Functionalist, Strain And Subultural Theories

Question 1

What is the functionalist belief about crime?

Answer 1

Functionalism sees society as based on value consensus. Sees members of society as sharing a common culture. A culture is a set of shared norms, values, beliefs, and goals. Sharing the same culture produces social solidarity - it binds individuals together, telling them what to strive for and how to conduct themselves. Social solidarity is maintained through socialisation plus social control. Socialisation instils the shared culture into its members. Social control sanctions are imposed to manage conformity (informal + formal).

Question 2

What did Durkheim claim about crime?

Answer 2

Durkheim claimed crime is healthy for a society, therefore crime can be functional. Durkheim said that crime was inevitable and universal. Every known society has some level of crime and deviance - a crime-free society is a contradiction in terms. For Durkheim (1893), ‘crime is normal…. an integral part of all healthy societies’.

Question 3

What 3 reasons are there for crime and deviance being found in all societies?

Answer 3

• Inadequate socialisation - not everyone is equally effectively socialised into the shared norms and values, so some individuals will be prone to deviate.
• Diversity of lifestyle - particularly in complex modern societies. Different groups develop their own subcultures with distinctive norms and values, and what the members of the subculture regard as normal, mainstream culture may see as deviant.
• Anomie - the rules governing behaviour become weaker and less clear-cut. Normlessness - not having the norms that everyone else has. Crime is more common in the city compared to traditional societies (rural) because there are weaker less clear norms which weakens collective conscience.

Question 4

What are the positive functions of crime?

Answer 4

• Boundary Maintenance
• Adaptation and change
• Crime acts as warning device
• Crime acts as a safety valve

Question 5

How is boundary maintenance a positive function of crime?

Answer 5

Crime produces a reaction from society, uniting its members in condemnation of the wrongdoer and reinforcing their commitment to the shared norms and values. People prefer if the wrongdoer is punished. This reminds other citizens of the value consensus which therefore strengthens its effectiveness. Crime creates social solidarity, a sense of togetherness, in society that serves to bind the wider community together. Punishment deters other from committing crime.

Question 6

How is adaptation and change a positive function of crime?

Answer 6

There must be scope for them to challenge and change existing norms and values, and in the first instance this will inevitably appear as deviance. However, in the long run. Their values may give rise to a new culture and morality.

Question 7

How is crime acting as warning device a positive function of crime?

Answer 7

According to Cohen, certain crimes act as a warning light that there is something dysfunctional in an aspect of society. Thus may draw attention to the problem leading to measures to resolve it. For example, riots (Mark Duggan (2011)), protest marches, and school truancy all signal that there is discontent and change needs to be made to the social system. Criminal activity can sometimes show that a current social policy has lost its functions in society.

Question 8

How is crime acting as a safety valve a positive function of crime?

Answer 8

Functionalist Davis suggests that a certain amount of deviant behaviour can be beneficial to the maintenance of social order. Davis uses the continuation of prostitution and pornography as evidence to support his claim. Pornography and prostitution provide sexual satisfaction for sexually frustrated men without threatening the family as an institution. This is because prostitution acts as a safety valve and it provides a release from the strains that threaten family life. It is more beneficial to maintain the nuclear family in society than to stamp out prostitution.

Question 9

Evaluation of Durkheim’s theory

Answer 9

✅ A useful explanation. A strength of Durkheim’s theory of crime is that it offers a social explanation for the causes of crime as opposed to crime being biologically (genetic) and psychologically (maternal deprivation) determined, which were prevalent at that time. The implication for society is that crime levels can be controlled by social engineering (i.e. social policies.

❌ Ignores social differences. It does not account why certain individuals (based on class, inequality, ethnicity, or gender) are more prone to commit crime than others. This suggests Durkheim’s theory offers only a partial explanation of crime as it cannot account for the social differences that can influence who commits a crime.

❌ Ignores crimes of the powerful. Marxists are critical because it fails to explain the relationship between power and crime. It fails to acknowledge criminal laws are made to benefit powerful social groups; the bias of law enforcement agencies (the police and the courts) is against the lower-working-classes. For example, the police are more likely to focus on working class crime and they are more likely to be arrested and prosecuted than those crimes committed by the powerful (e.g. business activities). The theory does not account for the fact that those in power can influence the social distribution of crime in society, which leads to a biased view of the criminal statistics of working class people.

