ABSTRACT
RACE, GENDER AND CLASS: TRANSFORMING RADICAL CRIMINOLOGY
Over the past several years there has been tremendous growth in the styles of thinking employed by radical or critical criminologists1• During its formative years (late 1960s-1970s) radical criminology was most closely associated with class analysis and the work of Karl Marx (for overview see Lynch and Groves, 1989; Lynch, 1993a). And to be sure, class models were extremely important to the development of contemporary critical criminology. Early radical analyses of crime and justice used a class model to: expose the connections between power and privilege (Krisberg, 1975); critique traditional criminological perspectives (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1972, 1970); pinpoint the causes of lower class crime (Gordon, 1971); and to expose class biases in law (Chambliss and Seidman, 1971; Tigar, 1971; Barak, 1974), including biases in the process of defining and labelling crime (Quinney, 1970), the enforcement of law (Quinney, 1974), and the penal process (Wright, 1973). Over the next decade, this view was expanded to include corporate crime (Reiman, 1979), state sponsored terrorism (Petras, 1987), the state as criminal (Frappier, 1985), and quantitative assessments of radical theory (Greenberg, 1977; Lynch, 1988).
