Right Realist Criminology

Last Updated on September 13, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Right Realism explains crime as a matter of individual choice rather than social structure. Right Realists argue that:

1. Most criminals are rational actors who weigh up the rewards of crime against the risk of getting caught
2. Visible disorder in a neighbourhood signals that nobody is in control, and attracts more crime
3. A growing underclass, detached from mainstream values, fails to socialise its children properly
4. The answer is to make crime harder to commit and easier to detect, not to redistribute wealth

Right Realism is usually the first of the two realist theories taught within the A-level sociology crime and deviance module, and it is followed by Left Realism, which reaches almost the opposite conclusions from the same starting point.

Why Realist Criminology Emerged

By the end of the 1970s Marxist and Interactionist approaches to crime were losing their grip on criminology. The problem was practical. Knowing that crime is an outgrowth of capitalism does not help you prevent a burglary, unless your plan for preventing burglary is to abolish capitalism, which — let us be honest — was not going to happen by Tuesday. Similarly, Interactionist approaches which saw crime as socially constructed and therefore not quite ‘real’ had little to say to the people being burgled during the sharp rise in recorded crime through the 1970s and 1980s.

Realist criminology emerged in response, and it differs from what came before in three ways:

1. It abandons grand theory. Realists are not interested in the deep structural causes of crime. It is not a criminologist’s job to get rid of capitalism, so there is little point building a theory around it.
2. It is pragmatic. Realists ask how governments can reduce crime now, working within the social system rather than waiting for it to be replaced.
3. It is victim-centred. Public fear of crime is treated as a real problem deserving a response, not as a media-manufactured illusion.

Realism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as neoliberal governments came to power in the United States and the United Kingdom. Neoliberals favoured lower taxation and a smaller welfare state, but law and order was the one area where they thought the state should be strong — and Right Realists take a correspondingly tough line on offenders.

Right and Left Realism Compared

There are two kinds of realism. They share the three features above and disagree about nearly everything else, and examiners like questions which ask you to compare them.

Right Realism is associated with the neoliberal governments of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, though most governments since have adopted some right realist policies. Right Realists reject the Marxist claim that structural factors such as poverty cause crime. They hold the individual responsible, while accepting that high levels of social disorder and weak social control are associated with higher crime rates.

Left Realism is more left wing and argues that inequality — specifically relative deprivation and marginalisation — is the main cause of crime, and that community intervention rather than tougher policing is the answer.

	Right Realism	Left Realism
Main cause of crime	Individual rational choice	Relative deprivation and marginalisation
Role of social structure	Minimal — inequality does not cause crime	Central — inequality is the root cause
View of the offender	Someone who calculated and chose	Someone excluded from legitimate opportunity
Key theorists	Wilson and Kelling, Clarke, Felson, Murray	Lea and Young, Matthews
Preferred solutions	Situational and environmental prevention, zero tolerance policing	Social and community prevention, community policing
View of the police	Should be tougher and more visible	Should work with communities, not against them
Timescale	Immediate, measurable reductions	Long term, structural
Main criticism of it	Ignores the causes of crime	Solutions are slow and expensive

The two share more than students often realise. Both take crime seriously as a real problem, both focus on street crime rather than elite crime, and both are willing to work with governments. The argument is about what to do, not about whether anything should be done.

Right Realism: The Causes of Crime

Right Realists are not especially interested in causes, but they do have a theory of them. There are three: rational choice theory, broken windows theory, and Charles Murray’s account of the underclass.

Rational Choice Theory

The central right realist claim is that crime is a choice. Most criminals are rational actors: if the risk of getting caught is low, or the punishment is mild, and the reward is high enough, crime becomes worth committing. Offenders weigh costs against benefits in much the same way as anyone deciding whether to buy something.

Rational choice theory therefore predicts that crime will increase where any of the following apply:

• Crime brings higher rewards than working within the rules — and rewards need not be material, they might be status or security
• There is little risk of getting caught
• There is little punishment if you are caught

Ronald Clarke developed this into the practical framework behind situational crime prevention, arguing that the balance of risk and reward in a particular situation matters more than any general disposition to offend.

Routine Activities Theory

Cohen and Felson’s Routine Activities Theory (1979) developed rational choice theory further. They argued that in most circumstances crime does not happen, because social control, lack of opportunity and the risk of getting caught prevent it. Crime requires three things to coincide:

1. Someone motivated to offend
2. A suitable target
3. The absence of a capable guardian — a parent, a neighbour, a police officer, a working CCTV camera

Most crime on this account is opportunistic rather than planned. If motivated individuals encounter easy opportunities in the ordinary course of their daily lives, crime is more likely. This matters for policy, because two of the three conditions can be changed without changing anything about the offender.

