Subcultural Theories (Functionalism)

Question 1

Why does crime/deviance happen?
- Cohen

Answer 1

• WC boys face anomie in MC education system
• culturally deprived and lack skills to achieve
• bottom of the official status hierarchy
• suffer status frustration
• resolve it by rejecting mainstream MC values, form subculture
• subculture offers illegitimate opportunity structure
• provides alternative status hierarchy
• group inverter mainstream values, e.g. gain status from vandalism

Question 2

Evaluation of Cohen

Answer 2

• assumes WC boys start off sharing MC goals, only to reject them when they fail, ignoring the possibility that they never shared them in the first place and so weren’t reacting to failure

Question 3

Why does crime/deviance happen?
- Cloward and Ohlin

Answer 3

• C&O agrees with Merton that WC youths are denied legitimate opportunities and that their deviance stems from their response to this
• they note that not everyone adapts to a lack of legitimate opportunities by turning to ‘innovation’
• some resort to violence, others drug use
• able to access illegitimate opportunity structures

Three different subcultures:
- professional criminal subcultures
- conflict subcultures
- retreatist subcultures

Question 4

Criminal Subcultures (professionals)

Answer 4

• offer an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime
• long-standing, stable criminal culture
• hierarchy of professional adult crime
• provides opportunities on the criminal career ladder

Question 5

Conflict subcultures (Gangs)

Answer 5

• arise in areas of high population turnover
• no stable criminal network
• offers few illegitimate opportunities in loosely organised gangs
• violence provides a release for blocked opportunities
• alternative status is earned through winning ‘turf’

Question 6

Retreatist subcultures (Dropouts)

Answer 6

• double failures, fail in both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures
• turn into a retreatist subculture based on illegal drug use
• not everyone who aspires to be a professional criminal or gang leader actually succeeds

Question 7

Evaluation for Cloward & Ohlin

Answer 7

• Matza (1964), claims that delinquents are not strongly committed to their subculture or tied to a subculture in their neighborhood or community, as strain theory suggests, but merely drift in and out of delinquency