Functionalist Theories of Crime Flashcards
An action that breaks a written law of society.
Crime
An action that breaks the norms and values of a particular society.
Deviance
Methods used to persuade or force people to behave in socially accepted ways.
Social Control
Expected ways of behaving in society.
Norms
Beliefs about what is right and wrong.
Values
Believe that society is based upon value consensus.
Functionalism
Shared rules of behaviour become less clear.
Anomie
Society is made up of various institutions - they all need to be functioning properly for society to function.
Organic Anaology
A shared agreement about what is right and wrong.
Value Consensus
Shared morality/moral code.
Collective Conscience
Making individuals feel a part of something.
Social Solidarity
The shared beliefs and norms passed on through social institutions shapes and constrains the behaviour of the individual.
Structural Consensus Theory
Deviance facilitates social change. If people never deviated from a society’s norms and values, then society would never change.
Adaptation and Change
Crime produces a reaction from society, uniting its members against the wrongdoer and reinforcing the commitment to the value consensus.
Boundary Maintenance
Some deviance allows people to ‘let off steam’ in relatively harmless ways - allows people to de-stress.
Safety Valve
When crime/deviance occurs, it sends a message to us that society’s social order is breaking down. This prompts the government to do something about the problem.
Warning Light
People experience ‘strain’ because of blocked opportunities for reaching the American dream.
Merton’s Strain Theory
Response to strain theory - Individuals accept the money success goal but use illegitimate means to achieve it. This is typical of those who lack legitimate opportunities.
Innovation
He argues that lower class people are frustrated because they want to be successful but they lack the qualifications and skills to do so, leaving them at the bottom of the ‘status hierarchy’.
Cohen’s Status Frustration Theory
Illegitmate opportunity structure - Not everyone gets the same chance to be criminal, different neighbourhoods provide different illegitmate opportunities.
Cloward and Ohlin
Established criminal networks focused on utilitarian crime.
Criminal Subculture
Exist in areas with high population turn over, have limited access to opportunity structures.
Conflict Subculture
Formed where people have failed to succeed in both opportunity structures and are therefore ‘doube failures’.,
Retreatist Subculture
He suggests that working class boys are socialised into a number of distinct values that together meant they were more likely than others to engage in delinquent or deviant behaviour (exictement, toughness, smartness, autonomy, fate).
Miller’s Focal Concerns
