Crime and Deviance - Paper 3
Crime - act/omission that is punishable by law
Deviance - diverging from accepted standards
Functionalist Theories of Crime
● Durkheim - Positive Functions of Crime
○ Boundary maintenance - condemn, solidarity
○ Adaption and change - all change starts with deviance e.g. suffragettes
● Davis - prostitution lets men release sexual frustration - protects nuclear family
● Ned Polsky - porn channels sexual desires away from adultery - protects family
● Albert Cohen - deviancy warns of problems with institutions - truancy + education
Evaluation
● Durkheim does not state how much crime is needed
● People don't commit crimes for the positive function
● Doesn't look at impacts on the individual victims
● Crime does not always lead to solidarity - fear, retaliation
Functionalist - Strain Theory - Merton
● People engage in crime as they are unable to achieve goals by legitimate means
● The American Dream
○ Cultural goal of money and happiness
○ Expected to achieve through hard work and self-discipline
○ Reinforces meritocracy
● Strain between goal of success and lack of legit opportunities to achieve it
● Merton’s types of adaption to strain
- Conformity: non-criminal/deviant
- Innovation: unemployment/poor education turns these people to crime
- Ritualism: given up on goals - forget a promotion, just works to get by
- Retreatism: given up all together e.g. drug addicts
- Rebellion: reject existing goals and replace with new to bring about change
● Research - societies that spent more on welfare had lower imprisonment rates
Evaluation
● Lower class crime rates are higher - less opportunity
● Most western crime is property crime - value material wealth so highly
● Marxists - ignores crime committed by R/C
● Marxists - ignores R/C ability to define the law
● Assumes everyone strives for money
Subcultural Strain Theories
Status Frustration - Cohen
● Focus on w/c boys
● Suffer from anomie in a m/c school system
● Can’t achieve legitimately - turn away from m/c values and to delinquent
subcultures
● Chavs - Owen Jones, w/c used as scapegoats for wider issues
, Alternative Status Hierarchy - Cohen
● Delinquent subculture reverses mainstream values - societal ‘bad’ is ‘good’ in the
subculture
● Mainstream society upholds school attendance, subcultures give status for truancy
● Offers another way to achieve status that these boys can’t achieve legitimately
Evaluation - Status Frustration and Alternative Status Hierarchy
● Offers explanation for non-economic delinquency
● Cohen, like Merton, assumes all w/c boys start off sharing m/c goals
● Ignores chance that they never shared these goals and never saw themselves as
failures
Three Subcultures - Cloward and Ohlin
● Aimed to explain youth delinquency in ways Merton did not
- Criminal Subcultures
- Youths provided with apprenticeship for career in utilitarian crime
- Arise in towns only where there is a stable criminal culture and hierarchy
- Young can climb the criminal career ladder
- Conflict Subculture
- Arises in areas of high population turnover
- Results in high levels of disorganisation and prevents stable criminal network
developing
- Its absence means illegitimate opportunities are only available in loosely
organised gangs
- Retreatist Subcultures
- Not everyone who aspires to be a professional criminal succeeds
- ‘Double failures’ - turn to retreatist subcultures - drug use
Evaluation
● Too deterministic
● Ignore wider power structures - who makes the law
Walter Miller - Lower Class Subcultures
● Not a strain subculture
● Not a result of inability to achieve, but a culture that makes deviance more accepted
● This subculture has a range of interests and characteristics:
- Toughness - expression of masculinity, rejects timidity, can lead to violence to
maintain a reputation for toughness
- Smartness - ability to con, steal and outsmart
- Excitement - Searching for stimulus, gambling, sex and alcohol
Institutional Anomie - Rosenfeld and Messner
● Obsession with money exerts pressure towards crime by encouraging anomie in
which people are encouraged to do anything in pursuit of wealth
● In USA and UK, economic goals are valued above all else
● Conclude that societies based on free market capitalism and lacking welfare are
inevitably going to have high crime rates
