Willem Adriaan Bonger[edit]
Dutch criminologist, Willem Bonger, who believed in a causal link between crime and economic and social conditions. He asserted that crime is social in origin and a normal response to prevailing cultural conditions. In more primitive societies, he contended that survival requires more selfless altruism within the community. But once agricultural technology improved and a surplus of food was generated, systems of exchange and barter began offering the opportunity for selfishness. As capitalism emerged, there were social forces of competition and wealth, resulting in an unequal distribution of resources, avarice and individualism. Once self-interest and more egoistic impulses assert themselves, crime emerges. The poor would commit crime out of need or out of a sense of injustice. Hence, those with power exercise control and impose punishment, equating the definition of crime with harm or threat of harm to the property and business interests of the powerful. Although the inherent activities comprising, say, a theft, may be identical, theft by the poor will be given greater emphasis than theft by the rich. This will have two consequences: direct which will increase the pressure for survival in an unequal society, and indirect in that it will increase a sense of alienation among the poor. Crime in the streets was a result of the miserable conditions in which workers lived in competition with one another. He believed that poverty alone could not be a cause of crime but rather poverty coupled with individualism, materialism, false needs, racism, and the false masculinity of violence and domination among street thugs.