Crime and Deviance: Theories Flashcards
-Functionalism -Sub-cultural -Marxism
What is the main functionalist theory on crime and deviance?
-for functionalists, explanations for why crime occurs can be found by examining society, rather than other factors such as ethnicity and gender.
-The vast majority of people in society are law-abiding, whereas criminals are a minority.
-effective socialisation combined with effective social control ensures that crime rates remain relatively low, and that society is essentially a healthy place to be a part of.
What is Hirschi’s “Control Theory” about (FUNCTIONALIST)?
-The stronger a person’s social bonds, the less likely they are to commit crime. These bonds include: attachment to institutions (family and school), commitment to our roles and responsibilities, involvement in our commitments and a belief in morality.
-most criminals lack strong bonds in the above ways, which explain why committing crime and other deviant acts are more likely for them.
What is an evaluation and a contemporary example for Hirschi’s theory?
-Is crime always committed by those with weak social bonds? There are many white-collar crimes committed by middle-class offenders who have strong social bonds.
-Footballer, Wayne Rooney was prosecuted for drink-driving in 2017. This contradicts Hirschi’s argument in that Rooney does not lack strong bonds to others and society.
What is Durkheim’s theory on value consensus + boundary maintenance(FUNCTIONALIST)?
-Durkheim believed that society is held together by people agreeing to, and buying into a value consensus.
-As Durkheim said, positive social change often begins with some form of deviance. Value consensus should be firm, but not so firm that it prevents change for the better taking place.
-According to Durkheim, crime re-affirms the boundaries of the collective conscience. For example, when a horrific crime occurs, people are drawn together to express their outrage. This restrengthens the common bonds that people share with one another and therefore, acts as a form of boundary maintenance.
What is a contemporary example for Durkheim’s theory on boundary maintenance?
-In New Zealand (2019), terrorist shootings at mosques left 51 people dead. It was committed by a white supremacist. Needless to say, these attacks shocked the world, resulting in Muslims and non-Muslims alike united in grief for those who were lost.
What is an evaluation for Durkheim’s theory on value consensus + boundary maintenance?
-Isn’t crime a symptom of social solidarity having broken down?
-Despite Durkheim’s claim that some crime re-affirms the boundaries of the ‘collective conscience’, it could be argued that terrorist attacks such as that seen in Paris are actually a reflection of social solidarity having broken down.
What is Durkheim’s theory on crime being functional in providing jobs?
-Crime provides jobs for people in society. Without crime, there would be no prison staff, no judges, no criminal lawyers etc…
-High unemployment is dysfunctional for any society, and an absence of the thousands of jobs relating to crime and justice would make this worse. This can cause anomie.
What is Durkheim’s theory on crime having a deterrence function?
-open court rooms and punishments have a deterrence function.
-members of the public are able to sit in the viewing gallery of court rooms. This is so that each and every member of society can see that the CJS is fair, and that those guilty of committing crime are suitably punished. This is important, since a healthy CJS is essential in allowing the public to have faith in it.
-A wider deterrence function also exists, however. All members of the public see what happens to somebody who commits crime, it is hoped that they too are reminded about what the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour are. Again, this creates boundary maintenance.
What is an evaluation for Durkheim’s argument on crime having a deterrence function?
-Deterrence is only effective in cases where the offender has planned their crimes. For those who act upon impulse, deterrence is ineffective. Furthermore, there is a high rate of recidivism (re-offending) among those who have spent much time in prison, which arguably shows that even the toughest punishments don’t have the desired deterrence effect.
How does restorative justice punishment support the argument of crime having a deterrence function?
-there are restorative justice punishments such as community sentences. Community sentences involve offenders tidying parks, building community facilities etc..
-This helps offenders to re-integrate back into society and allows the public to see that the offenders values aren’t that different from their own.
-This acts as a deterrence function as it can cut re-offending rates and can allow social solidarity to be restrengthened following crime.
What is a contemporary example on restorative justice punishments?
