Sociological Theories of Crime and deviance

• Crime is inevitable and normal aspect of society because not every member of society can be equally committed to the value consensus of society - particularly true in modern societies which have become more heterogeneous (made up of different types of people) so people are less likely to share same collective norms and values.
• Durkheim sees crime are having four positive functions:
  • Boundary testing - drawing attention to outdated laws.
  • A warning device - underlying social problems which need to be addressed.
  • A safety valve - releases stresses in society.
  • Strengthen collective values: brings people together.
• However, a large amount of crime is a sign of an anomic and dysfunctional society.
• Usefulness: shows ways in which deviance is necessary and functional for society
  • Davis - prostitution acts as a safety valve to release mens sexual frustrations without threatening the monogamous nuclear family
• However: no attempt is made to explain how much crime is the 'right amount'.
  • ignores how crime might affect different groups of individuals - functional for who?
  • Crime doesn't always promote solidarity, in some cases it make people feel more isolated.

• All members of society are socialised to have value consensus. In America people are encouraged to want certain cultural goals. However institutionalised means in society are not sufficient for everyone to obtain their cultural goals.Thus a strain develops between the goals and the means to achieve them leading to anomie. Merton sees five ways of responding to this:
• Conformity - accept goals and legitimate means - law-abiding middle class
• Innovation - accept goals but use deviant means - working class
• Ritualism - reject goals but conform to social norms and don't turn to crime - lower middle class office workers.
• Retreatism - reject both goals and legitimate means of society and drop out of society.
• Rebellion - reject goals and legitimate means and replace with new ones - usually members of a rising class.
• Usefulness -demonstrates how both 'normal' and deviant behaviour can arise
  • most crime is property crime - to gain material wealth and working class crime rates are higher.
• However, Marxist: ignores the power of the ruling class to make and enforce laws in their favour. It also only accounts for utilitarian crimes (for monetary gain) and does not explain crimes such as vandalism or state crime.

• Status is achieved via educational success and high status jobs. This is denied to certain groups of people (working class males) so status frustration leads them to seek other (illegitimate) means of achiecing it.
• often via an alternative status heirarchy (e.g.gangs) which create a deviant identity by reversing accepted forms of behaviour and valuing behavious such as rudeness to those in authority, petty crime, vandalism and violence.
• This is also a way of getting back at the society which has rejected them.
• Usefulness: Highlights the importance of structural problems in causing crime and deviance and helpts to explain non-utilitarian crime.
• However: Miller - delinquent sub-cultures do nor arise as some kind of reaction to the inability to achieve goals. Instead working class deviance is simply an exaggerated form of (normal) working class culture.

• People are socialised to value success
• those who have the mean to achieve success do so legitimately (education and work); those who are denied legitimate means still desire success so they pursue illegitimate means (crime and deviance)
• There are 3 illegitimate opportunity structures which explain why different sorts of deviance exist:
  • Criminal Subcultures: crime for financial gain, needs successful criminal role models.
  • Conflict Subcultures - crime as status where criminal subcultures don't exist.
  • Retreatest Subcultures - crime as a response to failure at all of the about.
• Usefulness: it helps explain why people may choose to become involved in criminal behaviour (it is a rational response to deprivation) and also explains why people develop different forms of deviant behaviour and identity.
• However: it assumes that everyone has the same basic goals in life, but people have a variety of goals in life. Some of which they manage to achieve and others which they fail to achieve. In addition, drug or alcohol abuse may not be a response to failure but may be an extension of working/social life.

• Criminal behaviour is learned through social interactions with others.
• In inner city environments which have high rates of crime have a differential social organisation (an alternative culture which is at odds with the law and which influences people)
• They have two cultures criminal and conventional which compete for the loyalty of the residents.
• An individual chooses the criminal cultures when reasons favour breaking the law exceed definitions unfavourable to breaking the law.
• Usefulness: highlights how it isn't a lack of social organisation that characterises areas which are high in crime and that since crime is a learnt behaviour, it can be applied to which collar and corporate crime.
• However: it assumes that people act rationally and deliberate carefully before acting, but some crimes are undertaken in the spur of the moment.

For Marxists, capitalism is criminogenic: by its very nature capitalism causes crime and deviance, because it is based on the exploitation of the working class. The law, the definition of crime and deviance, and the agencies of social control reflect and protect the ruling class interests and power, and are used to control the workforce, and criminalise those who oppose ruling class interests.

