Crime and Deviance - Revision - Year 13

1. Not everyone is socialised equally - some people will therefore deviate from how everyone else is socialised, and so commit some form of crime.

2. People have diverse lifestyles - some people develop their own subcultures. In modern, complex, society, rules governing behaviour become weaker and less clear.

1. Boundary maintenance - The punishment that criminals receive for their crimes reaffirms society’s shared rules

2. Adoption and change - if new ideas are always suppressed then society would not change and would remain stagnant. Crime allows for change. Crime leads to social change.

3. Cohen states that crime provides a warning that an institution with society is not working.

4. Crime is said to have the function of coping with the strains of transition from childhood to adulthood

5. Davies states that crimes such as prostitution is a safety valve for he release of men’s sexual frustration , without threatening the nuclear family.

There are 2 strengths:

1. One strength is that crime flags for potential changes that need to happen in legislation or society, as unhealthy levels of crime can be altered by social engineering such as the introduction of new laws and government policy. E.g. Civil Rights movement. Many of the protestors were arrested until the Civil Rights Act was passed.

2. The Functionalist theory defeats the view that criminals are biologically predestined to commit crime.

There are three weaknesses:

1. There is no way of knowing what amount of crime is the right amount of crime for society

2. The intentions of crime aren’t necessarily to strengthen social solidarity or to highlight parts of society that need changing. Some people commit crime because they benefit in one way or another.

3. Crime does not always lead to social solidarity and can lead to isolation of the criminal and/or the victim from society.

Peeople engage with deviant behaviour when they are unable to achieve socially approved goals by legitimate means.

Society’s unequal opportunity structure

The strong emphasis on success and goals, and the weaker emphasis using legitimate means to achieve them.

It is a result of the strain between the goals that society encourages individuals to achieve and what the structure of society allows the individual to actually achieve legitimately. The means of achieveing the desired goals. This strain then creates pressure to resort to illegitimate measures such as crime to achieve the goals set by society.

1. Conformity - This is non-deviant and non-criminal. Individuals accept the culturally approved goals and strive to achoeve them legitimately

2. Innovation - Using socially unapproved or unconventional means to obtain culturally approved goals. Example: deal drugs or steal to achieve financial security.

3. Ritualism - Give up on achieving their goals and stick to their current means. E.g. teachers who have given up on student success and just work until retirement

4. Retreatism - Individuals who reject both the goals and the legitimate means and become drop outs who give up all together

5. Rebellion - These people reject existing social goals and means but substitute new ones and create a new society.

1. Merton shows how both normal and deviant behaviour can arise from the same mainstream goals.

2. He explains the patterns shown in Official Statistics such as trends that show that crime is higher amongst lower classes as they have fewer opportunities to achieve their goals

1. Official Statistics cannot be taken at face value as upper classes also commit crime such as fraud that often goes unnoticed.

2. Many people from lower classes experience strain, but not all of them deviate.

3. Marxists argue that Merton ignores the power of the ruling class to make and enforce laws in ways which criminalise the working class.

4. The theory only accounts for utilitarian crime and not violent crime, state crime, or corporate crime.

He says that the working class youth believe in the success goals encouraged mainstream culture, but they have little opportunity to achieve these goals by legitimate means. They are also denied status in mainstream society and experience status frustration.

They react to this situation by developing a delinquent subculture. This subculture is a reaction to, and deliberate reversal of, the accpeted forms of behaviour. For example, stealing which replaces hard work, vandalism which replaces respect for property.

Committing crime give working class youth an opportunity to achieve the status in their peer group which they are denied by mainstream society.

An advantage is that it helps to explain non-utilitarian crime (crime that is committed not for personal gain) such as joy-riding, as this is a crime that may simply give working class youthes increased status amongst their peers.

1. There is too much focus on the working class and boys, and so ignores the crimes that are committed by the powerful

2. Cohen assumes that there is value consensus in the first place. Cohen’s view does not take into consideration the possibility that the working class boys do not share the same values as mainstream society, and so do not see themselves as failures.