-a successful example of restorative justice at work relates to ex-offender, Peter Woolf who formed a restorative justice punishment inspired charity called ‘Why Me?’. Peter Woolf points out that that it was facing the reality that his actions have consequences on the lives of others that became a turning point in his life, resulting in him being determined to put his past behind him. This example supports functionalist views that crime should always bring about a healing benefit to individuals and society.
What is Kingsley Davis’ theory and an evaluation(FUNCTIONALIST)?
-prostitution can benefit institutions like the family. He claims that pornography can be a means of allowing men to channel their sexual frustration in a way that prevents them from committing sexual offences. Prostitution, he claims, acts as a safety valve for the family in promoting its stability in society.
-However, this theory is considered to be far-fetched, and an insult to women in particular. Kingsley-Davis is accused of being highly irresponsible in putting his views forward and he receives little support even from fellow functionalists.
What is Durkheim’s view on when crime becomes dysfunctional for society and what is a contemporary example for this?
-crime only becomes a problem for society when it spirals out of control. Too much crime is, therefore, unhealthy, and leads to anomie (social chaos).
-In 2003, President Saddam Hussain of Iraq was toppled from power through a combination of revolution by the Iraqi people and an American-led invasion. As his regime collapsed, so did law and order leading to many crimes.
-The breakdown of social control made Iraq’s problems worse in many ways and is an example of anomie.
-However, Durkheim also points out that having low crime rates may not be a good thing as it could be an indication that society is not in a healthy place, as people don’t have very much meaning that there is little for others to take off them in criminal ways.
What is are two evaluations about Durkheim including one from a Marxist perspective?
-Durkheim’s study doesn’t explain individual criminality.He is accused of taking a highly positivist approach in examining crime on a larger-scale. He ignores the finer details about why a person commits crime, while another does not, despite both having a relatively similar relationship to others in wider society.
-Durkheim overlooks the flaws within the CJS processes. Marxists accuse Durkheim of overlooking how social class bias underpins the CJS. It is the poor who experience crime the most, and it is the poor who are unfairly punished the most too. Rather than strengthening social solidarity, the CJS uses criminal behaviour to strengthen inequalities that capitalist societies such as Britain are founded upon.
What is Robert Merton’s theory?
-as a functionalist, Merton also saw society itself as the main cause of crime. He explored how the USA has such a high crime rate, and how American values are ultimately behind this.
-The ‘American Dream’ underpins core values in the USA. It encourages everybody to work hard to achieve personal success.
-The legitimate meansof doing this include hard work at school, and hard work in a chosen career. For working class Americans, the ‘dreams’ can seem remote and unachievable. Strain is felt as wc people attempt to achieve the dream legitimately, yet are quickly pulled back by their wc roots. This can result in anomie, resulting in responses among others.
What are the three responses Merton claim that working class Americans give in response to anomie?
-conformity:vast majority of wc Americans continue to pursue the goal (American dream) and the legitimate means of achieving it.
-innovation: some Americans by-pass the legitimate means of achieving the ‘dream’ and use crime as a ‘quick fix’. Bank robbery, drug dealing for example can result in a person becoming wealthy so long as they don’t get caught.
-retreatism: the goal of the ‘dream’ is abandoned, as is the legitimate means of achieving it. A person may ‘drop out’ of society and become addicted to drugs, for example.
What is a contemporary example regarding Merton’s theory?
-Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company: 2015an underground safe deposit company was burgled in a raid. The value of goods stolen was totalled around £200 million. This type of crime, although having taken place in London, demonstrates what Merton meant by the way in which innovation in response to anomie can propel a person from ‘rags to riches’ in the way that the American dream encourages.
What is a positive and negative evaluation for Merton’s theory?
-Merton ignores crime that have no financial gain. He fails to make sense of non-utilitarian crimes such as vandalism, graffiti etc… This limits the extent to which Merton’s research can be applied to a full range of crimes.
-Merton’s theory does help to make sense of Britain’s lower crime rates. The British welfare state helps to provide financial assistance to the very poorest. America has no equivalent, explaining why innovation through crime as a means of accessing wealth is something criminals in America find themselves tempted by.