❌ Not appropriate to modern society. Durkheim’s theory may be outdated or, at best, is more appropriate for more simplistic societies rather than modern multi-cultural societies, such as in the UK. Modern industrialised social groups with varied cultures are more fragmented and diverse, and it is hard to see how there can be a shared agreement on morality in society. The suggestion is the theory there is no longer applicable to contemporary society, as not everyone shares the same values to strengthen social cohesion.

❌ Theoretical contradiction. Does deviance help promote social stability and reaffirm moral boundaries through punishment if offenders, or does it prepare the way for social change through the testing of society’s social boundaries?

Question 10

What did Merton believe?

Answer 10

Merton, a functionalist, expanded on Durkheim’s concept of anomie to explain criminal and deviant behaviour. His theory, named strain theory, was written in the 1930s and based on American capitalist society. Merton explained the causes of crime and deviance were due to structural inequality (unequal opportunities mainly due to class position) which can lead to some people deviating from the agreed basic rules of society. He notes the interplay of two factors which can lead to crime and deviance: structural and cultural.

Question 11

What is the interplay of structural and cultural factors that cause crime and deviance?

Answer 11

Structural factors - society’s unequal opportunity structure.

Cultural factors - the strong emphasis on success goals and the weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.

For Merton, deviance is the result of a strain between two things:

• The goals that a culture encourages individuals to achieve.
• What the institutional structure of society allows them to achieve legitimately.

For example, American culture values ‘money success’ - individual material wealth and the high status that goes with it.

Question 12

What is the American dream?

Answer 12

Americans are expected to pursue this goal by legitimate: self-discipline, study, educational qualifications, and hard work in a career. The ideology of the ‘American Dream’ tells Americans that their society is meritocratic.

However, many disadvantaged groups are denied opportunities to achieve legitimately.

The resulting strain between the cultural goal of money, success and the lack of legitimate opportunities to achieve it produces frustration, and this in turn creates a pressure to resort to illegitimate means such as crime and deviance. Merton calls this pressure to deviate, the strain to anomie.

The pressure to deviate is further increased by the fact that American culture puts more emphasis on achieving success at any price than upon doing so by legitimate means. Tho goal creates a desire to succeed, and lack of opportunity creates a pressure to adopt illegitimate means.

Question 13

What are the 5 deviant adaptations to strain?

Answer 13

Merton argues that an individual’s position in the social structure affects the way they adapt or respond to the strain to anomie. Logically, there are five different types of adaptation, depending on whether an individual accepts, rejects or replaces approved cultural goals and the legitimate means of achieving them.

Conformity: Individuals accept the culturally approved goals and strive to achieve them legitimately. This is most likely among middle-class individuals who have good opportunities to achieve, but Merton sees it as the typical response of most Americans.

Innovation: Individuals accept the goal of money success but use ‘new’, illegitimate means such as theft or fraud to achieve it. As we have seen, those at the lower end of the class structure are under great pressure to innovate.

Ritualism: Individuals give up on trying to achieve the goals but have internalised the legitimate means and so they follow the rules for their own sake. This is typically of lower middle class office workers in dead-end, routine jobs.

Retreatism: Individuals reject both the goals and the legitimate means and become dropouts. Merton includes ‘psychotics, outcasts, vagrants, tramps, chronic drunkards and drug addicts’ as examples.

Rebellion: Individuals reject the existing society’s goals and means, but they replace them with new ones in a desire to bring about revolutionary change and create a new kind of society. Rebels include political radicals and counter-culture such as hippies.

Question 14

Evaluation of Merton

Answer 14

✅ It explains the high level of working class crime. It provided a key explanation for the disproportionately high working class representation in criminal statistics and among the prison population.

❌ The unreliability of official statistics. Merton’s theory explains why the working class are over represented in criminal statistics. However, it is generally recognised how unreliable official crime statistics can be. For example, it is now well known that white collar crime and middle class crime are more widely committed than crime statistics would have us believe. In this respect, Merton has also been criticised for exaggerating working class crime and ignoring crimes of the powerful.

❌ The exaggeration of agreed consensus. Exaggerated this degree of consensus in America and other Western capitalist societies that everyone is pursuing the goals of material wealth. This may have been there in the 1930s, but in modern plural 21st century society with a diversity of different cultures, many people do not share the same material objects.

