Functionalist, strain and subcultural theories

-While functionalists see too much crime as destabilising society, they see it as inevitable and universal. Every known society has a certain degree of crime and deviance; a crime free society is a contradiction in terms. For Durkheim, 'crime is normal...an integral part of all healthy societies' 

-There are at least two reasons why crime and deviance are found in all societies. Firstly, not everyone is effectively socialised into the shared norms and values, so some individuals will be prone to deviate. Secondly, particularly in complex modern societies, there is a diversity of lifestyles and values. 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. 

-In Durkheim's view, modern societies tend towards anomie; the rules governing our behaviour become weaker and less clear cut. This is because modern societies have a specialised, complex division of labour, which leads to individuals becoming increasingly different from one another. This weakens the shared culture or collective conscience and results in higher levels of deviance. For example, Durkheim sees suicide as a result of anomie. 

-Crime produces a reaction from society, uniting its members in condemnation of the wrongdoer  and reinforcing their commitment to the shared norms and values.

-For Durkheim, this explains the function of punishment. This is not to make the wrongdoer to suffer or mend his ways, nor is it to remove crime from society. Durkheim's view is that the purpose of punishment is to reaffirm society's shared views and reinforce social solidarity. 

-This may be done through the rituals of the courtroom, which dramatise wrongdoing and stigmatise the offender. This reaffirms the values of the law abiding majority and discourages others from law breaking. Cohen has examined the important role played by the media in the 'dramatisation of evil'. In this view, media coverage of crime and deviance often creates 'folk devils'.

-For Durkheim, all change starts with an act of deviance. Individuals with new ideas, values and ways of living must not be completely stifled by the weight of social control. There must be some scope for them to challenge and change existing norms and values, and in the first instance it will appear to be deviance. 

-For example, the authorities often persecute religious visionaries who espouse a new message or value system. 

-However, in the long run their values may give rise to a new culture and reality. If those with new ideas are suppressed, society will stagnate and be unable to make necessary adaptive changes.

-Thus for Durkheim, neither too much or too little crime is desirable; too much crime threatens to break the bonds of society and too little crime suggests that society is supressing individual freedom and preventing change.

-Davis argues that prostitution acts as a safety valve for the release of men's sexual frustrations without threatening the monogamous nuclear family.

-Polsky argues that **** channels a variety of sexual desires away that would otherwise lead to greater alternatives such as adultery, which would pose a greater threat to the nuclear family. 

-Cohen identifies another function of deviance: a warning that an institution isn't working properly. For example, high levels of truancy suggest that there is a problem with the education system that needs to be fixed by the policy makers by effective change. 

-Erikson suggests that if deviance performs positive functions for society, then it suggests that society is organised in a way to promote deviance. He indicates that social control agencies are there to maintain a certain level of deviance, rather than to eradicate it completely. This has been  further developed by labelling theory. 

-Societies sometimes also manage and regulate deviance rather than eliminate it entirely. For example, festivals, freshers week and demonstrations all license misbehaviour that may otherwise be punished. Young people may be given the chance to 'sow their wild oats'. From a functionalist perspective, it helps deal with the transition to adulthood. 

-Strain theories argue that people engage in deviant behaviour when they're unable to achieve socially approved goals by legitimate means. For example, they may become frustrated and turn to criminal means of getting what they want, or lash out at others in anger, or find comfort for their failure in drug use. 

-The first strain. theory was developed by Merton, who adapted Durkheim's concept of anomie to explain deviance. Merton's explanation combines two elements:

-Structural factors: Society's equal opportunity structure.

-Cultural factors: The strong emphasis on success gain 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 and 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.

-Americans are expected to pursue this goal by legitimate means: Self-discipline, study, educational qualifications and hard work in a career. The ideology of the american dream tells americans that their society is a meritocratic one where anyone who makes the effort can get ahead- there are opportunities for all. 

-However, the reality is different: many disadvantaged groups are denied opportunities to achieve legitimately. For example, poverty, inadequare schools and discrimination in the job market may block opportunities for many ethnic minorities and the lower classes. 

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

-According to Merton, 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. Winning the game becomes more important that playing by the rules.

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

-Innovation: Individuals accept accept the goal of money success but use illegitimate means to achieve it. Those at the lower end of the class structure are under the greatest 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 typical of lower middle class office workers in dead-end, routine jobs. 

-Retreatism: Reject the goals and legitimate means and become drop outs. Merton includes 'psychotics, outcasts, vagrants, tramps, chronic drunkards and drug addicts' as examples.

-Rebellion: Reject existing means and values and replace with their own. 

