Franklin Saint, the protagonist of Snowfall, is everything society claims to admire: intelligent, disciplined, ambitious, with a capacity for calculation that in another context would have made him an executive or an economist. The problem is the context: the South Los Angeles of the eighties, a Black neighborhood without legitimate social elevators, where the only business that promises the wealth television sells him is crack. Franklin chooses that ladder, and in a few seasons he goes from courier to king of a network that floods with drugs the very streets where he grew up. For left realism, Franklin is a textbook case: the street offender whose causes are social and whose victim, nonetheless, is real and lives two blocks from his home.
// The theoryRelative deprivation and the intra-class victim
The left realism of Jock Young and John Lea explains the offender with two ideas, and both fit Franklin like a glove. The first is relative deprivation: it is not hunger that drives him, but the gap between what the United States promises him —success, the car, status— and the real avenues it offers, which are none. Franklin is not a desperate poor man; he is a frustrated ambitious one, and that frustration is more explosive. The second is subculture: the drug trade gives him a mold, a career, an identity of alternative status where his talent finally «counts». But left realism adds what idealism forgot: this explanation does not erase the victim. Franklin's crack does not fall on the bankers of Beverly Hills; it falls on his own Black community —the addicts on the corner, the broken families, the children he will recruit—. The crime is intra-class: the brilliant poor man victimizes the poor neighbor.
The ladder that only goes down into the neighborhood
Franklin illustrates the heart of left realism: to understand and not exculpate at the same time. To understand means seeing why he chooses crack —relative deprivation, the absence of legitimate ladders, the subculture waiting for him—; it is the structural analysis the punitive right ignores when it reduces him to a mere «criminal». But not exculpating means refusing the idealist alibi that Franklin is a victim of the system and nothing more. Because in the square of crime, Franklin occupies the vertex of the offender, and across from him stands another vertex occupied by concrete people: his community, which he lays waste to. The lesson is that one can explain the deprivation that shaped him without ceasing to name the harm he causes. The left that sees only the oppressed Franklin and not his neighborhood victims is, without meaning to, on the predator's side. The victim of street crime is not abstract: they have the same skin color and the same zip code as their executioner.
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// The subjectTalent with no legitimate ladder
What makes Franklin so powerful as an illustration is that his talent is undeniable. Snowfall takes pains to show us a young man who, with other opportunities, would have succeeded in any legal field. That is precisely the thesis of left realism: the problem is not that Franklin is a «born criminal» or a «degenerate», but that a neighborhood without legitimate avenues turns talent into ammunition for crime. But the series also refuses sentimentalism: the higher Franklin rises, the harder he grows, the more he rationalizes the harm, the further away the kid he started as recedes. His ambition —the same we would admire in a businessman— becomes, in that context, a machine for destroying his own people. Left realism asks us to hold both truths: Franklin is the product of a real deprivation, and Franklin is responsible for the community he poisons. Neither one cancels the other.
Franklin Saint
// The fault lineNeither Robin Hood, nor a monster without a cause
The fault line with Franklin has two faces, and left realism points to both. The first is that of idealism: turning him into a Robin Hood, a rebel who «just wants what is his» in a racist system, and using that reading to minimize or excuse the crack he deals. It is the temptation Snowfall flirts with and then dismantles: Franklin is likable, but his product kills. The second is that of the punitive right: reducing him to a «drug dealer» to be excised, a monster without a cause, forgetting the relative deprivation that manufactured him and the policies that could have offered another ladder. Both fault lines fail for the same reason: they let go of one of the square's vertices. The honest reading holds them all —the offender with his causes, the victim with their harm, the absent State that offered no alternatives, the community that pays the bill—.
That Franklin is brilliant does not redeem him, and that his victims are poor does not make them less victims: on the contrary, it makes them the central proof of the thesis. Left realism uses characters like him to remind the left that defending the poor also means protecting them from the poor man who preys on them, not only from the rich man who exploits them.
The victim shares his zip code
Franklin matters because he dismantles a certain left's most comfortable alibi: the idea that street crime is a minor matter compared to crime at the top. His crack does not travel to the rich neighborhoods; it stays, concentrates and devastates Black South Los Angeles. The victim of Franklin's crime shares with him skin color, neighborhood and class. That is the uncomfortable truth left realism put on the table: taking the victim of street crime seriously is an act of the left, not of the right, because that victim is the worker, the neighbor, the poor mother. Ignoring their fear so as not to sound punitive is to abandon them to the predator. Franklin teaches us to look at both sides at once: at the young man to whom society denied ladders, and at the community that he, with his talent, finished sinking. To explain him is not to exculpate him; it is the only serious way to protect his own people.
Three key takeaways
- Franklin Saint (Snowfall) is left realism's offender: a brilliant young man from South Los Angeles with no legitimate ladders, who chooses crack. Relative deprivation (the gap between the promised dream and the real avenues) turned into a criminal career.
- His crime is intra-class: crack does not fall on the rich, but on his own poor Black community —addicts, families, recruited children—. The victim of street crime shares his zip code.
- Neither Robin Hood (the idealist alibi that excuses him) nor a monster without a cause (the punitive reading that ignores the deprivation that shaped him). To explain him is not to exculpate him: all four vertices of the square of crime are held at once.
Sources · further reading
- Lea, J. y Young, J. (1984). What Is to Be Done About Law and Order?. Penguin.
- Young, J. (1999). The Exclusive Society. Sage.
- Currie, E. (1993). Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future. Hill and Wang.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Franklin Saint?
Franklin Saint («—») es un villano de Snowfall, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He is smart, ambitious, charming: the American dream in person.
¿Por qué Franklin Saint (—) se convierte en villano?
Franklin Saint and left realism: a sharp young man from South Los Angeles who chooses the only ladder available —crack— and lays waste to the Black community he came from. Relative deprivation turned into a career, and the victim who lives two streets away.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Franklin Saint?
El caso de Franklin Saint se analiza desde la Realismo de Izquierda. Left realism (Young, Lea) holds that street crime is real and hits the poor hardest. Franklin Saint, of Snowfall, embodies it: a brilliant kid from South Los Angeles, with no legitimate ladders toward the success society sells him, who chooses crack and floods his own Black community. Relative deprivation turned into a career; victims who live on his same block.
