Functionalists, strain and subcultural theories

• Crime produces social solidarity, binds individuals together into a harmonious unit

• To achieve a harmonious unit, society has two mechanisms: Socialisation and Social Control

Crime is inevitable:

• Crime is a normal part of all healthy societies
• Shared rules of behaviour become less clear
• Durkheim calls this anomie

Crime fulfills TWO positive functions:

1. Boundary Maintenance

• Crime produces a reaction which unites its members from the wrongdoer and reinforcing value consensus
• Reaffirms shared rules and reinforces social solidarity

2. Adaptation and Change

• Change all starts as deviance
• Individuals will challenge existing norms but supress them as society will not adapt to their changes and will stagnate

1. Davis' Safety valve: Prostitution acts to release men's sexual frustations without threatening the nuclear family

2.  Cohen's warning light: Indicates that there is malfunctioning in institutions e.g. education

• Ignores how crime might affect victims

• No way of knowing how much deviance is the right amount

• Crime does explain why it exists in the first place

Key Points: People in engage is deviant behaviour when they can not achieve socially accepted goals legitamately because of structural factors and cultural factors.

Structural factors: Society's unequal opportunity structure

Cultural factors: The emphasis on goals and using legitimate means to achieve them

• Deviance is the result of strain between the goals a culture encourages individuals to aim and what the structure of society allows them to achieve legitimately. 

• Americans are expected to achieve goals through legitimate means e.g. education

• Ideology that American society is meritocratic - poverty and discrimination block opportunities to achieve goals by legitimate means

• Lack of opportunities produce frustration and pressures to achieve goals through illegitimately

• Winning the game is more important than playing by the rules

Individual's positions affect how they adapt to the strain of anomie

1. Conformity - Accepts culturally approved goals and strives for them legitimately > Middle class

2. Innovation - Accepts money success goals but uses illegitamately means e.g. theft > Working Class

3. Ritualism - Gives up on goals but follows the rules for own sake > Lower Middle Class

4. Retreatism - Rejects both goals and legitimate means and drops out of society > Addicts and vagrants

5. Rebellion - Replace existing goals and creates new ones to bring social change > Political Radicals

C     I     R     R    R

• Shows how normal and deviant behaviour can arise from mainstream goals
• Conformists and innovators pursue same goals but by different means

Research methods strengths:

• Most crime is property crime thus American society values material wealth 
• Patterns are shown in official statistics
• W/C crime rates are higher because they have the least opportunity to achieve them legitimately.

Evalation of Merton:

NOT ALL WORKING CLASS DEVIATE - TOO DETERMINISTIC

Deviance results from the lower classes' inability to achieve through mainstram goals. 

Cohen criticisms on Merton's explanation:

• Ignores group deviance
• ignores utilitarian crim e.g. assult 

Cohen's ideas:

• W/C boys face anomie in the MC education system
• W/C boys are culturally deprived and lack the skills to achieve 
• Suffers status frustration and turn to other in the same situation thus forming a subculture 

Subcultures offer an illegitimate opportunity structure for bots who fail to achieve legitimately

• Subcultures provive an alternative status hierarchy by winning through deliquent actions

• Subcultures inverts mainstreams values

Agrees with Merton, WC boys are denied legitimate opportunities to achieve goals

• Not every adapts to a lack of legitimate opportunites. 
• Some subcultures resort to violence, others turn to drugs
• Different neighborhoods provide different illegitmate opportunies to learn criminal careers. 

1. Criminal Subcultures - Provides youth with an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime. 

2. Conflict Subcultures - Violence provides a release for frustration at blocked opportunities which are within lossely organised gangs.

3. Retreatist Subcultures - Double failures who resort to illegal drug uses

• Ignores crimes of the wealthy and over-predicts WC crimes

• Explains different types of WC deviance in terms of different subcultures

• Cohen's and Cloward and Ohlin is a reactive theory - Exlains deviant subcultures as forming in reaction the failiure to achieve mainstream success goals. Wrongly assumes everyones starts of sharing the same goals. 
  

EVALUATE MERTON'S STRAIN THEORY OF DEVIANCE.

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