-Agrees with Merton that deviance is mainly a lower class phenomenon. It results from the inability of those in the lower classes to achieve mainstram success goals by legitimate means such as educational achievement. However, he criticises Merton's explanation of deviance on two grounds: 

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

-Cohen focuses on deviance among working class boys. He argues that they face anomie in the middle class dominated school system. They suffer from cultural deprivation and lack the skills to achieve. Their inability to succeed in the middle class world leaves them at the bottom of the hierarchy. 

-As a result of being unable to achieve status by legitimate means (education) the boys suffer status frustration. They face a problem of adjustment in the low status they are given by mainstream society. In his view, they reject the middle class subculture and join delinquent subcultures. 

-The subcultures values are spite, malice, hostility and contempt for those outside it. The delinquent subculture inverts  the values of mainstream society. What society condemns the subculture praises and vice versa. For example, society upholds regular school attendance and respect for property, whereas the subculture, boys gain status from vandalism, property and truanting. 

-For cohen, the function offers an alternate status hierarchy in which they can achieve. Having failed in the legitimate opportunity, the boys create their own illegitimate opportunity in which they can win status from their peers through their delinquent actions. 

-One strength of this theory is that it offers an explanation of non utilitarian deviance. Unlike Merton, whose concept of innovation only accounts from crime with a profit motive, Cohen's ideas of status frustrations, value inversion and alternative status hierarchy help to explain non-economic delinquency such as vandalism and truancy. 

-However, Merton and Cohen both believe that working class boys start off with middle class values and only begin to reject them when they fail. He ignores the possibility that they didn't share these goals and so never saw themselves as failures

-Take Merton's ideas as a starting point. They agree that working class youths are denied legitimate opportunities to achieve money success, and that their deviance stems from the way they respond to the situation.

-They note that not everyone in this situation adapts to it by turning to innovation; utilitarian crimes such as theft. Different subcultures respond in different ways to the lack of legitimate opportunities. For example, the subculture described by Cohen resorts to violence and vandalism, not econimic crime or illegal drug use. 

-They attempt to explain why different subcultural responses occur. In their view, the key reson is not only unequal access to legitimate opportunity structures, but unequal access to illegitimate opportunity structures

-For example, not everyone who fails by legitimate means then has an ewual chance of becoming a successful safe cracker. Just like the apprentice plumber, everyone needs opportunity to learn and practice their trade. 

-Criminal subcultures provide youths with an apprenticeship for a career in utilitarian crime. They arise only in neighbourhoods with a longstanding and stable criminal culture with an established hierarchy of professional adult crime. This allows the young to associate with adult criminals, who can select those with the right aptitudes and and abilities and provide them with training and role models as ell as opportunities for employment in the criminal careers ladder. 

-Conflict subcultures arise in areas of high population turnover. This results in high levels of social disorganisation and prevents a stable professional criminal network developing. Its absense means that the only illegitimate opportunities available are within loosely organised gangs. In these, violence provides a frustration realase in the young mens frustrations at their blocked opportunities, as well as an alternate source of status that they can earn by winning turf from rival gangs. This subculture is closest to that described by Cohen. 

-Retreatist subcultures is in any neighbourhood, not everyone who aspires to be in a professional criminal career or gang leader actually succeeds, just like how in this subculture when not everyone gets a job. These 'double failures' may turn to a retreatist subculture based on illegal drug use. 

-young people may pursue a variety of goals other than money success. These include a popularity with peers, autonomy from adults, or the desire of young males to be treat like 'real men' 

-like earlier strain theorists, they argue that failure to achieve these goals may result in delinquency. They also argue that middle class juveniles too may have problems with achieving such goals, thus offering an explanation for middle class delinquency. 

-Messner and Rosenfelds institutiomal anomie theory focuses on the American dream. They argue that it is the obsession with money success and the winner take it all mentality that exerts pressures towards crimes by encouraging an anomic cultural environment in which people are encouraged to adopt an anything goes mentality in pursuit of wealth. 

-In America, economic goals are valued above all and this undermines other institutions. For example, schools become geared to prepare pupils for the labour marker at the expense of inculcating values such as respect for others. Messner and Rosenfeld conclude that in societies based on free market capitalism and lacking adequate welfare provision, such as the USA, high crime rates are inevitable.

-Downes and Hansen offer evidence for this view. In a survey of crime rates and welfare spending in 18 countries they found societies that spent more on welfarehad lower rates of imprisonment. This backs up messner and rosenfields claim that societies that protect the poor have less crime. 

-For Durkheim, society requires a certain level of crime, but he doesn't specify how much

-Crime doesn't always produce solidarity. It could have the opposite effect.

-For Merton, his theory takes crime statistics at face value

-Marxists argue it overrules the power of the ruling class

-Cloward and Ohlin: most delinquents aren't committed to their subculure