This is crime that is committed for personal gain

This is crime that is committed not for personal gain.

They say that although there is a ‘legitimate opportunity structure’ they also state that there is an ‘illegitimate opportunity structure’ which is available through gang membership. They also argue that different subcultures respond to a lack of opporutnities differently.

They state that subcultures emerge as a result of their unequal access to illegitimate and legitimate opportunities

They state that this subculture provides youth with an ‘apprenticeship’ for a career in utilitarian crime. They arise only in neighbourhoods with a long standing and stable criminal culture within an established hierarchy of professional adult criminals.

It is said that this subculture arises in areas of high population turn over, with many people moving in and out. This results in high levels of social disorganisation and prevents a stable professional crime network developing. Its absence means the only illigitimate opportunities there are, are in loosely organised gangs.

In any neighbourhood, not everyone who aspires to be a ‘professional criminal’ or gang leader actually succeeds - just as in the legitimate opportunity structure where not everyone gets good paying jobs. What becomes of those ‘double failures’ - those wo fail in both the illegitimate and legitimate opportunity structures is that they may turn to a retreatist culture and give up.

1. Their theory assumes that all crime is working class and ignores the crimes that are committed by the wealthy.

2. Ignores the wider power structure, including who makes and enforces the law,

3. The theory also assumes that people ‘subscribe’ to norms and values of society in the first place and that failure leads to a reaction against these norms and values

4. Matza examines the idea that young males drift in and out of delinquency and states that subcultures are not definitive, but are a phase of young adulthood.

They suggest that no act is inherently criminal or deviant in itself, but instead it only becomes criminal or deveiant when other label it as that. It is not the nature of the act, but society’s reaction to the act.

1. Interactions with agencies of social control

2. Appearance, bacground and personal biography

3. Situations and circumstances of the offence.

1. Cicourel had found that middle class youth were more likely to be equipped to negotiate the law with officers, where as, youths from working class backgrounds were less likely to be able to negotiate the law with police officers.

2. The parents of middle class youth are also more likely to intervene with the law and negotiate to have a reduced sentence.

1. Piliavin and Briar (1964) had found that police decisions to arrest a youth were mainly based on physical cues such as manner and dress, in which the police then used to make judgements on the youths character.

2. Cicourel found that officers’ ‘typifications’ (stereotypes) of what a typical delinquent is like led them to concentrate on certain types. This resulted in law enforcement showing an area bias and police patrolling working class areas more, leading to more arrests, thus confirming their stereotypes.

1. Briar found that those who were stopped late at night had run a higehr risk of being arrested.

2. Middle class youth are also more likely to receive reduced sentences or punishments because the law has stereotypes of them to make them believe that middle class children will not re-offend (e.g. being in uni, having professional parents)

   1. An example of this is Brock Turner who was accused of sexually assaulting a girl, his parents intervened and he served 3 months of a 6 months sentence, and the maximum sentence for his crime was 14 years.

This is when most people engage in deviant acts such as fare dodging, and most of these acts go unnoticed, and so people do not consider themselves as deviant.

This is when deviancy becomes labelled and stigmatised, and is when others may see you only in terms of how you have been labelled.

1. Development of a master status

2. Leads to a Deviant Career

3. Leads to Deviancy Amplification spiral

4. Creation of social policies - more people commit crime

5. Reintergrative shaming

This is when an individual has committed a crime, but now society no longer views them for who they are, but instead they only see the individual for their crime. This becomes the persons master status as the individual accepts the label that has been assigned to them and sees themselves the same way that society sees them. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the individual lives according to their label.

Lemert

This is when secondary deviance provokes more hostile reactions from society and treats the deviant as an ‘outsider’. This may lead to more deviance from the deviant and may lead to a deviant career. For example, an ex-convict may find it hard to go straight because no one is willing to employ him, so he seeks other outsiders for support. This may involve deviant subcultures that offer deviant career opportunities.

