Critical criminology examines the genesis of crime and the nature of justice in relation to power, privilege, and social status.
The gap between what these two paradigms suggest is of legitimate criminological interest, It is stated by Stephen Box in his book Power, Crime, and Mystification where he asserts that one is seven times more likely (or was in 1983) to be killed as a result of negligence by one's employer, than one was to be murdered in the conventional sense (when all demographic weighting had been taken into account).
Others are of the belief that such 'interests', particularly symbolic dimensions such as status are epiphenomenological by-products of more fundamental economic conflict (Taylor, Walton & Young 1973; Quinney 1974, for example).
For these theorists, societal conflict from which crime emerges is founded on the fundamental economic inequalities that are inherent in the processes of capitalism (see, for example, Wikipedia article on Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, a book that provides a seminal exposition of Marxian analysis applied to the problem of crime and punishment).
There are two main strands of critical criminological theory following from Marx, divided by differing conceptions of the role of the state in maintenance of capitalist inequalities.
On the other, structuralist Marxists believe that the state plays a more dominant, semi-autonomous role in subjugating those in the (relatively) powerless classes (Sheley 1985; Lynch & Groves 1986).
Instrumental Marxists such as Quinney (1975), Chambliss (1975), or Krisberg (1975) are of the belief that capitalist societies are monolithic edifices of inequality, utterly dominated by powerful economic interests.
Whereas Marxists have conventionally believed in the replacement of capitalism with socialism in a process that will eventually lead to communism, anarchists are of the view that any hierarchical system is inevitably flawed.
In a move diametrically opposed to that of anarchist theorists, Left Realists wish to distance themselves from any conception of the criminal as heroic social warrior.
Even left realists who have been criticised for being 'conservative' (not least by Cohen 1990), see the victim and the offender as being subject to systems of injustice and deprivation from which victimising behaviour emerges.
These early criminologies were called into question by the introduction of mass self-report victim surveys (Hough & Mayhew 1983) that showed that victimisation was intra-class rather than inter-class.
Such ends are sought through engagement with existing structures such as governments and legal frameworks, rather than by challenging modes of gender construction or hegemonic patriarchy (Hoffman Bustamante 1973, Adler 1975, Simon 1975, Edwards 1990).
Radical feminists see the roots of female oppression in patriarchy, perceiving its perpetrators as primarily aggressive in both private and public spheres, violently dominating women by control of their sexuality through pornography, rape (Brownmiller 1975), and other forms of sexual violence, thus imposing upon them masculine definitions of womanhood and women's roles, particularly in the family.
Marxist feminists, (Rafter & Natalizia 1981, MacKinnon 1982 & 1983) however, hold that such patriarchal structures are emergent from the class producing inequalities inherent in capitalist means of production.
Socialist feminists attempt to steer a path between the radical and the Marxist views, identifying capitalist patriarchy as the source of women's oppression (Danner 1991).
Such theorists (Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1979 & 1981, Messerschmidt 1986, Currie 1989) accept that a patriarchal society constrains women's roles and their view of themselves but that this patriarchy is the result not of male aggression but of the mode of capitalist production.
Socialist feminists believe that gender based oppression can only be overcome by creating a non-patriarchal, non-capitalist society, and that attempting merely to modify the status quo from within perpetuates the very system that generates inequalities.
That is, the differences between men and women are not by and large biological (essentialism) but are insociated from an early age and are defined by existing patriarchal categories of womanhood.
Among Carlen's criticisms is that of an apparent inability of feminist criminology to reconcile theoretical insight with political reality, exhibiting a "theoreticist, libertarian, separatist and gender-centric tendenc[y]".
This separatism, claims Carlen, further manifests itself in a refusal to accept developments in mainstream criminology branding them 'malestream' or in other pejorative terms.
Postmodernists shift attention from Marxist concerns of economic and social oppression to linguistic production, arguing that criminal law is a language to create dominance relationships.