Criticisms of Rational Choice Theory

Rational choice theory rests on a fiction that critics call ‘economic man’ — a figure continually scanning for opportunities to maximise personal gain, making immoral and asocial choices where these serve his goals. Economic man has no past, no complex motives, no rich social life and no social identity. He simply muddles through on imperfect information.

Rational choice theory also analyses episodes rather than contexts. It treats the individual as acting alone, in the moment, and takes no account of social background or wider injustice.

There is also the problem of crimes that are obviously not rational in this sense. A great deal of violence is committed by people who are drunk, enraged, or both, and no calculation of risk and reward is taking place. Lyng (1990) argued the opposite of rational choice: that for some offenders the risk itself is the reward, and increasing it makes crime more attractive rather than less.

Broken Windows Theory (Wilson and Kelling, 1982)

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s article ‘Broken Windows’, published in The Atlantic in 1982, has been described as perhaps the most influential single article on crime prevention ever written.

Wilson and Kelling use ‘broken windows’ to stand for all the signs of disorder and lack of concern for others found in some neighbourhoods — noise, graffiti, begging, dog fouling, littering, vandalism. Leaving broken windows unrepaired and tolerating aggressive behaviour sends out a signal that no one cares.

In such neighbourhoods both formal and informal social control are absent. The police concern themselves only with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance; residents feel intimidated and powerless. Without action the situation deteriorates and the neighbourhood tips into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out if they can, and the area becomes a magnet for offenders.

The policy implication is direct and is the reason the theory has been so influential: if disorder causes crime, then dealing firmly with disorder should prevent crime. That is the logic behind zero tolerance policing.

Note the date. Broken windows is Wilson and Kelling, 1982. Kelling and Coles’ Fixing Broken Windows is 1996, a different book making a later argument, and the two are frequently confused.

The evidence is genuinely mixed, and it is worth knowing both sides — see the fuller evaluation of broken windows theory, which covers the experimental support, the meta-analysis, and the studies that find no effect.

Charles Murray and the Underclass

Charles Murray argued that changes to family structure were responsible for much of the increase in crime in the 1970s and 1980s, attributing that growth to a growing underclass — a ‘new rabble’ defined by their deviant behaviour, who fail to socialise their children properly. The children of the underclass, on this account, fail to learn self-control and fail to learn the difference between right and wrong.

The underclass has grown, Murray argues, because of welfare dependency. Increasingly generous benefits since the 1960s have led more people to depend on the state. This has contributed to the decline of marriage and the growth of lone-parent families, because women can live on benefits rather than marrying to have children, which in turn means men no longer have to support their families and therefore no longer need to work.

According to Murray, lone mothers are ineffective agents of socialisation, particularly for boys. Absent fathers mean boys lack paternal discipline and appropriate male role models, and young men turn instead to delinquent role models on the street, gaining status through crime rather than through a steady job.

For Murray, the underclass is not only a source of crime. Its existence threatens social cohesion by undermining the values of hard work and personal responsibility.

Evaluating the Right Realist Account of the Causes of Crime

It is usual in A-level sociology to evaluate one perspective using others, and there is plenty of that below — but Right Realism also attracts a number of stand-alone criticisms worth knowing.

In its favour, rational choice theory is supported by the fact that situational measures work. Car crime in Britain fell dramatically as immobilisers and alarms became standard, which is difficult to explain unless a good deal of car theft was opportunistic and stopped when the opportunity closed. Newburn (2013) makes exactly this point. If offenders were driven by deep structural forces they should have found another way.

Right Realism also takes victims seriously, which the theories it displaced did not. Marxist and Interactionist criminology in the 1970s had remarkably little to say to people living on estates with high burglary rates, and Right Realists were the first to treat public fear of crime as a legitimate object of policy rather than a symptom of false consciousness.

HOWEVER, the theory only explains the kinds of crime it looks at. Rational choice, broken windows and underclass theory are all accounts of street crime. None of them explains corporate fraud, tax evasion, state crime or domestic violence — and Marxists would argue that this is not an oversight but the point, because a theory which locates crime in the underclass conveniently locates it away from the powerful.

Murray’s underclass theory is ideological and thinly evidenced. The claim that the underclass is dramatically more criminal than the rest of society is asserted more often than it is demonstrated. Critics point out that Murray infers a culture from a set of statistics: high unemployment, lone parenthood and crime cluster in the same areas, but that correlation is equally consistent with the left realist explanation that those areas suffer the most relative deprivation. Murray reads a moral failing where others read a structural one.