What are functionalist subcultural theories?
-they explore why people fail to share mainstream values and collectively behave in ways that are deviant.
What is Albert Cohen’s theory?
-Cohen agrees with Merton that young, wc boys share the main goals of success- to achieve the ‘American Dream’.
-However, as the effects of cultural deprivation take place, they realise the legitimate means are closed off from them.
-Negative labelling adds to this, resulting in status frustration and a situation where wc boys end up rejecting society’s mainstream goals, and thus replacing them with alternative ones. This is the beginning of delinquent subcultures and gang-related crime, of which the USA has a big problem.
How does Cohen challenged Merton’s theory?
-Cohen challenged Merton for assuming crime is financially motivated. Instead, crime is a means of gaining much desired status that is achieved by the recognition that non-utilitarian crime provides for gang members. Status and respect become substitute goals, providing wc boys in company of others, a means of achieving something. This collective response challenges Merton’s claim that crime is typically something that individuals commit.
What is an evaluation for Cohen’s theory?
-Why don’t all people from wc backgrounds experiencing status frustration respond in criminal ways? Even if Cohen’s research is true, it is unclear why delinquency in gang-contexts is the particular response that some people engage in, whereas the overwhelming majority of people do not.
What is Cloward and Ohlin’s theory?
-Cloward and Ohlin also challenge Merton’s Strain Theory. They argued that although Merton adequately explained deviant behaviour as a response to the legitimate opportunity structure, he didn’t look into the different ways in which people innovate in order to bypass the usual means of achieving success.
-Cloward and Ohlin found that there was different forms that gang-related deviance can take, and how the physical environment gangs find themselves in can influence the crimes that occur.
What are the three types of subcultures/gangs that Cloward and Ohlin found?
-criminal subculture: there are established patterns of crime, and young men are able to learn the ‘tricks of the trade’ from older criminals. This provides an illegitimate opportunity structure to criminal success. Modern examples of these are lucrative drug-dealing gangs.
-conflict subcultures: these usually form in the transition zone of cities, where the absence of social structures means that organised criminal gangs are largely absent. Instead, groups of young people ‘ hang around’, committing pointless acts of violence to gain ‘status’ and ‘respect’.
-retreatist gang: consists of young people getting drunk, taking drugs and ‘hang about’ bored. Similar to Merton’s ‘retreatist’ response to anomie, but instead Cloward and Ohlin provide a group response to this feeling.
What is an evaluation for Cloward and Ohlin?
-Cloward and Ohlin’s understanding of gangs is difficult to apply to today. Critics of Cloward and Ohlin claim that they based their understanding of gang life on old-style gangs of the past. In the 21st century, the nature of gang structures, organisation and life has changed, with some modern gangs showing elements of all three of Cloward and Ohlin’s subcultures.
What is Walter Miller’s theory?
-Walter Miller provides a challenge to Merton, Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin. They all assume that those who commit criminal acts begin by sharing the main values of society. ON the other hand, Miller claimed that a distinctive lower class subculture exists, with crime and delinquency an extension of normal, wc values. This requires a different approach to understanding crime.
What are the four values that wc boys values, according to Miller?
-toughness: demonstrating physical authority over others.
-trouble: seeking out conflict to assert oneself.
-excitement: searching for thrills, exhilaration (joy-riding).
-fatalism: living for the present, not worrying about the future.
-delinquency drifts from the ‘acting out’ of the focal concerns of lower class culture, rather than as a reaction against failing to achieve success.
What is Matza’s theory?
-Matza argues that subcultural theories are wrong to assume delinquents are different from everybody else and hold their own values. In reality, there are very few people who live a permanent life of gang-related crime.
-the majority of people in society have both law-abiding values, and also the potential to possess and demonstrate deviant, subterranean values. The main difference is that delinquents publically express their subterranean values at inappropriate times. This draws attention to them, creating the impression that alternative, subcultural values are held.
What is an evaluation for Matza?
-Matza overlooks how some criminals do live a permanent life of crime. Some people live a life of crime and so do not ‘drift’ in and out of it at all. Gang membership in America, for example, is often something that members sign up to for life. Matza shows a lack of understanding of the true nature of gang and subcultural deviance in this way.
What is a contemporary study to support functionalist subcultural theories of crime?
-Densley and Stevens (2017): in their ethnographic study of gangs in London, Densley and Stevens interviewed 69 self-proclaimed ‘gang members’.
-They found that in the eyes of the public, police and even the gang members themselves, the meanings of ‘gangs’ fuses together fact and fiction. The concept is, to an extent socially constructed.
-gang members felt that blocked opportunities to securing high-paid, high-status jobs discouraged them from following the law.
-This reinforces existing theoretical research, such as that provided by Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin and elements of Matza’s research are here too.
What is an evaluation for Densley and Steven’s study?
-Their research is based on evidence drawn from a small sample of gang members. Also, there is a potential problem of the interviewer effect, as those gang members interviewed could’ve exaggerated their views and the extent to which they live a life of crime.
What are some contemporary examples of conflict subcultures?
-The Bloods and Crips:
-The Bloods and Crips were both African-American street gangs who were well-known for their rivalry with each other. Their notable crimes included murder, robbery and drug-trafficking.
What are Marxists’ general view on crime and an example?
-Marxists believe that crime is essentially the product of the inequalities generated by capitalism. They believe that the law protects all citizens within a country on a surface level, however it is there to protect the interests of the upper and middle class.
-For example, Health and Safety Laws protect all workers in theory, but the ‘hidden agenda’ behind such laws is to ensure that company bosses don’t open themselves up to compensation claims following injury to their staff.
-An example of this is the Grenfell Tower incident where health and safety laws did little to protect working class residents.
How do Marxists believe the law is selectively enforced?
-Marxists believe that the law applies to everyone, however it is selectively enforced. The over-policing of working class areas mean that a higher proportion of wc people are stopped and searched. Meanwhile, middle-class people are under policed and all too easily escape justice.
What was Chambliss’ study about?
-In his study of two American gangs, the Saints and the Roughnecks, he found that negative labelling combined with selective law enforcement was often based upon perceptions of social class.
-Despite committing similar acts of delinquency, the middle-class backgrounds of the Saints meant that they easily escaped prosecution.
-However, the wc backgrounds of the ‘Roughnecks’ meant that they received severe law enforcement.
-Chambliss argued that this is typical of how the law serves the interests of the bourgeoisie over-penalising the poor while the wealthy escape justice.
What are Marxists’ view on whether working class people commit crimes?
-Working class crime typically reflect the materially deprived neighbourhoods in which people live in. These areas are often considered to be socially disorganised, with weak informal social controls resulting in a lack of community solidarity.
-Marxists acknowledge that there is a correlation between the fact that crimes such as burglary, vehicle theft etc… occur in the poorest areas of towns/cities. Here, weak informal social controls mean that the behaviour of offenders goes unnoticed.
-This allows offenders to escape justice. But it is the lives of the poor who are affected most. In the more affluent suburbs, residents have the ability to pay for alarms, security etc… Stronger, informal social controls mean that anti-social behaviour is less tolerated.
What is white-collar crime?
-white collar crime is crimes committed by the more affluent in society, who abuse their positions within their middle-class occupations to personally benefit from their crimes.
What is Hazel Croall’s study about?
-Croall claims that white-collar crime does not fit the social construction of what ‘typical crime’ is. In capitalist societies, it is in the interests of the bourgeoisie to create an illusion that crime is an wc issue.
-After all, there is often indirect victimisation associated with white collar crimes such as fraud. However, blue-collar crimes often have direct victims (such as an assault victim) and, therefore it is much easier to create an impression of the ‘typical offender’.
-Croall claims that this is dangerous for society, as middle-class crimes go easily unnoticed, even though they can be very serious.
What is a contemporary example to support Hazel Croall’s study?
-Major Charles Ingram: ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’
-Ingram is from a middle class, professional background. He, along with his associates, cheated the game show in order to win the jackpot.
-Although he was prosecuted, Marxists would point out that he was spared prison and escaped with only a fine, further highlighting the injustices in law.
What was Jamie Goldstraw-White’s study about?
in her interviews with 41 white-collar criminals across 5 different prisons, Goldstraw-White highlights the problems we experience in society in taking this form of criminality seriously.
-For example, these crimes are hard to detect as crimes such as illegal business transactions are often unclear.
-Furthermore, many of the offenders she interviewed felt ‘morally justified’ by their actions, especially where it was often felt that ‘nobody had been harmed’ by crime. One prisoner even said, ‘It’s not like I’m a real criminal’.
-Goldstraw-White provides further support that crime is indeed socially constructed as a wc problem.
What is an evaluation for Goldstraw-White’s study?
-Critics claim that Goldstraw-White’s interviews didn’t have a large sample, and problems relating to the interviewer effect may have damaged the validity of her conclusions.
What is corporate crime?
-refers to criminal acts committed by companies in order to maximise their profits. Victims tend to be employees, consumers and the public.
What was Laureen Snider’s study about and a contemporary example for that?
-Snider looks at corporate crime in greater depth. She takes a Marxist view in pointing out that, when compared to street crimes, corporate crimes cause more harm and cost than any wc crime. She claims that, when corporate crimes take place, it is difficult pin-pointing who exactly is to blame, making it hard for people to get prosecuted.
-In 2022, it was reported that P&O Ferries would not face criminal actions over the mass sacking of 800 staff earlier that year. According to a BBC report, the firm sacked staff without notice, replacing them with agency workers who were paid less than the minimum wage. Marxists would cite this as another example reinforcing the double standards that exists in the way the law is implemented.
What are three evaluations for traditional Marxist views on crime?
-Marxists are accused of being deterministic. Marxists claims that wc crime is often the result of poverty. Other sociologists, such as Right Realists, claim that people always have a choice and that crime is not necessarily beyond their control.
-There is increasingly a clamp-down on tax evasion, which Marxists ignore. In response to gaining criticism on tax evasion, the government have announced a dedicated ‘task force’ which has been set to specifically address the problem. This shows that measures are being introduced to address the issues Marxists raise.
-Communism is not a realistic solution to the ‘crime problem’. Capitalist countries do not (contrary to Marxist beliefs) always have high crime rates. Switzerland is a capitalist country, yet its crime rate is very low. Likewise, communist countries like Cuba have high crime rates, even though Marxists claim that it is capitalism that breeds crime.
What are Taylor, Walton and Young’s study about?
-Neo-Marxists recommend combining Marxism with Labelling theory in order to provide a fully social theory of deviance.
-They agree with traditional Marxists that capitalism essentially causes crime. However, they claim that crime is a rational choice- a deliberate intention on behalf of the offender to do wrong.
-For example, burglary is often considered in the eyes of the criminal to be a means of ‘re-distributing wealth’ more fairly.
What is a contemporary example to support Taylor, Walton and Young’s study?
-2011 London Riots: it was initially sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan however, it was also an opportunity to protest against poor living conditions and detoriating wc communities. Rioting in this case was a form of political resistance.
How do Neo-Marxists combine labelling theory with Marxism?
-they claim that it is often the material deprivation linked to social class that enable powerful labels to be formed, resulting in the criminalising of certain groups.
What is Stuart Hall’s study about?
-Hall’s research highlights the way in which Marxism and the Labelling Theory can be combined to explain crime.
-Media reports of as rise in ‘mugging’ during the 1970s successfully focused on creating a folk devil of young, black men living in poor neighbourhoods. The negative label led to an increase in stigma, leading to a rise in police ‘ stop and search’ and general targeting of young, black men in public.
-This artificially increased the representation of black, wc men in crime statistics.
What are two evaluations of neo-marxism?
-According to Left Realists, radical criminology only focus on the offender in their analysis, overlooking the impact on the victim, especially in wc sectors.
-Is crime really linked to political resistance? Critics point out that most crime exists within the same social class as the offenders themselves.
