sociologists

Durkheim

• ‘crime is normal’

• 2 positive functions:

• boundary maintenance

• adaption and change

Wilson and Herrnstein

• Right realise

• bio social theory that crime is caused by biological and social factors

Murray

• Crime is growing due to the growth of the underclass

• People failing to socialise their children properly

Davis

• safety valve

• prostitution acts as a safety valve for men to release sexual frustrations without threatening to break up the nuclear family

Merton

• strain theory

• crime is due to:

• structural factors - unequal opportunity

• cultural factors - strong emphasis on goals, weak emphasis on legitimate means

• deviance is a result of: goals and opportunities

• American dream

• adaptions: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebel

Cohen

• status frustration

• alternative status hierarchy

Cloward and Ohlin

• 3 subcultures:

• criminal

• conflict

• retreatist

Becker

• ‘social groups create deviance by creating the rules… applying those rules to particular people’

• deviance is simply someone whom is label has successfully been applied

• moral entrepreneurs - people who lead a moral campaign to change the law

• 2 effects:

  1. outsiders - deviants who break the new law

  2. creation of social control agency e.g. police, probation officers to enforce the rile and impose labels on offenders

Cicourel

• negotiations of justice

• Typifications - stereotypes of what a typical delinquent is like

• law enforcement show a class bias

• found that probation officers held the ‘common sense theory’ - juvenile delinquency was due to broken homes, poverty and lax parenting

• justice is not fixed but negotiable

• statistics do not give us a valid picture

Lemert

• primary deviance

• master status

• secondary deviance

• deviant career

Braithwaite

• disintegrative shaming

• reintegrative shaming

Douglas

• interactionist

• statistics on suicide are socially constructed

• shaped by interactions between coroners and relatives

• stats do not reveal reasons for suicide

• instead use suicide notes and doing interviews with peers / family

Atkinson

• coroners common sense knowledge

• argues it is impossible to know meanings the deaths gave

• focuses on taken for granted assumptions

• ‘typical suicide’ were important e.g. mode of death, location, circumstance

Goffman

• asylums show effects for being admitted to a ‘total institution’

• mortification of the self - their old identity is killed off and replaced with a new one ‘inmate’

• degradation rituals - confiscation of personal things

• inmates become institutionalised and internalise their new identity and unable to re-adjust

Gordon

• crime is a rational response to the capitalist

• dog eat dog system

Chambliss

• the state and law making

• cash tax in British east Africa forced locals to work for plantation owners

• the ruling class also blocks laws that might hurt their profits or challenge their power

Pearce

• ideological functions of crime

• laws benefit the ruling class by keeping workers fit for work

• gives capitalism a ‘caring’ face and create a false consciousness among the workers

Taylor, Walton and Young

• capitalist society is based on exploitation and class conflict - extreme inequalities of wealth and power

• state makes and enforces laws in the interest of the capitalist class and criminalises wc

• capitalism should be replaced by a classless society greatly reduce the extent of crime or even rid society of crime entirely

• wider origins pf deviant act

• immediate origins of deviant act

• the act itself

• immediate origins of social reaction

• wider origins of social reaction

• effects of labelling

Hall et al

• applied taylor et al approach to explain moral panic over so called ‘mugging’ in the 70s

• marxists call a ‘crisis of capitalism’ - economic recession, resulting in employment, disproportionate impact on black people

Sutherland

• occupational crime

• corporate crime

• harm caused by problems do not break the criminal law

Tombs

• corporate crime has enormous costs: physical, environmental, economic,

• financial crimes, crimes against consumers, crimes against employees, crimes against the environment, state corporate crime

Murray

• crime rate is increasing because of a growing underclass or new rabble who are defined by their deviant behaviour and who fail to socialised their children properly

Clarke

• rational choice theory

• to commit crime is a choice based on rational calculation of the likely consequences

• if perceived rewards outweigh the perceived costs then they will offend

Lea and Young

• identify 3 causes of crime

  1. relative deprivation

  2. subculture

  3. marginalisation