Crime and deviance

Question 1

Durkheim’s functions of crime

Answer 1

1) Boundary maintenance
- Crime produces a reaction from society, uniting its members against the wrongdoer and reinforcing their commitment to the value consensus.
- This is the function of punishment: to reaffirm shared rules and reinforce solidarity.

2)Adaptions and change
- for change to occur, individuals with new ideas must challenge existing norms, which will at first appear as deviant.

Question 2

Functionalists positive functions of crime

Answer 2

1) Its a safety valve
- Davis argues that prostitution acts to release mens sexual frustrations without threatening the nuclear family.

2) Its a warning light
- Cohen argues that deviance indicates that an institution is malfunctioning.
(e.g high truancy rated may indicate problems with the education system)

Question 3

Criticisms of Durkheims functionalist theory

Answer 3

Durkheim claims society requires a certain amount of deviance to function but offers no way of knowing how much is the right amount.

Durkheim and other functionalists explain crime in terms of its function, e.g. to strengthen solidarity. But just because crime does these things doesn’t necessarily mean this is why it exists in the first place.

Question 4

What is the Functionalist view on crime?

Answer 4

Functionalist’s see it as inevitable and universal.

Durkheim sees crime as a normal part of all healthy societies.

• In every society, some individuals are inadequately socialised and prone to deviate.

• In modern societies, there is a highly division of labour and a diversity of subcultures. The shared rules of behaviour become less clear. Durkheim calls this anomie (normlessness).

Question 5

What is Merton’s strain theory?

Answer 5

Merton argues that people engage in deviant behaviour when they cannot achieve socially approved goals by legitimate means.

His explanation combines:
Structural factors: society’s unequal opportunity structure.
Cultural factors: the strong emphasis on success goals and weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.

Question 6

Merton and the ‘American Dream’ ideology

Answer 6

For Merton, deviance is the result of a strain between the goals a culture encourages individuals to aim for and what the structure of society actually allows them to achieve legitimately.

• For example, the ‘American Dream’ emphasises ‘money success’. Americans are expected to pursue this goal by legitimate means, e.g. education, hard work.
• The ideology claims that American society is meritocratic. But in reality, poverty and discrimination block opportunities for many to achieve by legitimate means.

• The resulting strain between the cultural goal (money success) and the lack of legitimate opportunities produces frustration and a pressure to resort to illegitimate means.

There is pressure due to American culture ‘Winning the game is more important than playing by the rules.’

Question 7

What are the 5 deviant adaptations to strain? (Merton)

Answer 7

1. Conformity Individuals accept the culturally approved goals and strive to achieve them legitimately.
2. Innovation Individuals accept the money success goal but use illegitimate means to achieve it, e.g. theft. This is typical of those who lack legitimate opportunities.
3. Ritualism Individuals give up on the goal, but have internalised the legitimate means and follow the rules for their own sake.
4. Retreatism Individuals reject both goal and legitimate means, and drop out of society.
5. Rebellion Individuals replace existing goals and means with new ones with the aim of bringing about social change.

Question 8

What are the strengths of Mertons approach?

Answer 8

He shows how both normal and deviant behaviour can arise from the same mainstream gods. Conformists and innovators both pursue the same goal, but by different means.

He explains the patterns shown in official statistics:
- Most crime is property crime, because American society values material wealth so highly
- Working-class crime rates are higher, because they have least opportunity to obtain wealth
legitimately.

Question 9

What do Subcultural theorists think about Mertons strain theory?

Answer 9

• Subcultural strain theories both criticise Merton’s theory and build on it.
• They see deviance as the product of delinquent subcultures.
• These subcultures offer their lower-class members a solution to the problem of how to gain the status they cannot achieve by legitimate means.

Question 10

A.K Cohen: Status frustration

Answer 10

Cohen notes that working-class boys face anomie in the middle-class education system.

They are culturally deprived and lack the skills to achieve, leaving them at the bottom of the official status hierarchy.

