], Whereas The Crime Of Assault May Be A One Off Case, And Thus Have No Real

], whereas the crime of assault may be a one off case, and thus have no real structure to it. Left-realism encourages analysis of the internal nature of these structures and the relationships involved, as well as their mere shape: for example, every step of the pyramid of drug use is consensual, whereas, with the crime of assault relationships are purely coercive.
As regards to the trajectory of crime through time, a left-realist approach breaks this down into six component parts, the first is the background cause of crime, the second relates to the moral context of opting for criminal behaviour, the third relates to the situation in which a crime is committed, the fourth regards the detection of crime, the fifth looks at the response to the offender and the sixth the response to the victim [Young 1995, p106].
In conclusion, I must reiterate that the reason that so little success has been seen in the reduction of crime, despite the large volume of writing and criminological debate, is because in the past, criminology tended to be separated into various different schools of thought, each unwilling to entertain the strengths of their rivals theories. As a result, penal policy would choose the most popular paradigm at any one time and base its crime-reducing initiatives upon one theory alone. The results of this can be devastating, as we have seen through my historical analysis of the period 1951- 1971. I can conclude however that the dark ages of criminology may be over. Left realism as an approach has encouraged synthesis of ideas and theories, and encouraged deeper analysis of all the processes and aspects involved in the process of crime. Such an approach is a worthy one, and it may well lead to real advances in our understanding of the true causes of crime. Possibly someone answering this same essay question in 50 years time might be able to conclude that the presumption in the question is wrong; the various criminological writings and debate have lead to a reduction in crime.
References:
Wilson, J. Q. (1975), Thinking about Crime. New York Vintage Books. 2nd Ed. 3-4
Box, S. (1980), Where Have all the Naughty Children Gone?, in National Deviancy Conference, ed., Permissiveness and Control. London: Sage Publishing 116-117
Fyvel, T.R. (1963), The Insecure Offenders. London: Penguin. 17
Young, J. (1995), Recent Paradigms in Criminology. Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, Robert Reiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Skolnick, J. and Bayley, D. (1986), The New Blue Line. New York: Free Press 5-6
Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984), What is to be Done about Law and Order? London: Penguin
Currie, E. (1985), Confronting Crime. New York: Pantheon.
Lea, J. (1992), Left-Realism: A Framework for the Analysis of Crime, in J. Young and R. Matthews, eds., Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate.