Functionalism on crime Flashcards
What are Durkheims key ideas?
- Crime is inevitable.
- The perfect amount of crime will keep society healthy and avoid anomie (normlessness).
- Crime has positive functions.
What are the postive functions of crime?
- Boundary maintenance
- Adaptation
- Safety cohesion
- Safety value
- Malfunctioning society
What is boundary maintenance?
Reaffrims social norms and values of the law abiding majority.
This may be done through rituals of the courtroom, which dramatise wrongdoing discouraging others from rule breaking.
What is adaptation?
Functional rebels change the collective conscience for the better.
What happens to social cohesion?
Strengthened as we unite in disapproval.
Who promotes the saftey value?
Davis.
What is the saftey value?
A little bit of deviance reduces more serious problems.
EXAMPLE: Prositution as men releases sexual tension/frustration without threating their marriage which maintains the nuclear family.
What is the malfunctioning society?
Links to the warning device that states that criminal activity alerts us to other social problems.
What does strain theory focus on?
Why people commit crime.
What is Merton’s key idea?
People engage in deviant behaviour when they are unable to achieve socially approved goals.
How does Merton explain criminality?
- Deviance is the result between the American dream + legitimate ways if achieveing them.
- In response to strain within unequal socities produces frustration as some people cannot achieve the goals legititmately.
What is the response to strain?
Conformists.
What are the deviant adaptations?
- Innovators
- Rebels
- Ritualists
- Retreatists
What are conformists?
Those who fail to achieve success but still believe that hard work will help them achieve their goals.
What are innovators?
- Those who realise they cannot achieve success by conforming to conventional means of hard work.
- They create new ways to achieve which may lead criminality.
What are rebels?
Those who react badly to not achieveing goals therefore abandon it all together and create new goals.
EXAMPLE: Martin Luther King.
What are ritualists?
- Those who cope with failure by forgetting about the goal.
- They compensate for their failure by obessing over the means and therefore work hard and don’t relate/irritate others, resulting in them not progressing in the workplace.
What are retreatists?
- Those who give up on the goals as they lack the self belief to achieve them.
- Convert to habitual drugs and become alcoholics.
Why do some people convert to deviant adaptations?
Lower class and ethnic minorities are more likely to commit criminal acts because of their position in the social structure.
Who researched into status frustration on w/c boys?
Cohen.
What did Cohen find?
- A subcultural strain theory which argues lower class people are frustrated beacuse they want to be successful but lack the qualifications/skills to do so.
- They solve this frustration by rejecting society and creating their own subcultures in a gang.
- Here they achieve status through non-utilitarian crimes like violence and graffiti.
Who conducted research into opportunity structures?
Cloward and Ohlin.
What did Cloward and Ohlin find?
That not all subcultures responded to failure in the same way and where you live dictates the type of criminal activity available.
What are the subcultures founded by Cloward and Ohlin?
- Criminal
- Conflict
- Retreatist
