Last Updated on September 7, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Taylor, Walton and Young’s The New Criminology (1973) is the founding text of radical criminology in Britain. Its argument can be summarised in four points:
- Crime is a political act, not a symptom of maladjustment — offenders make choices and those choices have meaning.
- Existing criminology was too deterministic — biological, positivist, Marxist and labelling approaches all treated the offender as something acted upon rather than acting.
- A full explanation needs seven levels at once — the fully social theory of deviance.
- The goal of criminology is political — a society in which people are no longer criminalised for difference.
This is usually taught within the crime and deviance module and appears on AQA Paper 3 (7192/3). It comes after the traditional Marxist theory of crime, which it is partly a revolt against, and before left realism, which is partly a revolt against it.
A note on the names. Radical criminology, critical criminology, the New Criminology and neo-Marxist criminology all refer to broadly the same body of work from the late 1960s and 1970s. The New Criminology is the specific book; the other terms describe the wider movement. In an A-level answer, use “the New Criminology” for Taylor, Walton and Young and “critical criminology” for the tradition that followed.
Where radical criminology came from
The radical criminologies of the late 1960s and 1970s drew on Marxism, libertarianism, anarchism and American radical populism, and they shared a common target: the assumption that criminology’s job was to help the state manage offenders.
They insisted instead that crime control must be understood in terms of power, politics and inequality, and that criminology should be an activity with political consequences rather than a service industry for the Home Office.
Three claims are common to the whole movement:
Crime control is itself a form of power. Steven Box (1983) argued that law, enforcement and stereotyping work together to preserve unequal class relations, and that a great deal of criminology’s function is to mystify — to make the resulting pattern of punishment look natural. Chambliss and Mankoff (1976) made a related argument about the law itself.
Most ordinary offending is less harmful than what is legal. Exploitation at work, alienation, racism and pollution do more damage than most of what appears in the crime statistics, and none of them are crimes.
Much working-class crime can be read as a form of redistribution. Not organised political resistance, but a rough and inarticulate response to inequality — which is a claim the movement’s critics went after hard, and rightly.
This is the argument students most often get muddled. Radical criminologists were not saying that burglars are revolutionaries. They were saying that we cannot understand burglary without understanding the economic conditions that produce burglars, and that a criminology which ignores those conditions is doing political work whether it admits it or not.
The New Criminology (1973)
In 1973 Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young published The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. It combined Marxist attention to economic structure with interactionist attention to meaning and labelling, and it argued that criminologists had been asking too small a question.
Rather than “what makes this person offend”, they argued we should ask about the whole situation: how capitalism generates the circumstances in which the act becomes thinkable, how the offender understands what they are doing, how the police, the media and the courts respond, and how the offender then responds to being labelled.
Where it agreed with Marxism
- The material basis of society is the key to understanding crime — the economy is the most important part of the structure.
- Capitalist societies are unequal, and those inequalities are the root of crime.
- A theory of crime that offers no prospect of liberation is not worth having.
Where it broke with Marxism
- Marx was too economically deterministic. Taylor, Walton and Young insisted that criminals choose to break the law. External forces do not simply determine human behaviour.
- They rejected most causal theories outright. Biological, positivist, control and labelling theories were all treated as too determinist. Crimes were deliberate, conscious acts, often with political meaning.
- Deviants are not passive victims of capitalism. They are agents.
- They wanted a diverse society, not a uniform one. They envisaged a society in which hippies, gay people and drug users would not be criminalised for being different.
That last point is worth pausing on, because it dates the book in an instructive way. In 1973 male homosexuality had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales for six years and remained a criminal offence in Scotland. The claim that the law creates deviance rather than responding to it was not abstract.
The fully social theory of deviance
This is the part of the theory that comes up most in exams, and it is the reason the New Criminology is treated as a synthesis rather than just another Marxist account. Taylor, Walton and Young argued that a complete explanation of any deviant act has to work at seven levels at once:
- The wider origins of the deviant act — how wealth and power are distributed, the workings of the criminogenic capitalist system, and the role of the state in marginalising particular groups.
- The immediate origins of the act — the particular circumstances in which this person came to this decision.
- The act itself — what the individual actually did, and what it meant to them.
- The immediate origins of the social reaction — how family, friends, neighbours and the police responded, including the media’s power to create folk devils.
- The wider origins of the social reaction — why society reacted that way, who has the power to make rules, and why some deviant acts are punished more severely than others.
- The effects of labelling — how the criminalised person responds to being labelled.
- All six together, as a connected whole rather than as separate factors.
The seventh level is the point of the exercise. Any of the first six taken alone gives you an existing theory — level one is Marxism, level three is phenomenology, levels four to six are labelling theory. The claim is that a genuine explanation has to hold all of them simultaneously.
