Social Class In Society

Social class is a group of people with similar levels of wealth, influence, and status. There are five common social classes recognized in many societies which are the upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, working class, and lower class. The upper class represents heads of multinational corporations and capitalist elite such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Michael Eisner of Disney. Besides, the upper-middle class people are highly educated and has professional careers with sky-high incomes such as doctors, lawyers and midsized business owners. Next, the middle class is often made up of less educated people and they work as small business owners, teachers, and secretaries. The working class are those minimally educated people whose

Basically, lower class teenagers are just as likely as their upper class peers to engage in victimless deviant acts such as drug use, drunkenness and truancy. However the lower class adults with lower income more likely than those upper class with higher incomes to have mental disorder and commit street crimes such as robbery, assault, or theft. The poor are more prone to mental disorder because their lives more stressful. Most of them are unemployment and have more family problems. As an evidence, a study was conducted by Robert E. L. Faris and H. Warren Dunham, who examined the distribution of persons admitted to mental hospitals in Chicago from 1922 to 1934. They found that rates of hospital admission for psychosis were highest for people who resided in the area of lowest economic status. Next, the effects of poverty and strain theory make lower class people committed street crimes as a way to improve living

Corporate crimes are committed by company officials without the overt use of force, and their effect on the victims is not readily traceable to the offender. If a miner dies from a lung disease, it is difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he died because the employer violated mine safety regulations. Compared with street crime, corporate crime is more rationally executed, more profitable, and less detectable by law enforcers. Even when corporate crimes that caused the death of many workers or customers, corporate offenders have never been sentenced to death, though numerous lower class criminals have been put to death for killing only one person. Examples include 130 people died in underground coal mines between 2007 and 2011, hundreds more died from “black lung” disease caused by years of inhaling coal dust, and the poisoning of thousands of Indians at Bhopal. This is because all the companies involved had put profit before safety. Now, we will look at how conflict theorists regard social inequalities as the cause of deviance. Conflict theorists believe that deviant labels are applied to people who interfere with the operation of capitalism. The legal authorities are favouring the rich over the poor and consequently creating more criminals among the latter. For example, the poor who steal from the rich are prime candidates for being labelled deviant