• Gordon: Causes of crime - crime is a rational response to the capitalist system - hence it is found in all social classes.
  • Working class crime: it may be the only way to survive; to obtain the consumer goods they are encouraged by advertising to buy; alienation may lead to frustration and aggression resulting in non-utilitarian crimes.
  • Middle class and ruling class crime: the values of capitalism (greed, self interest, profit etc) encourages white-collar and corporate crimes such as tax evasion and breaches of health and safety laws.
• Usefulness: offers a useful explanation of the relationship between crime and the capitalist society.
• However: not all capitalist societies have high crime rates

• All classes commit crime, but powerless groups such as the working class and ethnic minorities are criminalized. The police and courts tend to ignore the crimes of the powerful.
  • Reiman: street crimes are far more likely to be pursued than white collar crime
  • Bennet: middle class offenders were more likely to be cautioned than working class offenders for the same king of offences. This creates the impressions that criminal behaviour is something working class people do.
  • Sampson: as crime is regarded as most common among the working class, young and blacks there is a much greater police presence among these populations. The approach the police adopt towards them is also more confrontational.
• Usefulness: emphasises the importance of power and questions the ability of the state to influence the law creation and enforcement.
• However: it is too deterministic and ignores individual motivation (excitement, peer pressure)

• Gordon: the selective enforcement of the law helps to maintain ruling class power and reinforce ruling class ideology.
  • By giving the impression that criminals are located mainly in the working class.
  • By distracting the working class from their own exploitation and oppression.
  • By dividing the working class; by providing a safety valve that releases aggression that might otherwise be directed against the ruling class.
  • The media contribute by portraying criminals as disturbed individuals, concealing the fact that it is the nature of capitalism that makes people criminal.
• Usefulness: it shows the link between law making and enforcement and the interests of the capitalist class (something functionalists don't even consider).
• However: the criminal justice system does sometimes act against the interests of the capitalist class.

• Snider: in the USA, corporate crime does far more harm than 'street crime', but there are generally very few prosecutions for corporate crime.
• Slapper and Tombs: Argue that there is a diverse range of cooporate crime and that it is very widespread.
• Box: This is driven by the need to maintain profits in an increasingly global market. As law enforcement serves the interests of the capitalist class, the police and courts tend to ignore corporate and white collar crime because they involve powerful people, are often hard to detect or are not prosecuted and dealt with as criminal acts.
• Usefulness: recognises how the criminal justice system can be manipulated by the powerful and reflect the economic interests of the bourgeoisie.
• However: the law does not simply reflect the ruling class interests -there are a range of laws that benefit everyone.

• Neo-Marxists look not just as wider social structure as a cause of crime, but also what it means to the individual, reactions to the crime etc in order to understand criminal acts - a fully social theory of deviance.
  • Taylor, Walton and Young: Crime is a meaningful action and a conscious choice by the actor and often has a political motive, e.g. to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Criminals are not passive puppets whose behaviour is shaped by the nature of capitalism: they are deliberately striving to change society.
• Usefulness: It helps explain the individual motivations for crime, the reactions to it and the effects on the individual (labelling etc)
• However: It romanticises working class criminals as fighting capitalism and redistributing wealth. However in reality these criminals simply prey on the poor and it ignores the effects crime has on working class victims.

• Capitalism maintains control over the majority of the population via ideological dominance (through the media) and economic pressures (people want to keep their jobs and pay their bills).
• Only those groups not controlled by ideology and finance are able to provide some form of resistance to the hegemony of capitalism.
• The single largest group offering resistance is the working class youth and this is done through the clothes members wear, the music they listen to and the language they use.
• Usefulness: It highlights the power of ideology
• However: the majority of working class youths did not join subcultures and those who did not may not have accepted the CCCS's interpretations of their behaviour.

• Delinquents are committed to the same values and norms as other members of society most of the time and commit only occasional acts of delinquency (behave according to subterranean values in inappropriate situations) as a means of achieving identity, excitement and peer group status for a short period of 'drift' in their lives before being constrained by adult responsibilities, work etc.
• Delinquents justify ther own crimes as acceptions to the rule via techniques of neutralisation
• Usefulness: Less deterministic than other subcultural explanations, highlighting how behaviour is adaptable and involves choice and free will in addition, it shows how the delinquent is not different from other people.
• However: it ignores wider structural framework of economic and social circumstances that drive male working class youths into greater levels of delinquency than anyone else.

• The labelling process: Deviance is not a quality of the act commit but a consequence of the application by others of the rule and sanctions to an individual. Whether or not a deviant label is applied will depend on societal reaction based on who commits the act, when and where, who observes it and the negotiation of meaning between those involved.
  • The police often operate with a pre-conception of what constitutes 'trouble', criminal types, criminal areas etc, these influence their response to behaviour they come across.Their reaction thus is not dependent so much on the actual offence but the stereotypes of the offender.
• The consequences of labelling: The extent of deviance in society is dependent on the effects of labelling by the powerful agencies of social control. Deviance can be amplified by the act of labelling itself.
  • The labelled gain a master status that dominated and shapes how others see them. The deviant becomes in effect stigmatised.
  • Eventually a self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion. In this way deviance can become more frequent and often expanded into new areas.

