Does illegality become natural? Systemic and preventive effects of the market economy

Generally speaking, criminological literature views the market economy as a driving force behind profit-driven crime with titles such as Crime as an American Way of Life (Bell, 1953) and Crime and the American Dream (Messner and Rosenfeld, 2007). Basically, US-American capitalism is taken as a critical example of a culture of rigid competition conveying the values of social Darwinism in which solidarity and consideration for others are alien concepts (Currie, 1997; Hagan et al., 2000). Although there is much justification for this criticism of the dominance of the economic system, particularly by the institutional anomie theory of Messner and Rosenfeld (2007), it fails to differentiate between not only driving but also preventive effects of the market economy.