The Underclass Theory of Crime

An American Sociologist Charles Murray (1989) first coined the term ‘the underclass’ to refer to that group of people in America who were long term unemployed and effectively welfare dependent.

the underclass

In the late 1980s he argued that the first generation of underclass were then having children and socialising the next generation of children into a culture of worklessness, thus creating a potential problem for US society because of this group being essentially cut off from ordinary social life and are not constrained by ordinary norms and values like ordinary working people. At that time, Murray looked across to Britain and warned us that in 20 years time we would be facing a similar problem….

The Underlcass in the United Kingdom

Three decades after Charles Murray coined the term ‘Underclass’ both national and local government departments in the UK were monitoring NEETS – a term which described 16-24 year old Not in Education or Training (NEETS).

For example by 2009 there were a series of government reports literally entitled NEET statistics quarterly briefs.

One study by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in the late 2000s estimated that each new NEET dropping out of education at 16 will cost taxpayers an average of £97,000 during their lifetime, with the worst costing more than £300,000 apiece….

Their impact on crime, public health and antisocial behaviour was so marked that the study found that a single 157,000-strong cohort of 16 to 18-year-old NEETS would cost the country a total of £15 billion by the time they died prematurely in about 2060. They are, says the study, 22 times more likely to be teenage mothers; 50% more likely to suffer from poor health; 60% more likely to be involved with drugs and more than 20 times more likely to become criminals.

[In response to these figures Charles Murray commented…]

“When I was looking at Britain in the 1980s, the offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were small children,” said Murray, speaking from his home in America. “Now they are teenagers and young adults and the problems are exactly those that I was warning they would be — high crime rates and low participation in the labour force.

These people have never been socialised and they simply don’t know how to behave, from sitting still in classrooms to knowing you don’t hit people if you have a problem. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to take these people now and provide basic conditioning. There has always been a small underclass but now you have got a major problem, who are being called the NEETs.”

Media Reaction to NEETS

NEETs were classic moral panic material…

The media gleefully jumped on these government reports with this 2012 Daily Mail article delighting in reporting on the fact that there were almost one million NEETs in the country, and that they were ‘a lost generation’.

One of the responses to the moral panic over NEETs was the Troubled Families Programme.

Criticisms of the Underclass Theory of Crime

The main problem with the theory is that growing youth unemployment isn’t in anyway correlated with the crime rate…

Youth unemployment trends

Youth unemployment.

Crime trends

Crime trends

Crime has been going down since 1995, but the ‘NEET’ phenomenon only started in the mid 2000s.

This study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also criticises the idea that there are cultures of worklessness which are passed down the generations.

Related Posts

This material is mainly relevant to the sociology of crime and deviance.

Related posts include…

The Functionalist Perspective on Crime and Deviance

Hirschi’s Social Control Theory of Crime

Robert Merton’s Strain Theory