Sociology & Criminology for a Changing World
Marxist Criminology represents a critical approach that views crime and criminal justice as products of social inequality and class conflict. Building on Marxist social theory, these perspectives argue that law and punishment serve the interests of the dominant class by maintaining existing power structures and controlling marginalized groups. Rather than seeing crime as the result
Robert K. Merton’s Anomie Theory expands Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie by linking deviant behavior to structural inequalities in access to culturally approved goals. First systematically developed in Social Structure and Anomie (1938/1949), the theory explains crime as a socially structured adaptation to blocked opportunities rather than individual pathology. Merton argues that when culturally valued