SOURCE: “Poverty, Crime and Politics: Engels and the Crime Question,” in The Condition of Britain: Essays on Frederick Engels, edited by John Lea and Geoff Pilling, Pluto Press, 1996, pp. 84-109.

In the following essay, Lea summarizes Engels' treatment of crime in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and discusses the relevance of the essay to modern issues.

The present period is an appropriate one in which to reread Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England. The demolition of the welfare state under conditions of high global unemployment and dramatic increases in poverty would have been thought impossible 20 years ago. Capitalism appears, in this and other respects, to be moving backwards, closer to the world described by Engels in 1844 rather than away from it. Of course there is a wealth of literature and social science research studying and documenting these conditions and proposing various...