Crime And Deviance Flashcards
Functions of Crime
Boundary maintenance: reaffirms shared rules and reinforces solidarity
Adaptation and change: New ideas must challenge the norms but first will appear as deviance
Safety Valve
Warning light: Deviance indicates that an institution is malfunctioning
Criticisms of Durkheim
Claims society requires a certain amount of crime but there’s no way of knowing
Doesn’t explain why crime exists in the first place
Merton’s Strain Theory
Comformity: Accept cultural approved goals and strive to achieve them legitimately
Innovation: Accep economic goals but use illegitimate means to achieve it
Ritualism: Give up on goal, but have internalised the legitimate means and follow the rules
Retreatism: Reject both goals and means, drop out of society
Rebellion: Replace existing goals and means to bring about social change
A.K Cohen Status Frustration
Sees deviants as an individual response to strain, ignoring the group deviance of delinquent subcultures
Focuses on utilitarians crime for material gain, ignores non utilitarian crimes which may have no economic gain
WC boys are culturally deprived and lack the skills to achieve
Suffer status frustration and resolve by rejecting mainstream middle class values
Alternative status hierarchy
Subculture provides an alternative status hierarchy where they can win through delinquent actions
Inverts maintstream values, what society praises it condemns
Cloward and Ohin: Three subcultures
Criminal subcultures: Provide youths with utilitarian crime, stable criminal culture and hierarchy of professional adult crime
Conflict subculture: Only illegitimate opportunities, arise in areas of high population turnover
Retreatist subcultures: Double failures in both the legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures
Primary and Secondary Deviance
Primary deviance: Deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled
Secondary deviance: Reactions from society
Self fulfilling prophecy
Labelling provokes a crisis for the individual self concept and lead them living to the label
Reinforce joining a deviant subculture that offers support, role models and career
Deviance amplification spiral (Mods and Rockers)
Media exaggeration and distortion began a moral panic
Moral entrepreneurs called for a crackdown
Demonising the mods and rockers as “folk Devils” marginalised them further, causing more deviance
Criminogenic Capiatlism
Crime is inevitable in capitalism
Poverty may mean crime is the only way some can survive
Crime may be obtaining the only way of obtaining consumer goods encouraged by capitalist, advertising, resulting in utilitarian eg theft
Alienation may cause frustration and aggression
Ruling class crime: Gordon argues crime is a rational response to capitalism
Crimes of the powerful
White collar crime
Financial crime
Crimes against consumers
Crimes against employers
Crimes against the environment
Corporate crime
Occupational crime
Invisibility of corporate crime
Media
Lack of political will
CC is complex
De-labelling
Under-reporting