• As a result, they suffer status frustration. They resolve it by rejecting mainstream middle-class values and turn instead to others in the same situation, forming a subculture (which provides an alternative status hierarchy)

Question 11

Cloward & Ohlin’s view on crime

Answer 11

• not everyone adapts to a lack of legitimate opportunities by turning to ‘innovation’ (utilitarian crime).
• some subcultures resort to violence; others turn to drug use.
• the key reasons for these differences is both the unequal access to the legitimate opportunity structure and unequal access to illegitimate opportunity structures.
• different neighbourhoods provide different illegitimate opportunities to learn criminal skills and develop criminal careers.

Question 12

What are Cloward & Ohlin’s three subcultures?

Answer 12

1. Criminal subcultures
   - provides youths with an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime.
   - arise in neighbourhoods where there is a longstanding, stable criminal culture and a hierarchy of professional adult crime.
   - adult criminals can select and train those youths with the right abilities and provide them with opportunities on the criminal career ladder.
2. Conflict subcultures
   - the only illegitimate opportunities are within loosely organised gangs.
   - violence provides a release for frustration at blocked opportunities and an alternative source of status earned by winning ‘turf’ from rival gangs.
3. Retreatist subcultures
   - The ‘double failures’ who fail in both the legitimate and the illegitimate opportunity structures often turn to a retreatist or ‘dropout’ subculture based on illegal drug use.

Question 13

Evaluation of Cloward & Ohlin

Answer 13

• Cloward and Ohlin ignore crimes of the wealthy and the wider power structure.
• over-predict the amount of working-class crime.
• they draw the boundaries too sharply between the different types. Actual subcultures often show characteristics of more than one ‘type’
• its a reactive theory - they explain deviant subcultures as forming in reaction to the failure to achieve mainstream success goals.
  This wrongly assumes that everyone starts off sharing these same goals.

Question 14

Becker: Social construction of crime

Answer 14

Becker (1963), social groups create deviance by creating rules and applying them to particular people whom they label as ‘outsiders’

So, an act or a person only becomes deviant when labelled by others as deviant.

Question 15

Labelling theorists view on crime

Answer 15

For labelling theorists, no act is deviant in itself: deviance is simply a social construct.

Question 16

Piliavin and Briar: differential enforcement

Answer 16

Piliavin and Briar (1964) found police decisions to arrest were based on stereotypical ideas about manner, dress, gender, class, ethnicity, time and place.

Question 17

Cicourel: Typifications

Answer 17

Cicourel (1976) argues that police use typifications (stereotypes) of the ‘typical delinquent’.

• Working-class and ethnic minority juveniles are more likely to be arrested. Once arrested, those from broken homes etc are more likely to be charged.
• Middle-class juveniles are less likely to fit the typification, and have parents who can negotiate successfully on their behalf. They are less likely to be charged.

Question 18

What is ‘the dark figure’ ?

Answer 18

The dark figure is the difference between the official statistics and the ‘real’ rate of crime - so called because we do not know for certain how much crime goes undetected, unreported and unrecorded.

Question 19

Lemert: Effects of labelling

Answer 19

Lemert (1972) argues that, by labelling certain people as deviant, society actually encourages them to become more so: societal reaction causes ‘secondary deviance’

Question 20

What is Primary deviance?

Answer 20

Primary deviance is deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled. They have many causes, are often trivial and mostly go uncaught. Those who commit them do not usually see themselves as deviant.

Question 21

What is Secondary Deviance?

Answer 21

Secondary deviance results from societal reaction, i.e. from labelling. Labelling someone as an offender can involve stigmatising and excluding them from normal society. Others may see the offender solely in terms of the label, which becomes the individual’s master status or controlling identity.

