A- level Sociology - C&D Theorists

Durkheim

-Functionalism

-Crime is normal and inevitable as some are inadequately socialised. It is useful for enforcing Boundary Maintenance (reinforcing social morality) and Adaption & Change (allows for questioning of social order).

Merton

-Functionalism

-Strain Theory: people engage in deviant behaviour when they cannot reach social goals via approved means. Categorises responses to cultural goals as Conformists, Ritualists, Retreatists, Innovators and Rebels.

Cohen

-Functionalism

-WC face anomie in the MC education system as they are culturally deprived, meaning they face ‘status frustration’. They resolve this by rejecting mainstream values and forming their own delinquent subcultures.

Cloward and Ohlin

-Functionalism

-Three different criminal subcultures develop due to inaccess to illegitimate opportunity structures: criminal (organised), conflict (loose) and retreatist (failures).

Hirschi

-Functionalism

-Control Theory - People don’t commit crime due to 4 types of social bonds: Attachment, Commitment, Involvement, Belief

Functionalism Criticisms

-Durkheim doesn’t say how much crime is the right amount

-Victims of crime don’t consider it functional

-Ignores crimes of the wealthy

-Assumes everyone has same societal values

-Cloward/Ohlin draw distinctions too sharply

Miller

-Subcultures

-Delinquency Subcultures arise from WC way of life as boys are encouraged to be tough and street smart. Focal concerns are fate, autonomy, excitement, trouble, toughness

Matza

-Subcultures

-Everyone has deviance (subterranean values) in them but young people are worse at suppressing them. Criminals are criminals because they don’t use techniques of neutralisation to justify behaviour.

Subcultural criticisms

-Not every WC has the same focal concerns

-Doesn’t explain crime rates among MC / WCC

Wilson and Herrnstein

-Right Realism

-Crime is down to biological differences, some are more prone to aggressiveness / low intelligence

Clarke

-Right Realism

-Rational Choice Theory - People are rational beings and they decide to commit crime based on evaluation of the consequences. People offend when rewards outweigh costs.

Murray

-Right Realism

-Welfare state is increasing amount of single mothers who cannot effectively socialise their children, leading to more WC crime.

Dennis

-Right Realism

-Changes to modern family life has undermined stability and traditional socialisation. External and internal forms of social control have weakened and there is no sense of community.

Wilson and Kelling

-Right Realism

-Crime predominates in disorganised areas (“broken windows”) so neighbourhoods need to be cleaned up to reduce it.

Right realism solutions

Harsh punishments are required to deter people from crime in the first place.

Right realism criticisms

-Not keen to address cultural causes (poverty)

-Ignores underlying causes and complex motives

-Ignores corporate crime

Gordon

-Marxism

-“Crimogenic capitalism” = The nature of capitalism encourages criminal activity. Crime is a rational response to the capitalist system. It comes to be associated with the working classes which helps justify the bourgeoises need to control them, and also distracts from their own problems.

Chambliss

-Marxism

-Investigated organised crime (Seattle, 1960s) and argued it was mostly controlled by a small elite group, including senior business and political members. Despite this police spend most time focusing on minor crimes.

Pearce

-Marxism

-Laws perform an ideological function for capitalism, as some are passed appearing to be for the WC’s benefit, however these also benefit the bourgeoise and create false class conflict. Also looked into “crimes of the powerful” (organised crime is a much larger scale than WC crime)

Box

-Marxism

-Law enforcement is selective in capitalist society - it targets and criminalises small and powerless groups (mystification) allowing the crimes of the wealthy to be ignored.

Sutherland

-Marxism

-Describes white collar crime as “crime committed by a person of high social status and respectability in the course of his occupation”

Tombs

-Marxism

-Categorised 4 types of corporate crime: financial offences, crimes against consumers, crimes against employees, and environmental offences (e.g. VW scandal)

Neo Marxists

Sociologists who ideas are influenced by traditional Marxism, which they combine with ideas from other approaches e.g. action theory / interpretivism

Taylor, Walton and Young

-Neo-Marxism

-Support a “full social theory of deviance” that a comprehensive understanding of crime and deviance would help to change society for the better

Gilroy

-Neo Marxism

-Young black criminals are politically motivated to commit crime by their discovery of slavery and colonialism and their experiences of racism

Hall

-Neo Marxism

-Moral panics about potentially disruptive groups, such as the young or ethnic minorities, are often created by the mass media, working on behalf of the state, in order to divide and rule a potentially troublesome working-class.