Jack Young

This is a process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase in the level of deviance in society. This then leads to greater attempts to control deviance, which then leads to greater deviance in society.

Stanley in his study ‘Folk Devils and Mora Panics’ which was a study on the societal reaction to the ‘mods and rockers’ disturbances. Press exaggeration and distorted reporting caused a moral panic and moral entrepreneurs called for a ‘crackdown’, in which police responded by arresting more youth, and courts gave harsher punishments. This then confirmed the truth of the original media reaction which then caused more panic. The demonisation of the mods and rockers as ‘folk devils’ caused their further marginalisation, which further increased their deviant behaviour.

Social policies may create more criminals as by changing laws and policies, a person who may not have been a criminal before may now be classed as a criminal due to the change in policy.

Triplett (2000)

This is a process in which is aimed at rehabilitating criminals and bringing them back into society. This may be done by shaming them publically so they change, or allowing them to meet the people who were hurt or affected by their crimes so that they change.

Braithwaite.

This is the difference between the ‘real’ rate of crime and the ‘official statistics’. This is the case because at each stage of the CJS, agents of social control (police officers and prosecutors) make decisions on whether to proceed to the next stage. As a result, crime statistics only really accurately show us the activities of the police and prosecutors and how many times they had chosen to progress onto the next stage, rather than the amount of crime that is committed in society in total.

It suggests that official statistics cannot be trusted.

1. Published every 6 months from the Home Office

2. They are drawn from the records of police and other official agencies

3. It provides an accurate view of the way the CJS processes offenders and the proportions of different categories of offenders.

4. They have been published since 1887, and so can see previous years data and compare them.

1. The statistics are only a social construction that just shows the crimes that are reported

2. Victims do not always report crimes for various reasons

3. Missing from stats are those crimes that are never reported by the police themselves

1. They highlight those crimes that are never reported by the police

2. They can be carried out locally and so can identify specific patterns within areas

3. An example is the British Crime Survey which is annually conducted by the Home Office of 40,000 households.

1. They do not include corporate or workplace crime, victimless crimes

2. Sometimes people put crimes into the wrong categories

3. Survey in which people are asked to report all cases of crime where they were the victim, it is possible that the recall may be flawed.

1. Steven Box argues that if petty crime was removed then the male/female ratio was closer to the official one

2. They identify the social characteristics of offenders

3. Anna Campbell gave a self report to young femaks and found the rate of crime was similar to young men

1. Steven Box argues that self report studies suffer from issues of validity as people can lie

2. Relying in memory is problematic, as it can lead to possible biases.

3. The self report asks people to honestly confess to crimes they have committed over a period of time, not many people are likely to do this.

1. Fails to analyse the source of power who attributes the labels but simply just explains them as moral entrepreneurs

2. Marxists would criticise this theory by saying that it ignores the power of the capitalist ruling class

3. Does not explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place

4. Focuses on less serious crimes such as drug taking

5. Ignores the victims of crime and how crime affects them

6. It is deterministic as it puts forward that once someone has been labelled as deviant, a deviant career is inevitable, and so disregards free will.

They mean that Capitalism causes crime. This is explained through the fact that capitalism is based on exploitation where people are paid minimal amounts, leading to people cutting corners and committing crime as a means of survival. Crime may be the only way to gain access to consumer goods that are encouraged by society. Alienation and lack of control over their lives will also lead to status frustration within the wc, which will lead them to gain status through crime.

This causes crime as the law and law enforcement serves the interests of the ruling/ capitalist class. This class is reluctant to pass any laws that do not favour the bourgeousie, such as laws that regulate business activity and threaten the profitability of the ruling class’ businesses. The police also ignore the crimes that are committed by the powerful.

They argue that even when laws look to favour the working class, they still benefit the bourgeousie. For example, health and safety laws allow the work force to remain fit and healthy so that they can continue to work and be exploited by the ruling class.

Often, the laws are not even enforced - corporate homicide has only had one successful prosecution.