❌ The strain theory does not necessarily lead to crime. The strain theory cannot account for why some people - especially those form working class - do not turn to criminal activity but comply with the values of mainstream society.

❌ Purposeless crimes. Accounts for crimes and deviance that are economically driven. However, it fails to explain criminal acts that have been committed just for ‘fun’ such as vandalism, violent crime and sexual crime.

Question 15

What is Hirshi’s Control theory?

Answer 15

He shares similar views to Durkheim about social order and the need for socialisation and shared values. He differs from Durkheim because rather than explaining why crime happens, he prefers to focus on explaining why it doesn’t happen more often. To explain this he focuses on four social bonds. These four social bonds are the things that prevent us.

Question 16

What are Hirschi’s four social bonds?

Answer 16

1: Belief: People share moral beliefs, such as respect for rights of others and need for obedience to the law.
2. Commitment: People are committed to conventional activities like working, getting educated, raising a family and building for the future. They have a stake in conformity, and have no wish to risk this through crime and delinquency.
3. Involvement: People are involved and kept busy with sports teams, school activities, community and religious groups, and social clubs. They have no time or opportunity for crime.
4. Attachment: People are attached to those around them, like family, friends and those in their local community, and sensitive to and interested in their needs and wishes.

Question 17

Evaluation of control theory

Answer 17

✅ Recognises the importance of socialisation and social control in maintaining a cohesive society, and the idea of social integration through social bonds is well established in functionalist theory.

❌ It assumes that those who commit crime and deviance have broken away from the bonds tying them into mainstream values, but Merton’s theory and Matza’s work suggest that criminals are committed to those values.

❌ It doesn’t explain why some have weaker bonds than others, or for that matter why all those with weaker bonds don’t turn to crime.

❌ It doesn’t explain the variety of forms of deviance and crime.

❌ It doesn’t recognise that it is possible to be deviant and have tight social bonds, as for example among well interpreted middle class drug users or white collar criminals with successful careers.

Question 18

What does Cohen say about Merton’s strain theory?

Answer 18

Cohen agrees with Merton that crime is largely committed by the working class. It results from the inability of them to achieve mainstream success goals by legitimate means such as educational achievement. Cohen criticises Merton’s explanation of deviance on two grounds:

1 Merton sees deviance as an individual response to strain, ignoring the fact that much deviance is committed in or by groups, especially among the young.

2 Merton focuses on utilitarian crime committed for material gain, such as theft or fraud. He largely ignores crimes such as assault and vandalism, which may have no economic motive.

Question 19

What is Cohen’s subcultural strain theory?

Answer 19

Cohen focuses on W/C boys, saying that they face anomie in the middle class dominated school system. They suffer from cultural deprivation and lack the skills to achieve. This leaves them at the bottom of the official status hierarchy. As a result of this, boys suffer frustration and they resolve their frustration by rejecting mainstream middle class values and they turn instead to other boys in the same situation, forming or joining a delinquent subculture referred to as an alternative status system. They gain status from their peers by doing acts of vandalism.

Question 20

Evaluation of Cohen’s subcultural status frustration theory

Answer 20

✅ Crime is a collective response. Cohen’s subculture explanation links deviance with status and explains how working class and youthful deviance is, in fact, a collective response, as opposed to an individualistic response, which also explains why crime is often a young white working class phenomenon, supported by official statistics.

✅ Non-utilitarian crimes. Able to explain non-utilitarian crimes (crimes without monetary gain e.g. vandalism and joyriding), something other theories fail to account for such as functionalist, interactionist and Marxist theories.

❌. Partial explanation. Can only partially explain crime and deviance since it focuses only on working-class males, ignores middle-class males and female subcultures as well as corporate and white-collar crime. It also claims crime is a group activity went at times this is clearly not so. This would suggest subcultural theory offers only a partial explanation.

❌ Little empirical evidence. Short and Strodbeck (1965) found little evidence to suggest gangs reject the middle class values of society. The young delinquent needs to be extremely intelligent to work out middle class values and then ‘invert’ them.

❌ The working class does accept mainstream values. Box (1981) argues Cohen’s theory can only be applied to a small number of delinquents. The remainder of delinquents accepts mainstream cultures and values. He suggests working class youngsters resent being seen as failures by teachers and middle class youngsters whose values they do not share. They simply turn against those who look down on them.