Cohen

-Neo Marxism

-Studied skinhead subculture and argued It was a symbolic reaction to the decline of working-class communities. Their dress exaggerated masculinity and aggression, and the anti-immigrant stance was a reaction to declining working-class neighbourhoods.

Hebdige

-Neo Marxism

-Punks deliberately set out to shock the establishment and appear deviant against capitalism. However, these challenges are short, lived because capitalism commercialises aspects of youth, cultural style.

Criticisms of Marxism

- It largely ignores the relationship between crime, gender and ethnicity.

- It is too economically, deterministic and over predicts the amount of crime in the working class, and neglects the power of the individual

- Not all capitalist societies is have high amounts of crime, for example Japan or Switzerland

- Ignores the fact that prosecutions for corporate crime do occur

- Ignores intraclass crimes where both criminals and victims are working-class such as mugging

Young

-Left Realism

-The role of criminology should be to provide credible solutions to policy makers to limit the harm crime does

Left Realists

3 causes of crime: relative deprivation, marginalisation, subcultures

Relative deprivation

The awareness of disparity between the poor and rich: feeling poor/deprives in comparison to others. Helps explain MC crime

Lea and Young

-Left Realism

-Poverty and Unemployment themselves don’t directly cause crime, it is relative deprivation: in the 1930s poverty was higher than in the 80s: but crime was higher in the 80s (due to economic boom)

Marginalisation

Where certain groups are more likely to suffer economic, social and political deprivation. Political, in particular, makes people feel powerless

Subcultures

Develop among groups experiencing relative deprivation and marginalisation. Lea and Young argue they are still located in the value of wider society, but are blocked off from success

Modernisation (Young)

-Left Realism

-Argues since the 1970s instability, insecurity and exclusion have increased. De-industrialisation has increased unemployment and poverty - leading to marginalisation and exclusion

Left Realism Solutions

-Policing and control must be improved, and must be able to deal with deeper structural causes of crime

-A multi-agency approach is needed to prevent crime (involving education, social services etc)

Left Realism Policy

LR influenced policies of Blair in being ‘tough on crime and the causes of crime’, leading to policies such as ASBOs and Sure Start

Left Realism Criticisms

-Fails to explain causes of street crime and why offenders commit in the first place

-Doesn’t explain corporate and white collar crime

-Has been accused of racialising crime

Moral Panic

Public concem on a large scale

Cohen

-Labelling

-Folk devils and Moral Panics: Studied public reaction to the Mods & Rockers. Press exaggeration caused a moral panic and moral Entrepreneurs calling for a crackdown, which resulted in more arrests and seemed to confirm the truth of the original media reaction (deviance amplification spiral)

Becker

-Labelling

-Social groups create deviance by creating the rules who’s infraction constitutes deviance and applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders

-Defined moral Entrepreneurs, Outsiders and Social Control agencies

Moral Entrepreneurs

People who lead a “moral crusade” to change the law in the belief that it will benefit those to whom it applies

Outsiders

Outlaws or deviants who break the new rules set by entrepreneurs

Social control agencies

Enforce rules and enforce labels on offenders

Cicourel

-Labelling

-Officers typifications led them to concentrate on certain groups / “types”, resulting on them policing these groups harder and having more arrests - fulfilling their stereotypes. Also argued “justice is negotiable”

Lemert

-Labelling

-Distinguished between primary and secondary deviance.

-Primary = deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled

-Secondary = the result of societal reaction: being labelled as criminal, potentially resulting in shame and exclusion and leading crime to become their master status

Young

-Labelling

-Exemplified secondary deviance in his investigation of hippies and weed: originally drugs were peripheral to their lifestyle but persecution by the police lead them to see themselves as outsiders and retreat into closed groups

Lemert and Young

-Labelling

-Their studies illustrate that it is not the act itself but the reaction of society that creates deviance

Phillips and Bowling

-Labelling

-Aggressive policing of BAME: Black people are 7x more likely to be stopped and searched, Asian people are 2x as likely

Durkheim

-Labelling (mental health)

-Carried out the first sociological study of suicide using official statistics, claimed to have discovered the sources of suicide in how effectively society intergrated its members and regulated their behaviour

Douglas

-Labelling (mental health)

-Criticises the use of Official Stats to study suicide and states they are social constructs. Whether a death comes to be labelled as such depends on the interactions and negotiations between social actors.