Police also selectively enforce the laws - so it makes it look as though the working class are the problem, which conceals the true nature of the ruling class.

The Bhopal Gas tragedy is known as the world’s worst industrial disaster where the chemical toxic chemicals were spilled from a Union Carbide factory in India. This gas had killed at least 15,000 people and affected over 600,000 workers. This supoorts the Marxist explanation for crime and deviance because it relates to ‘law making and law enforcement’. It shows that the owners of Union Carbide had not been prosecuted whilst those who suffered received no justice. The law was not enforced, and the aftermath had no clean up. This shows that the law is selectively enforced.

1. Marxist criminologists argue that the costs of elite crime are greater than the cost of street-crime, yet the elite are more likely to get away with their crimes. Tombs and Whytes research supports this. In their research, the elite are more likely to get away with their crimes as despite checks made by regulation companies, big companies were still able to disregard safety procedures, and only 10 directors of these firms were disqualified due to health and safety reasons.

1. It largely ignores the relationship between crime and non-class inequalities such as ethnicity and gender.

2. It is too deterministic and over predicts the amount of crime in the working class. Not all poor people commit crime, despite poverty pressuring them to.

3. Not all capitalist societoes have high crime rates. For example, the homicide rates in Japan and Sweden is only about a 1/5th of that in the USA.

4. The CJS does sometimes act against the interests of the capitalist class. For example, prosecution for corporate crime does occur. For example, Madoff received 150 years for the Ponzi scheme.

5. Left realists argue that Marxism ignores intra-class crimes (where both the criminal and the victim are wc) such as burglary and ‘mugging’ which causes great harm to victims

These are theorists who have been influenced by the ideas put forward by Marx but their theories have also ben influenced by other approaches such as the labelling theorists.

1. They agree that capitalism is based on exploitation and class conflict, and that capitalism is criminogenic.

2. They agree that the state makes and enforces the laws in the interests of the capitalist class

3. They agree that capitalism should be replaced by a classless society to stop crime.

1. They state that Marxism is deterministic

2. Neo-Marxists see crime as a conscious choice by the person committing the crime, where as Marxists don’t

3. They state that crime does often have a political motive such as re-distributuing wealth from the rich to the poor to deliberately change society.

1. Wider origins of the act - The capitalist systems wider society

   1. The economic structure of society is the root of all actions in that society

2. The immediate origins of the deviant act - The motivation for an individuak to commit a crime

   1. The actual causes that are at the heart of an individual choosing to commit a specific crime. Such as poverty or revenge

3. The Act itself - Why should a person choose to commit a particular type of crime>

   1. What does the act mean to the criminal?

4. The immediate origins of the societal reaction

   1. Why do people respond in different ways to a particular deviant act?

   2. Do the police respond differently to black offenders for example

5. The wider origins of a deviant reaction - This is all about the wider background to law creation and enforcement

   1. It also involves the role of the media

   2. Why are tobacco and alcohol products legal, despite their harm to health?

6. The outcome of the societal reaction on the deviants further actions - We need to understand how the labelled criminals respond to their labelling

   1. Their self concept and subculture

7. The nature of the deviant process as a whole - This point just accepts that deviance is a complex process

   1. It cannot be explained by one simple ‘perspective-driven’ theory.

1. Only a very small portion of crime could be considered as politically motivated. While theorists might attach a motive to all manner of crime (from burglary to vandalism), it rarely seems to be a motive that criminals themselves claim.

2. Left realists point out that most victims of crime are working class. Therefore, Marxists and Neo-Marxists should produce ‘solutions to the problem of crime’, rather than simply trying to understand (and even excuse) working class criminals

This was a term used to describe the crime committed by people who work in offices. This term was used to overcome the notion that crime was a working class phenomenon.

Individual crime against a company.

Crime committed by big firms that has a serious physical or economic impact on its employees, consumers of the product, or the general public.

‘Any illegal act that is the result of delieberate decisions or culpable negligence by a legitimate business organisation that is intended to benefit the business.’’

