ReviseSociology

Tag: underclass

  • Media representations of benefits claimants

    In this post I summarize some recent sociological research which suggests newspapers and ‘reality T.V. shows represent benefits claimants in a limited range of stereotypical ways, focusing on them as lazy, undeserving scroungers engaged in immoral, wreckless and criminal behaviour. A lot of the research below also reminds us that media representations in no way…

  • The Troubled Families Programme

    The Troubled Families Programme is a good example of a New Right social policy aimed at tackling criminality by targeting the so called underclass, it basically involves local authority workers intervening in so called troubled families in order to get them to take responsibility for their behaviour. Following the riots in 2011, a new government initiative,…

  • The Long History of the ‘Underclass’ Thesis

    Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory – the idea that there is a ‘hardcore’ of a few hundred thousand families and individuals who are welfare-dependent and responsible a disproportionate amount of crime in society has a long history: In Victorian times there was a concern about a ‘social residuum’, and shortly afterwards it was ‘unemployables’ who were…

  • Social Class and Crime

    Prison statistics suggest the lower class commit more crime, which consensus theorists and right realists accept, but Marxists believe the crimes of the elite are hidden and yet more harmful.

  • 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. 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…