand concerns the relationship between the police and the public, and it follows from the square of crime: if public reaction is one of the four corners, then policing that damages public trust makes crime worse.

Left Realists argue that the police depend on the public far more than is generally recognised. The great majority of crimes come to police attention because a member of the public reports them, and most are detected using information the public provides rather than through independent investigation. Kinsey, Lea and Young made this argument in Losing the Fight Against Crime (1986), and the policy conclusion follows directly from it.

If the relationship between police and public breaks down, the flow of information dries up. Deprived of information, the police have to find other ways of detecting crime, and they drift towards military policing — stop and search, surveillance, saturation patrols directed at whole communities rather than at individuals. That alienates residents, makes law-abiding people feel like suspects, and reduces trust further. The result is a downward spiral in which each round of tougher policing makes the next round more necessary and less effective.

The answer, for Left Realists, is the opposite: police should concentrate on improving relationships with communities, and the public should have a real say in shaping police priorities, so that the police deal with the crimes that most affect people in a given area.

This is where Left Realism is at its most distinctive. Right Realists want the police to be tougher; Marxists tend to see the police as the problem; Left Realists want the police to be more accountable and better informed — which is a genuinely different position from either.

For how the perspectives compare on policing specifically, see The Role of the Police in Controlling and Reducing Crime.

Evaluating Left Realism

In its favour

It takes victims seriously, and it was the first left-wing criminology to do so. By using local victim surveys rather than police statistics, Left Realists were able to show how heavily crime falls on the poorest communities — something both official statistics and Marxist theory had obscured.

Relative deprivation explains what absolute deprivation cannot. The rise in crime during a period of rising prosperity is a real puzzle and Left Realism has the best answer to it.

The square of crime is genuinely integrative. It is one of the few frameworks in the crime and deviance module that combines structural and interactionist insights rather than choosing between them.

Community prevention can be extremely good value. Left realist solutions are the most expensive crime prevention measures to implement — but turning one potential offender into an employed taxpayer saves very large sums over a lifetime, which is exactly what the Perry cost-benefit analyses attempt to measure.

It has influenced real policy. New Labour’s approach to crime — ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ — drew directly on left realist thinking, and programmes such as Sure Start reflect the intervention logic.

Criticisms

Marxists argue it does not go far enough. These policies may reduce deprivation but they leave the structural inequalities of capitalism intact, and those inequalities are the root cause. Left Realism, on this view, treats symptoms.

It still focuses on working class street crime. Despite criticising Right Realism for ignoring elite crime, Left Realism largely does the same. Its interventions target inner-city and working class communities and have nothing to say about corporate or state crime.

Foucault and Garland read community intervention less charitably than Left Realists do. What looks like support can also be understood as surveillance — extending state monitoring into families and communities under a therapeutic label, without changing the conditions that produced the problem.

The solutions are slow and expensive, which makes them politically unattractive. A government can install CCTV before an election; it cannot demonstrate the results of a pre-school programme for thirty years. The Perry follow-ups took four decades to produce the evidence now cited in their favour, and few politicians plan that far ahead.

The evidence on intervention is mixed. The Troubled Families Programme in England was explicitly built on the intervention logic — £448 million, aimed at ‘turning around’ 120,000 families. The national evaluation by Bewley, George, Rienzo and Portes for the DCLG (2016) found no significant or systematic impact attributable to the programme: families in the programme changed in much the same ways as comparable families outside it. This is important to know, because it is frequently cited on the other side.

It relies on a concept of community that may no longer exist. Postmodernists argue that communities today are unstable, short-lived and have a high turnover of population, and that many people’s lives are organised around networks rather than localities. If so, community intervention is aiming at something that has largely dissolved.

Interactionists argue that Left Realism accepts the official picture of who offends too readily, and therefore ends up explaining a pattern that is partly a product of policing rather than of relative deprivation.

Left Realism — evaluation summary
Supporting	Criticising
✓ Takes victims of working class crime seriously; local victim surveys give better data than police statistics	✗ Marxism: tackles deprivation, not the structural inequality causing it
✓ Relative deprivation explains rising crime in a richer society	✗ Still focuses on street crime; ignores corporate and state crime
✓ The square of crime integrates structural and interactionist explanations	✗ Foucault and Garland: community intervention is surveillance by another name
✓ Community prevention offers a very high long-term return (Perry)	✗ Solutions are slow and expensive, so politically unattractive
✓ Influenced real policy, including New Labour and Sure Start	✗ Troubled Families: no significant impact found (DCLG 2016)
✓ Offers a distinctive account of policing neither Right Realism nor Marxism provides	✗ Postmodernism: ‘community’ may no longer exist in the required sense
	✗ Interactionism: accepts the official picture of who offends
	✗ Perry’s cost-benefit figure is contested (Heckman et al. 2010)

Signposting and Related Posts

This post is written for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, examined on Paper 3 (7192/3).

Left Realism is taught straight after Right Realist Criminology, which contains a full comparison table of the two — worth reading alongside this, since exam questions frequently ask you to compare them.

It is usually followed by post and late modern theories of crime. Jock Young, one of the founders of Left Realism, went on to develop the Vertigo of Late Modernity, which extends left realist ideas about exclusion into a fuller theory of late modern society.

For social and community crime prevention in much more depth, including the evidence on which interventions work, see Crime Prevention and Control Strategies.

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Sources

Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? Penguin.

Kinsey, R., Lea, J. and Young, J. (1986) Losing the Fight Against Crime. Blackwell.

Runciman, W.G. (1966) Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Routledge.

Sage Encyclopedia of Criminology (2010), entry on Left Realism — https://study.sagepub.com/system/files/Left_Realism_Criminology.pdf

Bewley, H., George, A., Rienzo, C. and Portes, J. (2016) National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme: National Impact Study Report. Department for Communities and Local Government.