Subcultural Theories

Durkheim (1893) The inevitability of crime

• Not everyone is equally effectively socialised into the shared norms and values

• In modern societies, there is diversity of lifestyles and values so deviance is subjective to different subcultures

Durkheim (1893)

‘Crime is normal… an integral part of all healthy societies’

Durkheim Boundary maintenance

Courtrooms dramatise wrongdoing and publicly shames and stigmaatises the offender to reaffirm society’s shared values, discouraging rule breaking

Stanley Cohen (1972)

Examined the role of the media in the ‘dramatisation of evil’. Media coverage of crime and deviance often creates ‘folk devils’

Durkheim Adaptation and Change

Individuals with new ideas and values (who may first appear deviant) may give rise to new culture and morality. Repressing and controlling these individuals too much stifles individual freedom and prevents adaptive change.

Kingsley Davis (1937)

Prostitution acts as a safety valve for the release of men’s sexual frustrations without threatening the monogomous nuclear familt

Ned Polsky (1967)

Pornogrpahy safely channels a variety of sexual desires away from alternatives such as adultery which would pose a greater threat to the family

Albert Cohen

Deviance functions as a warning that an institution is not functioning properly

Kai Erikson (1966)

If deviance peforms positive social functions, then perhaps it means society is organised to promote deviance. Agencies of social control may cuntion to sustain a certain level of crime.

Criticisms of Durkheim

Ignores how it might affect different individuals within society

Robert K. Merton (1938) Elements of anomie to explain deviance

Structural factors: Society’s unequal opportunity structure

Cultural factors: strong emphasis on success goals and weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve

Merton

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

The American Dream

Society is not meritocratic and many disadvantaged groups are denied opportunites to achieve legitimately, resulting in a strain and turns into pressure to achieve illegitimately - the strain to anomie.

Adaptations to strain

Conformity - accept culturally approved goals and strive to achieve legitimately (M/C)

Innovation - accept goals of succes using illegitimate means to achieve

Ritualism - give up on achieving but have internalised legitimate means (L/C workers)

Retreatism - Reject both goals and legitmite means and become dropouts

Rebellion - Reject goals and legitimate mean and rebel for change in society

P+ Evaluation of Merton

• Most crime is property crime as American society values material wealth so highly

• L/C crime rates are higher due to less opportunities

N- Evaluation of Merton

• Official crime statistics over-represent working-class crime and is deterministic

• Marxists emphasise the power of the ruling class to make and enforce laws that criminalise the poor

• Assumes ‘value consenus’ and ignores that people may not share a goal

• Only accounts for utilitarian crime not violence

• Ignores role of group deviance like deliquent subcultures

Cohen’s criticisms

• Merton sees deviance as an individual response to strain, ignoring deviant groups

• Merton focuses on crime committed for material gain, ignoring other crimes

Albert K.Cohen (1955)

Working-class boys lack the skills to achieve legitimately in schools, leaving them at the bottom of the staus hierarchy. Inability to achieve status by legitimate means (education) leads to status frustration and reject M/C values forming a deliquent subculture

Alternative Status Hierarchy

The deliquient subcultures inverts the values of mainstream society and give an opportunity to win status from peers through deliquency

Cloward and Ohlin (1960)

Criminal subcultures - provides youths with an apprenticeship for a career in utilitarian crime (training and role models)

Conflict subcultures - Loosley organised gangs

Retreatist subcultures - Illegal drug use due to fear of failing to be a criminal

Eval of Cloward and Ohlin

Over-predicts the amount of working-class crime and ignore the wider power structure.

South (2014)

Drug trade is a mixture of other conflict and criminal subcultures, and retreatist users are also pofessional dealer.

Walter B. Miller (1962)

The lower class has its own independent subcultures seperate from mainstream culture, with its own values. Their subculture does not value success so its member are not frustrated by failure but deviate out of an attempt to achieve their own goals.

David Matza (1964)

Most delinquents are not strongly committed to their subculture, but merely drift in and out of delinquency

Recent strain theories

Young people may pursure a variety goals other than money success such as popularity amogst peers, autonomy from adults or the desire of some young males to be treated like ‘real men’. Middle class juveniles may have a problem achieving such goals, hence middle-class delinquency.

Messner and Rosenfeld (2001)

Institutional anomie theory focuses on the American Dream an argue that it pressures towads crime by encouraging an ‘anything goes’ mentality in pursuit of wealth. In free-market capitalist societies, lacking adequate walfare provision, high crime rates are inevitable (USA).

Downes and Hansen (2006)

In a survey of crime rates and welfare spending in 18 countries, societies that spent more on welfare had loawer rates of imprisonment.

Savelsberg (1995)

Applies strain theory to post-communist societies in Eastern Europe and saw a rapid rise in crime after the fall of communism, indicating thr values were replaced by new western capitalist goals of ‘money success’