Atkinson

-Labelling (mental health)

-Believed the Coroner’s ideas about a typical suicide were important: certain modes of death and life history etc were seen as typical of suicide

Szaz

-Labelling (mental health)

-The myth of mental illness: psychiatric labels are stigmatising. Mental illness is a social construct and a feature of social control for behaviour society doesn’t understand or approve of

Lemert

-Labelling (mental health)

-Studied paranoia by explaining that some individuals don’t fit easily into groups as a result of primary deviance. Others labelled a person as odd and begin to exclude them - the negative response to this is the beginning of the secondary deviance, and gives others more reason to exclude them.

-They begin discussing the best way to deal with a person which confirms the persons suspicion that people are conspiring against them, and they justify fears mental health and lead to psychiatric intervention, leading the label of mentally able to become the master status.

Goffman

-Labelling (mental health)

-When admitted to a mental hospital, the inmate undergoes a modification of the self in which the old identity is symbolically killed off and replaced by new one. This is achieved by various degradation rituals.

-Some inmates become institutionalised and internalise the new label and identity to the point where they cannot readjust to the outside world. Others adopt various forms of resistance, or accommodate to the new situation.

Williams and Dickinson

-Media

-British newspapers devote 30% of the new space to crime. However, while the media show a keen interest in crime they give a distorted image of it.

Ditton and Duffy

-Media

-46% of the media reports are about violent or sexual crimes yet these made up only 3% of crimes reported by the police

Felson

-Media

-“Age fallacy” - the media portrayed criminals and victims as older and more middle-class

Young

-Media

-“News values” = The criteria by which journalist, and editors, decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the newspaper: this includes immediacy, dramatisation, personalisation, higher status, people and celebrities, simplification, novelty, risk, and violence.

Surette

-Media

-Fictional representations of crime follow the “law of opposites”: they are opposite to official statistics. For example, property crime is underrepresented, Sex crimes are usually done by evil strangers and Deaths normally result from greed and calculation (rather than fights)

Media as a cause of crime

Media can create crime through imitation, arousal, desensitisation, transmitting knowledge, as a target for crime, stimulating desire for unaffordable goods, portraying police as incompetent and glamorising offending.

Gerbner et al

-Media

-Heavy users of television had higher levels of fear of crime. However this doesn’t inherently prove media causes crime as it may be those who are already afraid of going out who stay in and watch tv

Sparks

-Media

-“Media effects” research often ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence

Lea and Young

-Media

-The media has disseminated a standardised image of lifestyle, which for those who can’t afford that it accentuates the sense of relative deprivation

Hypodermic Syringe model

-Media

-The media “injects” its audience with powerful messages; “copycat crime”

Schramm et al

-Media

-For most children under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial

Reinforcement model

-Media

-The media merely reinforces our existing views, doesn’t change them. Those who are violent are often already damaged.

5%

Of the prison population was women in 2011

Low female crime rates

Some argue statistics underestimate rate of female offending

1.Typically female crimes like shoplifting are less likely to be reported

2.Even when women’s crimes are detected or reported they are less likely to be prosecuted

Pollack

-Gender

-’Chivalry Thesis’ most criminal justice agents are men and are socialised to act in a chivalrous/protective way towards women

-Means they are more lenient with women

Graham and Bowling

-Gender

-Researched sample of 1,721 14-25yr olds and found that although males were more likely to offend the differences were smaller in the official stats

Flood-Page et al

-Gender

-Only 1/11 self-reported female offenders had been cautioned or prosecuted, the statistic foe men was 1/7

Ministry of Justice

-Gender

-49% of females recorded as offending recieved a caution in 2007, compared to only 30% of males

Farrington & Morris

-Gender

-Studied 408 sentencings of theft in a magistrates court and found women were not treated more leiniently

Buckle & Farrington

-Gender

-Studied shoplifting and found women were more likely to be prosecuted than male counterparts

Double Deviance

Some feminists argue that the criminal justice system is biased against women, as by offending they are deviant for doing something criminal and deviant for going against women’s caring role

1.Double standards - courts punish girls but not boys for premature promiscuous activity