This is anything such as tax evasion, bribery, money laundering and illegal accounting. Victims include other companies, shareholders, taxpayers and the government. A real life example of this is JP morgan not paying their due corporation tax

These are crimes such as false labelling. A real life example of this is Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

These are crimes such as sexual and racial discrimination, violations of wage laws and violations of rights. A real life example of this is Apples factories in China mistreating workers with long hours.

These are crimes such as the Bhopal gas lead by Union carbide. Other more general example are things such as illegaally poluting more than what is permitted and toxic waste dumping. A real life example of this is sharks being killed for their fins.

This refers to harms committed when government institutions and businesses co-operate to pursue their goals. A real life example of this was the Forced Steralisation in California.

1. Media coverage of corporate crie is very limited. If it is covered at all, the media censors their language such as covering incidences as ‘accidents at work’ instead of simply stating how the situation truly is, such as ‘employee negligence’.

2. There is a lack of political will. There have been no efforts made by the homme office to gather data on this type of crime.

3. These crimes are often very complex. Law enforcement are often under-resourced and staffed and also lack the expertise to investigate this type of crime.

4. There is under-reporting from the victims. Often teh victim is the environment or society as a whole. Many people may not even be aware that they are a victim of corporate crime, and in the cases that they are aware, they do not consider it a ‘real crime’ and so do not report it

5. De-labelling: Corporate crimes are consistently filtered out from the process of criminalisation. It is considered as breaking civil law as opposed to breaking criminal law - as a result, prosecution is limited.

He states that if a firm cannot achieve its goals by legal means, it may move to illegal means. When business conditions become more difficult and profitability reduces, businesses may be tempted to break the law.

They found that law violations increased by companies as financial performances deteriorated. This suggests that they had to ‘innovate’ to achieve their profit goals.

1. Deviant subcultures form deviant solutions to achieve corporate goals.

2. If a company justifies committing crimes to achieve their corporate goals, employees will be socialised into criminality.

3. Sutherland sees crime as behaviour learned from others in a social context

4. People commit deviancy in the workplace more if they can easily neutralise their actions. E.g. by saying that it was an order from above

5. New people may join the company and so will be socialised into deviancy also.

1. Corporations have the power to avoid labelling

2. They can afford the experts, accountants and solicitors to help avoid getting into serious trouble.

3. Law enforcement is also relucatance to prosecute firms for corporate crimes also reduces the number of offences.

1. Crime is a result of the normal functioning of capitalism

2. Because capitalisms goal is to maximise profits, it is inevitable that harm will occur, such as death or injury to employees and consumers, as company’s chase profit

3. Where laws are ineffective, such as in developing countries, capitalism shows its true colours to maximise profits by engaging in low wages and dangerous conditions for employees in order to maximise profits

4. Box suggests that Capitalism has created ‘mystification’ where corporate crime is seen as less harmful than working class crime.

1. Both Strain Theory and Marxism seem to over-predict the amount of business crime. Nelken argues that it is unrealistic to assume that all businesses would commit offences if it were not for the risk of punishment

2. Even if the capitalist pursuit of profit is a cause of corporate crime, this doesn’t explain corporate crime in non-profit making organisations such as the police, army or civil service.

3. Law abiding may also be more profitable than law breaking. Braithwaite (1984) found that US pharmaceutical companies that complied with FDA regulations to obtain licences for their products in America were then able to access lucrative markets in poorer countries. These countries cannot afford their own drug testing facilities and so relied on the FDA for licensing procedures as a guarantee of quality.

These Realists favour a ‘get tough’ approach. They believe that many theories prior to them have focused solely on the cause of crime and have not proposed a tough and practical solution to deal with a growing crime problem.

These Realsits believe that there is a growing crime problem, however they believe that in order to minimise crime rates, we need to recognise who is most affected by crime. They see crime as imbedded in inequality and propose that we need to know why inequalities exist which will lead to practical strategies to minimise it.

