03 Section B Option 1, Key question 3 - Right realism and the New Right (part 7)

Two related approaches to crime

Right realism and the New Right overlap in their emphasis on responsibility and control, but they are not interchangeable theories.

Right realism treats crime as a real problem causing harm and fear, and gives priority to practical ways of reducing it. It focuses on offenders' choices, opportunities and the controls surrounding particular acts. A society need not eliminate every inequality before it can prevent a burglary. However, explaining why a particular house was targeted is different from explaining why some people become persistent offenders in the first place.

The New Right is a broader political outlook combining support for markets and individual responsibility with conservative concerns about authority, family life and social order. Its crime arguments often concern the long-term production of offending: how children learn rules, how adults acquire responsibilities and whether welfare arrangements encourage or weaken self-reliance. Particular writers differ; a theory about theft opportunities does not by itself establish a claim about welfare.

Consider an original teaching example: fitting a better lock reduces theft from a bicycle store. This is consistent with opportunity reduction because the theft becomes harder. It does not show that the previous offenders lacked a father, claimed benefits or belonged to a particular class. Those are different claims requiring different evidence. Keeping the claims separate prevents a successful prevention measure from being treated as proof of an entire political outlook.

Choices, opportunities and perceived costs

Rational choice explains offending through the benefits and costs that an offender perceives in a particular situation.

In the perspective developed by Derek Cornish and Ronald Clarke, an offence is a purposive act: someone expects to gain something. The gain might be money, excitement or approval. Costs may include effort, injury, discovery, legal punishment and damage to valued relationships. Bounded rationality means that decisions use limited knowledge, time and attention; an offender need not carefully calculate every consequence. Clarke's own account of the perspective distinguishes immediate opportunities from more distant causes of motivation. Felson and Clarke's 1998 Home Office paper, especially pp. 7–8, explains why even a hurried decision can respond to features of a target.

An original example makes the mechanism clearer. A person considers stealing a phone displayed near a shop exit. Its resale value is a perceived reward; an unattended display makes taking it seem easy. A member of staff moving beside the display increases the perceived risk of discovery. The same person might reject the theft if a friend whose respect they value is watching. The shop worker supplies guardianship, while anticipated disapproval supplies informal control. Neither requires the person's motivation to disappear.

Guardianship means the presence of someone or something capable of protecting a target, such as an attentive owner or effective access controls. Opportunity is therefore more than the physical existence of a valuable object: accessibility, observation and the offender's ability matter too. Different crimes involve different decisions. Choosing a vulnerable phone display is not the same process as organising a complex fraud.

The approach helps explain variation between places and occasions, including why similar people can behave differently in different settings. Its limit is that identifying a low-risk opportunity does not fully explain why one person exploits it while another refuses. Anger, coercion, addiction, learned commitments and unequal access to legitimate rewards may need additional explanation. These limits do not make opportunity irrelevant; they prevent it becoming a complete explanation by assertion.

Family, welfare and the underclass argument

New Right accounts connect offending to socialisation and incentives rather than treating poverty alone as its cause.

In Charles Murray's British underclass argument, published in 1990 and reprinted in the 1996 debate collection, an underclass is defined through patterns of behaviour, not simply low income. He links crime, withdrawal from paid work and births outside marriage. His proposed mechanism is that welfare support can weaken incentives to work or marry, while an absence of stable paternal role models and authority weakens boys' socialisation into responsibility. Patterns can then be reproduced across generations. This is a contested explanation, not an established description of benefit recipients or lone-parent families.

The argument combines two claims that need separate testing. An incentive claim concerns whether changing rewards and costs alters behaviour. A socialisation claim concerns whether children learn expectations and self-restraint through family relationships. Supporting an incentive claim does not automatically establish that a particular family structure produces crime. Murray's discussion draws on social trends and observations rather than randomly assigning families to welfare arrangements; those observations alone cannot isolate the proposed causes.

For example, neighbourhoods with high unemployment might also contain more family disruption and recorded offending. A connection between these measures could arise because insecure employment and poverty put pressure on households and restrict young people's opportunities. It could also reflect differences in policing. Correlation means that measures vary together; it does not determine which caused which, or exclude a shared cause. The quality of care, supervision and relationships must be distinguished from the number or marital status of parents. A child can receive committed supervision from a lone parent or wider family.

There is evidence against treating welfare dependence as proof of transmitted anti-work values. Shildrick and colleagues (2012) used life-history interviews with two generations in 20 families affected by long-term worklessness in deprived areas of Glasgow and Middlesbrough. They found commitment to work rather than an inherited culture rejecting it, alongside barriers including ill-health and limited opportunities. This original research challenges a key cultural mechanism. Its purposive, small sample cannot estimate the national prevalence of attitudes, and it was not an experiment establishing the effect of benefits on crime. It therefore weakens a sweeping explanation without proving that family processes or incentives never matter.

Broken windows and the evidence for disorder

Broken-windows reasoning proposes that unattended disorder can weaken local control and create conditions in which further offending becomes easier.

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's (1982) original article uses an unrepaired broken window to represent a signal that nobody will intervene. The proposed sequence runs from visible disorder to fear and withdrawal by residents, weaker everyday supervision and greater opportunities for offenders. Repair and order maintenance might interrupt this process. The argument concerns social responses to neglect; broken glass does not mechanically produce a serious offender.

The article discusses the Newark foot-patrol evaluation. It reports that foot patrol did not reduce measured crime rates, although residents felt safer and reported more favourable views of police. Distinguishing the outcomes matters: reduced fear is valuable, but it is not evidence that serious crime fell. The original argument about maintaining neighbourhood order is also broader than a demand to arrest everyone for every minor infraction.