2.Women who dont conform to standards of monogamous heterosexuality and motherhood are punished more harshly

Heidensohn

-Gender

-Courts treat females more harshly than males when they deviate from gender norms

Carlen

-Gender

-When women are jailed it is less for the seriousness of their crimes and more according to the courts assessment of them as wives, mothers & daughters

Smart

-Gender

-The criminal justice system is partiarchal, exemplified in rape cases: quotes Judge Wild in saying

“Women who say no do not always mean no, it is not just a question of how she says it”

Lombroso & Ferrero

-Female Offending

-Criminality is innate and there are less ‘born female criminals’

-Biological factors like testosterone in males can account for gender differences

Functional Sex Role

-Female offending

-Different socialisation of males & females affects crime rates

-Parsons traces differences in deviance to gender roles in the nuclear family

Heindensohn

-Female offending

-Women’s behaviour is far more conformist, due to partiarchal controle operating:

-At home: domestic role imposes restrictions on time/movement (Dobash & Dobash - DV used if they reject this)

-In Public: women fear male violence

-At Work: behaviour is controlled by male supervisors and managers

Carlen

-Female Offending

-Used a version of Hirschi’s control theory (turning to crime if rewards outweigh risks) to study crime among WC women

-The class deal: women will work will be offered material rewards with a decent living standard

-The gender deal: Patriarchal ideology promises women material and emotional awards from domestic family life

Adler

-Female offending

-Liberation thesis: as women become more liberated from patriarchy, their crimes will become as frequent and as serious as men’s

Denscombe

-Gender

-There has been an increase in ‘girl gangs’

Messerschmidt

-Male Offending

-There is a ‘normative masculinity’ (what a real man should be) highly valued by most, males constantly work towards it. Outlines 3 groups:

-White MC Males, White WC Males, Black lower class Males

White MC Males (Messerschmidt)

Independence, dominance & control are ‘given up’ in school and an accomodating masculinity is adopted. However this is then compensated outside by adopting an ‘oppositional masculinity’

White WC Males (Messerschmidt)

Also experience school as emasculating - but less chance for academic success, so denied route to hegemonic (dominant) masculinity

They therefore construct masculinity around aggression/violence

Black LC Males (Messerschmidt)

Experience problems finding secure employment, at an increased risk of poverty, so are less likely to gain status via material goods

Tend to express masculinity ‘in the street’ via violence and crime

Winlow

-Male Offending

-Postmodern society has caused a loss of traditional employment and a growth in the service sector, providing WC men with a combination of legal employment, criminal opportunities, and new ways of expressing masculinity via ‘night time economy’

-Becoming bouncers allowed both paid work and illegal expressions like drugs

Katz

-Male Offending

-Argues criminology has failed to understand the role of pleasure in committing crime

Lyng

-Male Offending

-’Edgework’ young males seek pleasure,, like risk taking, meaning they commit crimes like car theft, joyriding & hooliganism

Ethnicity Statistics

Afro-carribbean and Asian people are over represented in the OCS - at the end of 2016 just over 1/4 of the prison population was from a minority group

Victim surveys show black people are over represented among those identified by victims as offenders

Graham and Bowling

-Ethnicity

-Self-report study found that black and white people had similar rates of offending, and Indians, Pakistanis & Bangladeshis had lower rates

Phillips and Bowling

-Ethnicity

-The black community has been subjected to oppressive, military style policing due to negative profiling

Cicourel

-Ethnicity

-Officers hold ‘typifications’ leading them to concentrating on certain people, their decisions are influenced by class/gender/ethnicity

-The police patrol WC more intensely, reinforcing stereotypes

-The application of justice is a ‘negotiation’ many of which disadvantage minoritie

Holdaway

-Ethnicity

-Outlined ‘routine policing’ which officers use to cope with the workload: they stereotype and all levels engage in a ‘canteen culture’ where this is used

Ethnicity & Justice system

-2006/7 arrest rate for black people was 3.6x the rate for whites, and once arrested BAME were less likely to be cautioned

-CPS are more likely to drop cases against BAME

-BAME are more likely to elect for a trial before jury in the crown court

-BAME are less likley to be found guilty

-2006/7 custodial sentences given to greater number of black offenders

Hudson & Bramhall

-Ethnicity

-Pre-Sentence reports (written by probation officers) allow for unwitting discrimination