Crime And Deviance: Perspectives Flashcards
Define social construct
Created by society rather than naturally occurring. This means it’s likely to vary in differing locations and over time.
Define social control
The attempt to make members of society act a particular way
Define right realism
Crime as seen as a real problem in society. These are a conservative group who prefer to a tough approach to crime - the individual is responsible for the crime. It is a rational choice as the criminal weighs up risk and reward.
Define left realism
Crime is a problem for the disadvantaged groups in society. Relative deprivation and marginalised poor produces criminal subcultures whose members victimise other people people.
What are the 2 mechanisms to achieve solidarity according to functionalists?
Socialisation: instils the shared culture into its members. This helps to ensure individuals internalise the same norms and values and they feel it is right to act in the way society requires.
Social control: mechanisms of social control include reward for conformity and punishments for deviance. These help to ensure that individuals behave in the way society expects.
What are the 3 reasons why crime and deviance appears in all societies?
Not everyone is equally effectively socialised: some people are more prone to deviance as they aren’t socialised into the norms and values.
Complex modern society, there is diversity of lifestyle and values: different groups develop their own subcultures with distinctive norms and values. What the subculture sees as normal, the mainstream culture view as deviant.
Modern societies have a tendency towards anomie and normlessness: the rules governing a behaviour become more weaker and less clear cut. Society is more complex (specialised division of labour). So people are becoming more different. Collective consciousness is weakened, resulting in high levels of crime and deviance
According to functionalists, what are the 5 functions of crime?
Boundary maintenance, adaption and change, safety valve, warning, and regulates behaviour.
Functionalists functions of crime: boundary maintenance
Crime produced a reaction from society. It unites its members in the condemnation of the wrongdoer and reinforces their commitment to the shared norms and values. Media example: killings by Al Qaeda shown live broadcast. Society’s reaction is to try to identify and capture the wrongdoer.
Functionalists functions of crime: adaptation and change
Change starts with an act of deviance. Individuals with new ideas, values, and ways of living must not be completely stifled by the weight of social control. There must be some scope for them to challenge and change the existing norms and values. Example: authorities often try to persecute visionaries who try to preach a new message. In the long run, their values may give rise to a new culture and morality.
Functionalists functions of crime: safety valve
Davis argues that prostitution acts as safety valve for the real de of men’s sexual frustrations without threatening the monogamous nuclear family. Polsky argues that pornography safely ‘channels’ a variety of sexual desires away from alternatives such as adultery, which would pose a much greater threat to the family.
Functionalists functions of crime: warning
Deviance is a warning that an institution is not functioning properly. For example, high rates of truancy from schools may indicate that there is a problem within the education system.
Erikson argues that crime and deviance performs positive social functions, then perhaps this means society is actually organised to promote deviance. He suggests that the true function of agencies of social control such as police may actually be to sustain a certain level of crime rather than to rid society of it.
Functionalists functions of crime: regulates behaviour
Demonstrations, carnivals and festivals all license misbehaviour that in other contexts may be punished.
What is Durkheim’s views on low and high levels of crime?
Neither too much or too low levels of crime are desirable:
Too much crime threatens to tear the bonds of society apart.
Too little crime means that society is repressing and controlling its members too much, stifling individual freedom and preventing change.
Evaluate the functionalist perspective on crime and deviance in society.
- it is recognised that some deviance is good for society; however, Durkheim offers no explanation as to how much deviance is the right amount.
- functionalists explain the existence of crime in terms of its supposed function. For example, strengthening social solidarity. But, this doesn’t mean that society actually creates crime in advance with the intention of strengthening society. Just because crime does these things is not necessarily why it exists in the 1st place.
- crime doesn’t always promote solidarity. It may have the opposite effect, leading to people becoming isolated. E.g forcing women to stay indoors for fear of attack.
What is Merton’s strain theory?
Strain theory argues people engage in deviant behaviour when they are unable to achieve goals by legitimate means. E.g may become frustrated and resort to criminal means of getting what they want. OR turn to drugs to comfort their failure and remove themselves from society
Mertons strain theory: what 2 elements does Merton combine?