Crime - act/omission that is punishable by law
Deviance - diverging from accepted standards
Functionalist Theories of Crime
● Durkheim - Positive Functions of Crime
○ Boundary maintenance - condemn, solidarity
○ Adaption and change - all change starts with deviance e.g. suffragettes
● Davis - prostitution lets men release sexual frustration - protects nuclear family
● Ned Polsky - porn channels sexual desires away from adultery - protects family
● Albert Cohen - deviancy warns of problems with institutions - truancy + education
Evaluation
● Durkheim does not state how much crime is needed
● People don't commit crimes for the positive function
● Doesn't look at impacts on the individual victims
● Crime does not always lead to solidarity - fear, retaliation
Functionalist - Strain Theory - Merton
● People engage in crime as they are unable to achieve goals by legitimate means
● The American Dream
○ Cultural goal of money and happiness
○ Expected to achieve through hard work and self-discipline
○ Reinforces meritocracy
● Strain between goal of success and lack of legit opportunities to achieve it
● Merton’s types of adaption to strain
- Conformity: non-criminal/deviant
- Innovation: unemployment/poor education turns these people to crime
- Ritualism: given up on goals - forget a promotion, just works to get by
- Retreatism: given up all together e.g. drug addicts
- Rebellion: reject existing goals and replace with new to bring about change
● Research - societies that spent more on welfare had lower imprisonment rates
Evaluation
● Lower class crime rates are higher - less opportunity
● Most western crime is property crime - value material wealth so highly
● Marxists - ignores crime committed by R/C
● Marxists - ignores R/C ability to define the law
● Assumes everyone strives for money
Subcultural Strain Theories
Status Frustration - Cohen
● Focus on w/c boys
● Suffer from anomie in a m/c school system
● Can’t achieve legitimately - turn away from m/c values and to delinquent
subcultures
● Chavs - Owen Jones, w/c used as scapegoats for wider issues
, Alternative Status Hierarchy - Cohen
● Delinquent subculture reverses mainstream values - societal ‘bad’ is ‘good’ in the
subculture
● Mainstream society upholds school attendance, subcultures give status for truancy
● Offers another way to achieve status that these boys can’t achieve legitimately
Evaluation - Status Frustration and Alternative Status Hierarchy
● Offers explanation for non-economic delinquency
● Cohen, like Merton, assumes all w/c boys start off sharing m/c goals
● Ignores chance that they never shared these goals and never saw themselves as
failures
Three Subcultures - Cloward and Ohlin
● Aimed to explain youth delinquency in ways Merton did not
- Criminal Subcultures
- Youths provided with apprenticeship for career in utilitarian crime
- Arise in towns only where there is a stable criminal culture and hierarchy
- Young can climb the criminal career ladder
- Conflict Subculture
- Arises in areas of high population turnover
- Results in high levels of disorganisation and prevents stable criminal network
developing
- Its absence means illegitimate opportunities are only available in loosely
organised gangs
- Retreatist Subcultures
- Not everyone who aspires to be a professional criminal succeeds
- ‘Double failures’ - turn to retreatist subcultures - drug use
Evaluation
● Too deterministic
● Ignore wider power structures - who makes the law
Walter Miller - Lower Class Subcultures
● Not a strain subculture
● Not a result of inability to achieve, but a culture that makes deviance more accepted
● This subculture has a range of interests and characteristics:
- Toughness - expression of masculinity, rejects timidity, can lead to violence to
maintain a reputation for toughness
- Smartness - ability to con, steal and outsmart
- Excitement - Searching for stimulus, gambling, sex and alcohol
Institutional Anomie - Rosenfeld and Messner
● Obsession with money exerts pressure towards crime by encouraging anomie in
which people are encouraged to do anything in pursuit of wealth
● In USA and UK, economic goals are valued above all else
● Conclude that societies based on free market capitalism and lacking welfare are
inevitably going to have high crime rates
