Key Sociologists - Crime and Deviance Flashcards
Pat Carlen - Feminist - The Class and Gender Deal
Women make a class deal which offers respectable working class women consumer goods in return for their wage.
Women make a gender deal for the psychological and material rewards offered by male breadwinners in return for their love and domestic labour.
When these rewards are not available or prove to be illusory, criminality becomes a viable alternative.
Written from a feminist perspective, Carlen studied a group of working class women aged between 15 and 46 who had been convicted of one or more crimes. She carried out in-depth, unstructured qualitative interviews with each of the women.
Carlen’s work was based on a relatively small sample (39 women) but it supports the view that criminal behaviour becomes more likely when social control breaks down.
Heidensohn - Feminist - Women Do Not Have The TIME for CRIME
In the domestic sphere: women are controlled by their societal expectation to conform to the expressive caregiver role.
In the public sphere: women are controlled by the threat of sexual violence from men. May not leave the house at night, for example.
In the work sphere: women are controlled by the hierarchy of male dominated workplaces. Subject to sexual harassment, too.
Due to these three levels of control, women do not have the time to crime.
Cohen - Functionalist - Cultural Deprivation, Status Frustration, Deviant Subculture
As a consequence of educational failure and poor employment prospects, working-class boys have little or no opportunity to achieve their goals.
Cohen holds the view that cultural deprivation accounts for working class boys’ lack of educational success. They become stuck at the lowest level of the stratification system and as a consequence of their lack of opportunity, they suffer from status frustration.
They turn to criminality as an alternative route to success, becoming members of a criminal subculture which values activities such as stealing, vandalism and truancy.
Merton - Functionalist - Five Ways to Respond to Goals
Conformity: this describes individuals who work towards achieving success by conventionally accepted means, eg by gaining educational qualifications which in turn give them access to secure, well paid employment.
Innovation: this describes individuals who are unable to succeed using conventionally accepted routes and turn to deviant means, usually crime.
Ritualism: this describes middle class individuals who are deviant because they abandon conventional success goals. They are unable to innovate because they have been strongly socialised to conform, but they have little opportunity for advancement and remain stuck in low paid, low status ‘respectable’ jobs.
Retreatism: this describes individuals from any social class position who are deviant because they abandon both success goals and any means of achieving them. They ‘drop out’ of society; this response can be applied to explain the behaviour of social outcasts of all kinds including vagrants and drug addicts.
Rebellion: this describes those individuals who reject success goals and the usual means of achieving them, but then replace those that they have rejected with different goals and means. They are deviant because they wish to create a new society, in Merton’s view they are typically members of a ‘rising’ social class who may well attempt to organise a revolution.
Becker - Interactionist - Labelling Theory. Master Status, Self Fulfilling Prophecy, Deviant Career
Writing from an interactionist perspective Becker argued that an act only becomes deviant when others define it as such.
Whether the ‘label’ of deviancy is applied depends on who commits the act, when and where it is committed, who observes the act, and the negotiations that take place between the various actors involved in the interaction.
The agents of social control, for example the police and the courts, have the power to make the label stick. The label applied to the individual becomes a master status; the young people have become criminals and this label will affect how others see them and respond to them. As a consequence the individuals will begin to see themselves in terms of the label, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy. The individual who has been publicly labelled as deviant is rejected from certain social groups on the basis of various negative assumptions about their future behaviour; this may well encourage further deviance, which in turn begins what Becker describes as the deviant career.