1. Biological Differences

2. Inadequate Socialisation

3. Rational Choice to Offend

Right Realists Wilson and Herrstein put forward this explanation for crime and state that people commit crime as a result of a mixture of biological and social factors. They argued that some people are innately predisposed to commit crime more than others. For example, personality traits such as aggressiveness and low intelligence put some people at greater risk of offending than others.

A weakness of this explanation is that it ignores the wider structural causes of poverty that may push someone towards committing a crime.

Murray argues that the crime rate is increasing because of a growing underclass who are defined by deviant behaviour and who fail to socialise their children properly. This underclass is reliant on the welfare state and has thus resulted in an increase in divorces and unemployment, since the state provides money for them. Because of the increase in divorce, there has been an increase in the number of single mothers, and Murray argues that single mothers are incapable of adequately socialising boys, which leads to delinquent behaviour.

A weakness of this explanation is that it is only culturally specific to the UK and the US, and so cannot be applied to other, non-western cultures where crime is still high.

Clarke argues that the decision to commit crime is a choice that is based on a rational calculation of the likely consequences. If the perceieved rewards of crime outweigh the perceived costs, and so it is low risk, then people will likely offend. Fleson added that people are less likely to commit a crime in the presence of a guardian.

A weakness of the explanation is that it overstates the role of rationality within crime.

1. Relative Deprivation

2. Subculture

3. Marginalisation

Lea and Young put forward this explanation and it refers to how deprived someone feels in relation to others, or compared with their own expectations. This can lead to crime when people resent others having more than what they have and so commit crime to get what they feel they are entitled to. Late modernity and individualism has contributed to this through advertising luxury lifestyles. Society in todays time is more prosperous but is more prone to crime as a result.

1. Weakness of this explanation is that not all people who are economically deprived commit crime.

Cloward and Cohen suggest that a subculture is a groups collective solution to the problem of relative deprivation. Different groups produce different subcultural solutions to close the deprivation gap. Some may turn to religion, and others may turn to crime.

A weakness of this explanation is that it assumes that value consensus exists and crime only occurs when that breaks, and that it could be the case that value consensus never existed, and that crime still occurs, meaning that this explanation would be inapplicable.

This explanation states that those who are marginalised in society lack clear goals and those to represent their interests. By contrast, employed people have bodies to represent their views and concerns (such as trade unions). De-industrialisation and the loss of unskilled jobs have increases unemployment. The unemployed have no body or organisation to represent them and express their frustration through criminal acts.

1. A weakness of this explanation is that it does not explain corporate crime, which according to Marxists, is more harmful that street/working class crime

2. Interactionists argue that because Left Realists rely on data from victim surveys, they cannot explain the offenders motives.

This specifically refers to how certain adaptations to certain situations can be applied to prevent criminal acts. This is done by looking at what crimes people commit, where they are committed, and what can be done to prevent the crimes.

1. Target Hardening

2. Designing Out

This decreases the opportunity for crime with measures like window locks, window shutters, CCTV etc.

This approach means that soe features of an area will be redesigned in order to make crime much harder to occur. E.g. sloping seats at bus shelters prevents people sleeping on them, anti-homeless spikes outside certain town-centre properties prevents people sleeping in public places. Spikes can also be used to make certain buildings harder to climb to prevent things such as theft and vandalism.

1. NEWburn (2013) pounts out a link between improved car security measures and reduced car crimes, which shows that situational crime prevention is effective

2. Port Authority Bus terminal is a real life example of how effective Situational Crime Prevention can be in reducing crime

1. This solution of crime ignores factors such as inequality and deprivation as causes of crime

2. Lyng (1990) states that this solution of crime ignores the role of the emotional thrill as causes of crime

3. This solution of crime only tackles opportunistic street crime and has little to no effect on white collar crime or state crime.

4. This solution of crime simply leads to displacement. This solution does not actually reduce crime, but merely displaces it, or moves it to another place or time. After all, if criminals act rationally, they will simply move to easier targets.