Question 21

What do Cloward and Ohlin say about Cohen and Merton?

Answer 21

They agreed with Merton and Cohen’s view that the opportunities for working class to succeed materially by legitimate means are severely restricted. However, what they failed to recognise is those who lack legitimate opportunities do not necessarily turn to utilitarian crimes. Some resort to other forms of criminal behaviour such as drug taking, violence or being in a gang.

Question 22

What is Cloward and Ohlin’s idea?

Answer 22

They suggest:

• Illeigitmate opportunities structures. As well as accepting that unequal access to legitimate opportunity structures leads to crime, there is also a parallel opportunity structure - what they’re referred to as ‘illegitimate opportunities structures’. However, even within the illegitimate opportunity structure there is unequal access to them. For example, not everyone who fails at school becomes a drug dealer.
• Dependent on the type of neighbourhood. Cloward and Ohlin believe different neighbourhoods have different deviant subcultures which provide different illegitimate opportunities. This gives youngsters in the neighbourhood the opportunity to learn and develop a criminal career. By accepting the illegal opportunity structure, individuals can obtain society’s goals. They identify three types of subculture gangs an individuals can join, dependent in the neighbourhood’s characteristics.

Question 23

What three types of subculture gangs did Cloward and Ohlin identify?

Answer 23

1. Criminal subcultures - mainly refer to crimes that bring financial and material rewards. This type of subculture tends to form in working-class neighbourhoods where youngsters are absorbed into utilitarian crimes and are likely to occur where established and organised adult criminal activity already exists. In this way, youngsters serve as apprentices to criminal adults, where they can learn the tricks of the trade and are given the opportunity to rise through the criminal hierarchy.
2. Conflict subcultures - refers to ‘gang’ type behaviour and occurs where there is no established organised criminal world, possibly due to a high turnover in the neighbourhood population. In such neighbourhood communities, with little opportunity to succeed both through legitimate means or illegitimate opportunities, youngsters express their frustration in the form of conflict or violent gangs as a means of obtaining status and respect.
3. Retreatist subcultures - refers to young people who have failed to succeed in both legitimate or illegitimate (conflict or criminal) subcultures. These double failures sometimes form retreatist subcultures (dropouts) organised mainly around illegal drug use.

Question 24

Evaluation of Cloward and Ohlin’s illegitimate opportunity structure

Answer 24

✅ A fuller explanation than other subcultural theories. It incorporates both aspects of Merton and Cohen’s theory, but goes one step further and shows criminal subcultures are not solely concerned with material gains but provide additional explanations for the existence of several different delinquent subcultures.

❌ Categorisation is too simplified. Difficult to accept that such a neat distinction of deviant subcultures into three clear categories. For example, which category would a terrorist fall under?

❌ Partial explanation since it focuses only on working class males; it igniters middle class males, female subculture crime, and corporate and white-collar crime.

❌ Not everyone shares the same mainstream goals. Taylor, Walton and Young (1973), claim Cohen’s (and Merton’s) explanation is to some extent fundamentally flawed. It makes the basic assumption everyone is initially committed to the same goals of success, e.g. achieving material wealth. This is incorrect, as some deviant subcultural groups such as ‘hippies’ and ‘tramps’ often make a conscious decision to reject mainstream goals.

❌ Delinquency leads to blocked opportunities. The relationship between blocked opportunities which lead to delinquent criminal behaviour may be the other way round. Delinquency occurs first which leads to blocked aspirations and opportunities.

❌ Subcultural groups are not frustrated by failure. Walter Miller rejects Cloward and Ohlin’s views. He suggests lower class youngsters never accepted mainstream norms and material values of success in the first place; they have their own distinct set of subcultural values which are different from mainstream society. These unique subcultural values include ‘toughness’, ‘smartness’, ‘excitement’ and ‘fatalism’. These are exaggerated by lower class youth members to achieve status recognition from their peers. These subcultural values mean lower class youngsters are more likely to be involved with in crime and deviant behaviour.

❌ Drift theory questions subcultural theories. David and Matza (1964) challenge the subcultural theories. They argue delinquents are not different with distinct subcultural values from other members of mainstream society but simply ‘drift’ in and out of trouble, and at the same time hold the same values of those of mainstream society.