HOWEVER, no study has ever managed all seven. The closest attempt is Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis (1978), which applied the framework to the moral panic over mugging — and even that concentrates on levels one, four and five. That is either a criticism of the theory or an indication of how demanding a properly social explanation is, depending on your view.
Criticisms of radical criminology
Radical criminology has been criticised from every direction, including by its own authors — which is unusual and worth saying in an essay.
It romanticises offenders. The best-known criticism, and the hardest to answer. Most offenders are not engaged in political struggle against their oppressors. They are, in the phrase that has stuck, just thugs.
Victim surveys destroyed the class-struggle reading. The local victim surveys of the late 1970s and 1980s showed that crime is overwhelmingly intra-class, not inter-class — working-class people are victimised by other working-class people. That is difficult to square with any account of crime as a strike against the elite, and it is the finding that pushed Jock Young himself towards left realism.
It ignores victims. Left realists argue that critical criminology became so absorbed in the crimes of the powerful that it lost interest in the people who actually suffer most from ordinary crime — the poor, the young and the marginalised.
It ignores women. The New Criminology has almost nothing to say about domestic violence, sexual violence or the victimisation of women, which cut across class and occur in every kind of society. Feminist criminology took this up in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is the criticism the original authors later conceded most readily.
It offers no practical solution. If capitalism and the state are the problem, revolution is the only answer. Meanwhile there are burglaries to investigate. This is a criticism of the whole tradition, not just of one book.
It was too idealistic. The vision of a society in which nobody is criminalised for difference rests on an idealised picture of a free future. Not all capitalist societies are the same, and socialist states have been capable of severe repression.
It didn’t survive institutionally. Radical criminology attracted very little research funding — governments do not commission research arguing that government is the problem — and several departments closed. That is a political fact about the discipline rather than a flaw in the theory, but it explains why the movement produced fewer empirical studies than its ambitions required.
Evaluation summary
| Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|
| Restores agency — offenders make choices, they are not simply pushed by economic forces | No study has ever applied all seven levels; the framework may be unusable in practice |
| The fully social theory is a genuine synthesis of structure, meaning, reaction and labelling | Romanticises offenders as rebels when most are not |
| Extended the definition of crime to include the harms done by the powerful | Victim surveys show crime is intra-class, undermining the class-struggle reading |
| Opposed correctionalism and argued for tolerance of difference, which shaped later law reform | Almost silent on the victimisation of women |
| Its critical legacy runs through feminist criminology, left realism, green criminology and postmodern criminology | Offers no practical solution short of revolution |
The legacy
Looking back in the late 1990s, the authors accepted a good deal of this, particularly the feminist criticism. In their own defence they pointed to what the movement stood against: correctionalism, the assumption that the job of criminology is to eliminate deviant behaviour rather than to ask why particular behaviours get defined as deviant in the first place. The New Criminology argued for tolerance instead, and on that measure it won.
Its critical legacy is substantial and worth knowing for the higher mark bands. Left realism came directly out of it — Jock Young was one of its authors and became its most prominent critic. Feminist criminology, green criminology, cultural criminology and postmodern and late modern criminology all trace back to the same starting point: the refusal to accept the state’s definition of crime as the beginning of the inquiry.
A fortieth anniversary edition was published in 2013 with a new introduction, which is a fair indication that the book is still being argued with rather than merely cited.
Exam application
Radical criminology is not usually a question on its own. It comes up in three ways:
As the neo-Marxist half of a Marxism essay. In a 30-mark question on Marxist explanations of crime, the New Criminology is what you use to answer the “too deterministic” criticism of traditional Marxism. That is worth analysis marks, because you are using a development within a perspective to defend it.
As a stage in a “theories of crime” narrative. Traditional Marxism → New Criminology → left realism is a sequence, and each stage is a response to a weakness in the one before. Examiners reward students who can show that movement rather than listing perspectives.
As evaluation of labelling theory. The fully social theory’s criticism of labelling — that it explains reaction without explaining origins — is a strong evaluative point in an interactionism question.
Do not write that the New Criminology says criminals are political rebels and stop there. It is the single most common error on this topic and it loses the analysis marks the theory is there to earn.
References
Box, S. (1983) Power, Crime and Mystification. London: Tavistock.
Chambliss, W. J. and Mankoff, M. (eds.) (1976) Whose Law? What Order? A Conflict Approach to Criminology. New York: Wiley.
Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fortieth anniversary edition, Routledge, 2013.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).
Read the Marxist theory of crime first — the New Criminology is a response to it, and the argument makes little sense without the traditional version.
The single most important application of this theory is Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis, which used the fully social theory to explain the moral panic over mugging in the 1970s.
For the concept of moral panic itself, including Cohen’s original study of the mods and rockers, see moral panics.
Students usually study left realism and right realism next, both of which are reactions against this perspective.
More on Marxism across the specification is on the Marxist theory hub.
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