Structural factors: society’s equal opportunity structure.
Cultural factors: strong emphasis on success goals and weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.
Mertons strain theory: what is deviance a result of?
The goals that a culture encourages individuals to achieve and what the institutional structure of society allows them to achieve legitimately (whether you can achieve it.)
American dream vs American reality
Merton’s deviance typology
Conformity: when an individual accept culturally approved goals to achieve legitimately. Most likely to be middle class people with good opportunities.
Innovation: people who accept goals of success but use illegitimate goals of getting there eg theft/fraud. Usually LC people.
Ritualism: given up trying to achieve goals but have internalised legitimate means so to stick to the rules. Eg lower middle class, office workers.
Retreatism: reject goals and means, become drop outs in society. (Psychotics, outcasts, vagrants, tramps)
Rebellion: people who reject society’s goals and means and replace them with new ones, hoping to bring about revolutionary change.
Evaluation of Merton
- it takes official statistics as face value. These over-represent working class crime, so Merton sees crime as mainly a WC phenomenon. It is also too deterministic: the WC experience the most strain, yet they don’t all deviate.
- Marxists argue it ignores the power of the ruling class to make and enforce the laws in ways that criminalise the poor and not the rich.
- it assumes that there is value consensus - everyone strives for money success and ignores the possibility that some may not share this goal.
What is subcultural strain theory?
Sees deviance as a product of delinquent subculture with different values from those of mainstream society.
Cohen- status frustration: cohen actress with Merton that deviance is largely a lower class phenomenon. It results from the inability of those in lower classes to achieve mainstream success goals by legitimate means such as educational achievement.
Cohen criticises Mertons explanation of deviance: Merton sees deviance as an individual response to strain, ignoring that much deviance is commitment in or by groups especially among the young.
Merton focuses on utilitarian crime committed for material gain eg theft or fraud. He largely ignores crimes such as vandalism, and assault which may have no economic motive.
Subcultursl strain theory: deviance among working class Boys
He argues that they face anomie in the middle class dominated school system. They suffer from cultural deprivation and lack of skills to achieve. This inability to succeed in the middle class world leaves them at the bottom of the official status heirarchy.
Alternative status heirarchy
Subcultures values are characterised in spite, malice, hostility, and contempt for the outside world. The delinquent subculture inverts values of the mainstream society - turns them upside down. For example, society upholds regular school attendance and respect for property, whereas in the subculture, Boys gain status for vandalism and truancy.
A subcultures function is to offer the Boys an alternative status heirarchy in which they can achieve. They create their own illegitimate opportunity structure where they can win status from peers through delinquent actions.
Cloward and Ohlin: 3 subcultures
Cloward and Ohlin agree that working class youths are denied legitimate opportunities to achieve ‘money success’, and their deviance stems from the way they respond to this situation. Different subcultures respond in different ways to the lack of legitimate opportunities eg the subculture described by Cohen resorts to violence and vandalism, not economic crime or illegal drug use.
Cloward and Ohlin argue that different neighbourhoods provide different illegitimate opportunities for young people to learn criminal skills and develop criminal careers.
Cloward and Ohlin: what 3 deviant subcultures did they identify?
Criminal subcultures:provide youths with an apprenticeship for a career in utilitarian crime. They arise only in those neighbourhoods where there is longstanding and stable local criminal culture with an established heirarchy of professional adult crime.
Conflict subcultures: arise in areas of high population turnover. This results in high levels of social disorganisation and prevents stable professional criminal network developing. Its absence means that the only illegitimate opportunities available are within loosely organised gangs. In these, violence provides a release for young men’s frustrations at their blocked opportunities as well as an alternative source of status they can earn by winning ‘turf’ from rival gangs. This subculture is the closest that is described by Cohen.
Retreatist subcultures: in any neighbourhood, not everyone who aspires to be a professional criminal or gang leader actually succeeds - just as legitimate means. What becomes of these ‘double failures’ - those who fail legitimately and illegitimately? Cloward and Ohlin argue they then to a retreatist subculture based on illegal drug use.
