A new hypothesis in criminal justice is that an individual's involvement in criminal enterprise is not a result of unemployment (or underemployment) but, rather, that the time spent involved in perpetrating crimes prevents the person from seeking gainful employment. However, the overwhelming abundance of research directed at crime and unemployment views the issue from the starting points of poverty, education, and unemployment as the causatives. Thus, this research examines the issue of crime and unemployment from the conventional perspective which dominates the literature of past and present research.
Sociological criminology is undergoing a theoretical transformation that is energized in part by the new ethnographies of poverty and crime. This transformation involves a new appreciation of connections between cultural and structural sources of crime, studied through the life course and across communities. It frees criminology from a restrictive dependence on an aging group of classical theories and ties the study of crime more closely to broader currents in contemporary sociology (327).
In this opening paragraph, Hagan marks the emergence of a new way of investigating the relationships which exist between education, poverty, unemployment, and crime . . . particularly by employing ethnographies to study "crime comparatively in community settings across the time and space of recent American history. [Such ethnographies] reveal the consequences of a period of structural and cultural disinvestment in the lives of visible minority youth" (327).
More recently, Baron and Hartnagel wrote the following:
Advanced capitalist societies are undergoing structural transformations in their economies and labor markets that produce growth in nonstandard employment (including part-time, part-year, and temporary work) and an increasingly segmented labor market with many poor-paying jobs in a lower tier service sector. Struct...