The welfare argument does not survive comparison. If generous welfare produces an underclass and therefore crime, then countries with more generous welfare states than Britain should have more crime. Broadly they do not; the Nordic countries combine high welfare spending with low rates of violent crime.

Crime has fallen for thirty years while the supposed causes have got worse. Recorded crime and Crime Survey crime in England and Wales have declined substantially since the mid-1990s — a period in which lone parenthood increased and inequality did not narrow. Whatever caused that fall, it is hard to square with a theory that predicts crime should have risen.

From an Interactionist perspective, Right Realism takes official statistics at face value and misses the extent to which they record police activity rather than criminal behaviour. If the police concentrate on poor areas, the statistics will show crime concentrated in poor areas, and the theory will appear to be confirmed by evidence it helped create.

From a Feminist perspective, the account is silent on gender. Rational choice cannot explain why the overwhelming majority of offenders are male, and Murray’s argument about absent fathers ends up blaming lone mothers for crimes committed by men.

Right Realism: Controlling Crime

Right Realists emphasise two techniques of crime control, and both follow directly from the theory of causes. If crime is a rational choice, then making crime harder and riskier should reduce it.

• Situational crime prevention focuses on specific places and objects — window locks, CCTV in a shop, a gate across an alleyway.
• Environmental crime prevention focuses on whole neighbourhoods — more police on the streets, a tougher line on minor offences.

Situational prevention is micro, environmental prevention is macro. The two overlap constantly and it is not worth losing sleep over the boundary.

Situational Crime Prevention

Situational crime prevention aims to reduce crime by reducing the opportunities to commit it and increasing the risk of getting caught. It is based directly on rational choice theory: change the calculation and you change the behaviour.

The two most common strategies are increasing surveillance and target hardening.

Increasing surveillance raises the perceived risk of being caught. The main method in Britain since the 1990s has been CCTV, supplemented by security guards, neighbourhood watch and — more recently — the doorbell cameras now attached to a large proportion of British front doors. Following Foucault, it does not much matter whether anyone is actually watching; people change their behaviour if they believe they might be watched.

Target hardening means making buildings harder to break into and objects harder to steal or damage. Door and window locks, lockable shutters, spiky railings and anti-climb paint all count, as do alley gates on the passages behind terraced houses. On objects, car alarms and immobilisers, property marking, and IMEI blocking for stolen phones all work the same way.

Situational prevention also includes designing out crime — reshaping a space so that offending becomes awkward. Felson (1998) gives the example of the Port Authority bus terminal in New York, whose layout offered ready opportunities for theft and drug dealing; redesigning the building substantially reduced crime there.

A more unusual example is the decline in suicide by gassing in Britain. In the early 1960s around half of all suicides involved coal gas, which is highly toxic. As coal gas was replaced by less toxic natural gas, suicides by gassing fell almost to nothing — and, crucially, the overall suicide rate fell too, rather than people simply switching methods. It is the clearest available evidence that removing a means can reduce an outcome rather than displacing it.

Environmental Crime Prevention and Zero Tolerance Policing

Environmental crime prevention changes the wider area rather than the individual target, increasing formal and informal social control to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and stop an area deteriorating. It relies much more heavily on the police than situational prevention does, and it follows directly from broken windows theory.

Examples include zero tolerance policing, ASBOs and the orders that replaced them, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders, and the three strikes rule in parts of the United States.

Zero tolerance policing means strictly enforcing penalties for minor offences and anti-social behaviour — begging, drug possession, public drinking, fare evasion. The best-known example is New York City, where the approach was adopted under Police Commissioner William Bratton from 1994, at a time when the city was in the grip of a crack cocaine epidemic. Specific measures included a ‘clean car program’ on the subway, under which any carriage found carrying graffiti was taken out of service until it was cleaned. Crime in the city fell sharply over the following years, and the New York example has been cited ever since by politicians who want to look tough on crime.

Whether zero tolerance caused that fall is the central argument, and it is covered properly in the evaluation of zero tolerance policing. The short version is that crime fell in American and British cities which never adopted zero tolerance, which makes it hard to credit the policy with the decline.

For the full account of environmental prevention, including ASBOs and the orders that replaced them, see Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies.

Evaluating Right Realist Solutions to Crime

Situational prevention works, within limits. Welsh and Farrington’s systematic review of CCTV schemes found a modest overall reduction in crime, with much larger effects in car parks than in town centres or public housing. That pattern is itself instructive: CCTV works best where the crime is property theft from a confined space and worst where the crime is violence between people who have been drinking.

These measures are cheap, quick and politically attractive. A council can install alley gates this year and report a result next year, which is a large part of why governments like them. They can also be implemented by almost anyone — councils, businesses, schools, householders — rather than requiring a national programme.

They avoid the labelling problem, because they change places rather than people. Nobody acquires a criminal record because a shop fitted shutters.

HOWEVER, the displacement objection is serious. If offenders are rational, making one target harder should push them towards an easier one, moving crime rather than reducing it. Displacement can be spatial, temporal, or across types of offence. The evidence suggests displacement is usually partial rather than total — but ‘usually partial’ is a long way from ‘eliminated’.

Garland (2001) argues that situational prevention represents a fundamental retreat. The state has effectively given up on the idea that it can reduce crime by addressing its causes, and now manages crime as a routine risk to be contained — like weather, or traffic. Inequality and deprivation are simply left out of the picture.

Bauman’s objection is about what these measures do to cities. Situational prevention creates ‘fortress cities’ in which the wealthy retreat behind gates, cameras and private security while the poor are left in unprotected streets outside. Security becomes a commodity, distributed according to ability to pay, and the effect is to entrench inequality rather than reduce crime.

They do not touch the crimes that do most harm. Target hardening is useless against domestic violence, which happens inside the home, and against corporate and state crime, where the offenders are precisely the people with the power to resist surveillance of their own activities.

Environmental prevention is more expensive and more divisive. Zero tolerance requires a lot of officers and, from an Interactionist perspective, giving the police more power to act against minor offences simply produces more labelling and more criminal careers. Reiner has argued that police would be better deployed against serious crime hot spots than clamping down on nuisance behaviour.

And it falls unequally. Zero tolerance in New York produced a large increase in arrests for cannabis possession, with consequences for employment and housing that far exceeded the seriousness of the offence, and the great majority of those dealt with were Black or Hispanic. A policy which is racially neutral in its wording can be very far from neutral in its effects.

Right Realism — evaluation summary
Supporting	Criticising
✓ Rational choice is supported by the fall in car crime following better vehicle security (Newburn 2013)	✗ Only explains opportunistic street crime; silent on corporate, state and domestic crime
✓ Situational prevention is cheap, fast and can be implemented by anyone	✗ Displacement — crime may move rather than fall
✓ Takes victims and public fear of crime seriously	✗ Ignores inequality and deprivation as causes (Garland 2001)
✓ Avoids labelling by targeting places, not people	✗ Creates divided ‘fortress cities’ (Bauman)
✓ Broken windows has some experimental support	✗ Ignores the thrill of risk as a motive (Lyng 1990)
✓ Recognises that weak informal social control matters	✗ Murray’s underclass theory is ideological and poorly evidenced
	✗ Crime has fallen for thirty years while the supposed causes worsened
	✗ Zero tolerance falls disproportionately on ethnic minorities
	✗ Takes official statistics at face value (Interactionism)
	✗ Cannot explain why most offenders are male (Feminism)

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).

Right Realism is usually taught immediately before Left Realist Criminology, which shares the realist starting point and reaches very different conclusions about both causes and solutions.

For the crime control strategies covered above in much more depth, along with social and community prevention and the perspectives that reject the realist approach altogether, see Crime Prevention and Control Strategies.

The two theories above have their own dedicated posts: Broken Windows Theory: An Evaluation and Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory.

For how right and left realists differ on the role of the police specifically, see The Role of the Police in Controlling and Reducing Crime.

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Appendix: Situational Crime Prevention — a fuller list of techniques

Retained from the original post. Useful for essay examples.

Increasing the effort needed to commit crime

• Target hardening — defending objects with shields, locks and other devices
• Access control — making it difficult to approach targets
• Deflecting offenders — graffiti boards, litter bins, channelling behaviour into legitimate forms
• Controlling facilitators — age checks on the sale of vapes, alcohol and knives

Increasing the risk of offending

• Screening people — stop and search, bag checks, border controls
• Formal surveillance by police
• Employee surveillance — train guards, shop staff
• Natural surveillance — lowering hedges, improving street lighting, CCTV

Reducing the rewards

• Target removal
• Cards rather than cash, so there is less cash to steal
• Rapid removal of graffiti, so vandalism achieves nothing
• Property identification and marking
• Clear rule setting, as with tax regulations