Question 25

What are some other important subcultural theories found studying the Chicago school?

Answer 25

• Cultural transmission theory (Shaw and McKay). They noted how some neighbourhoods develop a criminal tradition and or culture that is transmitted from generation to generation, while other neighbourhoods remain relatively crime-free over the same period.
• Differential association theory (Sutherland). Sutherland was interested in the processes by which people become deviant. He argues that deviance was behaviour learned through social interaction with others who are deviant. This includes learning both criminal values and criminal skills.
• Social disorganisation theory (Park and Burgess). They argued that deviance is the product of social disorganisation. Changes such as rapid population turnover and migration creates instability, disrupting family and community structures. These become unable to exercise social control over individuals, resulting in deviance.

Question 26

What is Walter Miller’s subcultural theory?

Answer 26

Focal Concerns.

Miller suggested that working class boys were socialised into a number of distinct values that together meant that they were more likely than others to be delinquent or submit to delinquent behaviour. Miller described the values as “focal concerns”.

Concern Evaluation

• Excitement They seek out excitement (particularly when not at work.
• Toughness They wish to prove that they are tough/“hard”.
• Smartness They use wit (which might include “smart” remarks.
• Trouble Linked to excitement and toughness, they might well find themselves in trouble.
• Autonomy They wish to be independent and not reliant on others.
• Fate They believe that their future is already decided; what they do won’t influence it.

Question 27

Evaluation of Miller’s six focal concerns

Answer 27

Miller’s six focal concerns definitely still have relevance in explaining WC crime today because criminal subcultures do tend to form in working class neighbourhoods. They have a fatalistic attitude and so give up on education and a future very early on and resort to crime that, initially, is not utilitarian, for example, vandalism, violence, drink driving. They believe that what they do won’t have an effect on their future. These acts are done in working class areas because they are usually under funded so there aren’t any clubs or activities to do leading them to deviate to crime. They wish to gain status after being shunned from education and society so they want to prove their toughness and smartness by getting into trouble.

They want to be independent and not reliant on others because they are used to being let down (education, government, perhaps parents) and don’t want to appear weak which could mean lower status from peers. These distinct values are either reinforced by their parents or their peers so not conforming is social suicide and they won’t belong to any subculture. Performing acts like this can develop into utilitarian crime where it is for material gains rather than status.

Question 28

Criticisms of the functionalist based explanations of crime and deviance

Answer 28

• Taylor et al says it is wrong to assume this, pointing out that not everyone is committed to mainstream goals. For example, some religious sects reject the struggle for material success in favour of alternative spiritual goals, and job satisfaction may be more important to some workers than career progression, financial success and lots of consumer goods.
• Subcultural explanations only explain working class delinquency and do not explain white collar and corporate crimes.
• They rely on the pattern shown in official statistics. However, a lot of crime is never reported, and a lot of offenders are never caught. This makes it difficult to know who the real offenders are, so subcultural explanations are inadequate as they are based on an unrepresentative sample of offenders.
• The idea of a delinquent subculture implies that working class youth are socialised into and committed to central values of delinquency. If true, this should lead to delinquent behaviour being widespread and persistent, but, as Matza found, most working class youth didn’t engage regularly in illegal acts, and those who do give it up in early adulthood.
• Matza criticises subcultural theories for making the delinquent out to be different from other people. Matza stresses the similarity between the values held by delinquents and those of mainstream society, and shows how ordinary delinquents actually are. He points out, for example, that they show feelings of outrage about crime in general similar to those of most people. When they are caught offending, neither delinquents express feelings of remorse, guilt and shame, and use what Matza calls techniques of neutralisation rooted in mainstream values to explain away their actions as justifiable or excusable temporary lapses in otherwise conformist behaviour - as exceptions to the rule. For example, they were only shoplifting because they wanted to get their mum a birthday present and didn’t have any money, or the person they were fighting with was a bully who deserved it. This shows a commitment to mainstream values, not a rejection of them. Matza also suggests that many young people commit only occasional delinquent activities as a means of achieving identity, excitement and peer group status for a short period of ‘drift’ in their lives before reaching full independent adult status. They have little serious commitment to delinquent values or a delinquent way of life, and many give it up as they grow older.