• Becker:  Societal reaction and the reaction of the application of the deviant label produces more deviance than it prevents - deviancy amplification.
  • The mass media also amplify crime and deviance as they demonise deviants and create moral panics.
  • The deviancy amplification spiral is similar to Lermert's idea of secondary deviance. In both cases, the social reaction to the deviant act lead not to successful control of the deviance, but to further deviance, which in turn leads to greater reaction and so on.
  • Young and Cohen have shown this to be the case with youth subcultures such as hippies and mods and rockers.
• However: it is not certain that an individual will accept a label
• Interactionists too readily dismiss official statistics on crime - it assumes an act isn't deviant until it is labelled as such, yet many people know perfectly well that what they are doing is deviant.
• Gouldner argued that labelling is too deterministic and those labelled have a range of possible reactions other than just passively accepting the label - it ignores the importance of wider structural factors in creating deviance, and assumes it is all down to societal reaction.

• Cicourel: Juvenile crime rates are consistently higher in working class areas than middle class areas because the police viewed the behaviour of middle class and working class juveniles differently even why they were engaged in the same action.
  • The polices perception is that the middle class youth came from a 'good background' with lots of family support, so their behaviour was interpreted as temporary lapses, and charges were brought. They held the opposite perception of working class youth, and so more formal action was taken against them
• Lemert: Distinguished between primary and secondary deviance:
  • Primary Deviance: deviance that has not been publicly labelled as such and has few consequences for the person, so long as no one knows about it.
  • Secondary Deviance: when an offender is discovered, publically exposed and the label of deviant attached. This label then becomes that persons master status sustaining an alternative image in the deviants own eyes and in those of others become difficult.

Considers crime from the perspective of the New Right and reject economic factors for crime but blame cultural factors such as declining morality and respect for authority.

• 1. The breakdown in moral fabric of society: Marsland: schools and religion have become less effective agencies of control. This has led to a decline in morality so crime has increased.
• 2. Underclass: Murray: the welfare state has created dependency and weakened the work ethic. The underclass have norms and values which encourage crime, hence, they are responsible for a great deal of anti-social behaviour.
• 3. A breakdown of social order: Wilson: Community breakdown and the loss of informal social control leads to more crime. Linked to Broken Window Theory areas will deteriorate if vandalism etc. is not tackled as it sends out a message that criminals are free to commit crime.
• 4. Opportunities for crime: Cornish and Clarke: Individuals engage in crime when opportunities present themselves and there seems to be a little risk involves e.g. 2011 riots.
• 5. Crime as a rational choice: Cornish and Clarke: crime is seen as 'attractive' by some mostly because of a 'lenient' criminal justice system this encourages reoffending and others to do the same. Criminals only decide on a course of action after a ration process - cost/benefit.

• Usefulness:
  • can link to relevant solutions to crime (CCTV, tougher sentences etc.)
  • has influences government policy in UK and USA.
  • It recognises that if minor problems aren't addressed, they may grow into more serious crime
• However:
  • rather than the existence of an underclass, the decline in demand for unskilled labour has led to a rise in crime.
  • it ignores wider structural causes of crime.
  • zero tolerance policing means the police concentrate their attention on minor offenders/offences thus ignore corporate crime etc. which is more costly to society
  • Informal control measures, such as CCTV seem to displace crime rather than discourage it
  • Do offenders always act rationally?

Sees the causes of crime in the economic structure of society. It rejects the way earlier Left approaches seemed to romanticise crime and emphasises instead how the weakest sections of society bear the most of the costs of crime.

Causes of crime: Lea and Young:

• 1. Relative deprivation: the gap between the expectations people have, and the reality of what they can obtain. Crime can this arise from the experiences of particular groups even if living standards in general are rising.
• 2. Marginalisation: A lack of organisations to represent their interests in political life, and which lack a clearly defined goal means these groups are particularly prone to the use of violence and riots as forms of political action.
• 3. Subcultures: The collective solution to the above problems. As these groups are not completely separate from wider social since they share, for example, a high value place on material wealth, subcultures may develop norms and values which legitimate or encourage crime and deviance. In these ways crime is related to the economic structure of society. However, a particular subculture is not an automatic, inevitable response to a situation.

• Usefulness:
  • it explains the social causes of crime and recognises that tackling crime means tackling inequalities (Young).
  • it recognises that most victims of crime are poor and working class.
  • it recognises a 'multi-agency' approach to solving crime
  • it has been influential on social policy in the UK (elected police commissioners, improving relationships with communities etc).
• However:
  • it fails to explain why some people who experience relative deprivation turn to crime whilst others do not
  • their theories appear to rely on speculation rather than being based on research
  • it over simplifies the causes of crime
  • corporate and white collar crime cannot be clearly understood within the framework of their theory.