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The following is a excerpt from one of my graduate research papers on criminological theory. I have included the references but have eliminated the footnotes to preclude anyone from submitting the paper in a college class.

Social structural theories attempt to explain why people commit crimes as related to the social structure of society. They are macro theories that address the broader questions about differences across societies or among major groups in a society. Social structural theories involve factors that can affect the individual but are beyond the control of the individual to change. They attempt to relate the "extent and distribution of crime" and "Why do they do it?" to the social structure. Social structural theories do not simply try to locate individuals above or below one another in the social structure; they try to locate individuals in terms of their relationship to one another within the structure.

Social structural theorists do not agree over the causes of crime. Some believe crime can be linked to subcultures of crime, while others doubt even the existence of subcultures. Some feel crime is linked to social forces that can be changed through reform, while others, such as Marxist supporters, feel crime is linked to oppression in capitalist societies, which cannot be changed except through revolution.

Although Marx did not write specifically about criminal behavior, he was concerned with how social structure affected behavior. He felt that a capitalist two-class social structure, consisting of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and the working class (the proletariat), permitted the bourgeoisie to control and oppress the proletariat and thus affect their behavior. Marx felt the only way this oppression could change would be for the proletariat to revolt against the bourgeoisie. Bonger later applied Marx’s theory to criminal behavior by hypothesizing that the capitalistic social structure induces and encourages greed and selfishness, which then leads to criminal behavior. Marxist supporters fall into two major groups. The first group is the instrumentalists, who view the political state as only and always an instrument of the capitalist state. The second group is the structuralists, who see the view the political state as having some "relative autonomy" and not totally under the domination of the ruling elite.

Colvin and Pauly attempted to link structural-Marxism and behavior by postulating that workplace control structures affect the family control structure according to the parents’ locations within the workplace control structure. They found that parents controlled their children in the same ways they were being controlled at their jobs, but the researchers could not make the link between class and behavior.

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