Question 22

Young’s (1971) study of ‘hippy marijauna’

Answer 22

• Drug use was initially peripheral to the hippies’ lifestyle (primary deviance), but police persecution of them as junkies (societal reaction) led them to retreat into closed groups, developing a deviant subculture where drug use became a central activity (self-fulfilling prophecy).
• The control processes aimed at producing law-abiding behaviour thus produced the opposite.

Question 23

Cohens (1972) study of ‘Folk Devils’

Answer 23

Folk devils and moral panics Cohen’s (1972) study of the mods and rockers uses the concept of deviance amplification spiral:

• Media exaggeration and distortion began a moral panic, with growing public concern.
• Moral entrepreneurs called for a ‘crackdown’. Police responded by arresting more youths, provoking more concern.
• Demonising the mods and rockers as ‘folk devils’ marginalised them further, resulting in more deviance.

Question 24

The difference between Functionalists and Labelling theorists view on C&D

Answer 24

Functionalists see deviance producing social control.

Labelling theorists see control producing further deviance.

Question 25

Douglas: the meaning of suicide

Answer 25

Douglas argues that to understand suicide, we must discover its meanings for the deceased.
He rejects the use of official stats: they are social constructs that only tell us about the labels applied by coroners.
To discover the deceased’s meanings, we must use qualitative methods, eg, the analysis of suicide notes or unstructured interviews with the deceased’s relatives.

Question 26

Paranoia as a self fulfilling prophecy

Answer 26

Interactionists are interested in how a person comes to be labelled ad mentally ill and the effects of this labelling.
Lemert (1962) shows how socially awkward individuals may be labelled and excluded from groups.
The individuals negative response gives the group reason to fear for his mental health and this may lead to a medical label of paranoia.
The label ‘mental patient’ becomes his master status.

Question 27

Institutionalisation and mental illness

Answer 27

• Goffman shows the possible effects of being admitted to a ‘total institution’ such as a psychiatric hospital.
• Patients undergo a ‘mortification of the self’ in which their old identity is ‘killed off’ and replaced by a new one: ‘inmate’
• This is achieved by ‘degradation rituals’, eg confiscation of personal effects.

However some inmates resist being institutionalised.

Question 28

Official statitsics show the working class as more likely than the higher classes to offend. What are the different perspectives explanation’s for this?

Answer 28

Functionalism sees crime as the product of inadequate socialisation into a shared culture. Miller argues that the lower class has an independent subculture opposed to mainstream culture and this explains their higher crime rate.

Strain theory argues that the class structure denies working class people opportunity to achieve by legitimate means, so they are more likely to ‘innovate’ (using utilitarian crime)

Subcultural theories AK Cohen sees working class youths as culturally deprived & unable to achieve in education. Failure gives rise to status frustration. As a solution, they form delinquent subcultures in which they gain status from peers. Cloward and Ohlin 3 subs criminal, conflict, retreatist.

Labelling theory rejects the view that official stats are a valid picture of which class commits most crime. They focus on the role of law enforcement agencies, which have the power to label the WC as criminals.

Question 29

Marxist perspective on class and crime

Answer 29

• Marxists agree that the law is enforced mainly against the working class and that official statistics are flawed.
• They criticise the labelling theory for ignoring the structure of capitalism within which law making, enforcement and offending take place.
• Marxism sees capitalist society as divided into the ruling capitalist class, who own the means of production, and the working class, whose labour capitalists exploit for profit.
• Marxism is a structural theory: society is a structure whose capitalist economic base determines the superstructure. Their function is to serve the ruling class interests. For marxists, the structure of capitalism explains crime.

Question 30

What is criminogenic capitalism?

Answer 30

Crime is inevitable in capitalism, becuase capitalism is criminogenic - its very nature causes crime.

Question 31

Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class for profit. As a result:

Answer 31

• poverty may mean crime is the only way some can survive
• crime may be the only way of obtaining consumer goods encouraged by capitalist advertising, resulting in utilitarian crimes. eg theft
• alienation may cause frustration and aggression, leading to non utilitarian crimes, eg violence, vandalism.