A-Level Sociology: Crime and Deviance Comprehensive Review

Essential vocabulary covering sociological perspectives, subcultural theories, realisms, and contemporary dimensions of crime and deviance.

Functionalism

A sociological theory that views society as a system of interconnected parts held together by a shared value consensus, arguing that crime and deviance are inevitable and can serve positive functions.

Shared Value Consensus

A broad agreement among members of a society concerning what is important and how individuals should behave.

Anomie (Durkheim)

A state of normlessness or a tendency towards a loss or lack of clear norms and values, leading to uncertainty about acceptable behaviour in increasingly complex societies.

Boundary Maintenance

A positive function of crime identified by Durkheim wherein societal reactions to rule-breaking reinforce the boundary between law-abiding and law-breaking individuals, reaffirming collective moral codes.

Adaptation and Change (Durkheim)

The principle that all social progress originates with acts of deviance, as individuals who challenge existing values can bring about necessary societal evolution.

Safety Valve (Davis)

The functionalist argument that certain deviant practices, such as prostitution, release men's sexual frustrations safely without destabilising the traditional nuclear family.

Warning Signal (Cohen)

The concept that deviance indicates an institution or facet of society is malfunctioning, prompting policymakers and authorities to initiate reforms.

Strain Theory (Merton)

A structural theory arguing that deviance occurs when individuals experience a structural tension between culturally approved goals and the legitimate means available to achieve them.

Innovation (Merton)

A deviant adaptation to strain wherein an individual accepts cultural success goals but employs illegitimate means (such as theft or fraud) to achieve them.

Ritualism (Merton)

An adaptation to strain in which an individual abandons cultural goals of success but rigidly abides by institutional rules and legitimate procedures.

Retreatism (Merton)

An adaptation to strain where an individual rejects both cultural goals and legitimate means, effectively dropping out of mainstream society.

Rebellion (Merton)

An adaptation where an individual rejects existing societal goals and means, seeking to replace them with revolutionary values and social systems.

Status Frustration (Cohen)

The personal sense of failure and frustration experienced by working-class boys who cannot succeed within a middle-class dominated education system.

Value Inversion (Cohen)

The process within delinquent subcultures whereby mainstream societal values are turned upside down, granting high status to defiance, aggression, and rule-breaking.

Non-Utilitarian Crime

Offenses that are committed without financial or material gain as the primary motive, such as vandalism or assault, often undertaken for peer status within a subculture.

Criminal Subcultures (Cloward and Ohlin)

Subcultures arising in areas with established adult criminal networks, providing young people with an apprenticeship in crime, role models, and pathways in utilitarian offending.

Conflict Subcultures (Cloward and Ohlin)

Subcultures found in socially disorganised areas with high population turnover, where status is won through territorial aggression, violence, and gang clashes.

Retreatist Subcultures (Cloward and Ohlin)

Subcultures composed of 'double failures' who cannot attain status through either legitimate opportunities or illegitimate criminal/conflict subcultural routes, turning to substance abuse.

Moral Entrepreneurs (Becker)

Individuals or groups who identify a perceived social problem and lead crusades to create new laws, which subsequently produces new classes of 'outsiders.'

Typifications

Mental categories and stereotypes held by social control agents regarding what typical offenders look like and where they operate, influencing arrest and policing patterns.

Negotiation of Justice (Cicourel)

The idea that justice outcomes are not fixed but actively negotiated, often allowing middle-class parents to use social advantages to keep their children out of the formal legal system.

Primary Deviance (Lemert)

Minor, unlabelled deviant acts that go largely unpunished, allowing the perpetrator to rationalise them as isolated moments without adopting a deviant identity.

Secondary Deviance (Lemert)

Deviance that is produced as a direct consequence of public labeling, societal reaction, stigmatisation, and exclusion.

Master Status

A dominant label or identity that overrides all other social roles an individual possesses, shaping how society perceives them and how they perceive themselves.

Deviance Amplification Spiral (Cohen)

A process in which social control agencies and the media attempt to control or sensationalise deviance, inadvertently provoking more of the deviant behaviour.

Reintegrative Shaming (Braithwaite)

A restorative justice approach that condemns the deviant act rather than the individual, allowing offenders to make amends and successfully reintegrate into society.

Criminogenic Capitalism (Gordon)

The Marxist view that capitalism by its very structure induces crime across all social classes through exploitation, survival needs, alienating work, and profit-driven competition.

Ideological Function of Law (Pearce)

The Marxist argument that laws appearing to benefit the working class actually preserve capitalism by maintaining a productive workforce and presenting the system as caring.

Fully Social Theory of Deviance (Taylor et al.)

A comprehensive neo-Marxist framework combining structural inequalities in capitalist society with interactionist understandings of the personal meaning and societal reaction to deviance.

White-Collar Crime (Sutherland)

A crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation.

Occupational Crime

Offenses committed by individual employees for personal gain, frequently directed against their employer or company.

Corporate Crime

Crimes committed by employees on behalf of an organisation to advance its operational, financial, or strategic goals.

De-Labeling (Nelken)

The ability of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals to hire legal expertise and reframe illegal conduct as civil disputes or administrative errors.

Rational Choice Theory (Clarke)

A perspective proposing that offenders possess free will and rationally calculate the perceived rewards versus potential costs before committing an offense.

Routine Activity Theory (Felson)

A theory stating that crime occurs when three conditions converge: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian.

Broken Windows Theory (Wilson and Kelling)

The thesis that unrepaired environmental disorder signals an absence of informal social control, inviting escalating levels of crime and antisocial behaviour.

Target Hardening

A situational crime prevention method that makes targets physically more difficult to breach through measures like locks, window bars, alarms, and CCTV.

Relative Deprivation (Lea and Young)

The subjective sense of economic or social deprivation felt when comparing one's situation to others or to media-promoted standards of material consumption.

Marginalisation (Left Realism)

The state of disadvantaged groups lacking both clear institutional representation and designated goals, leaving them powerless and prone to expressing frustration through rioting or violence.

Macpherson Report (1999)

An official UK inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence that concluded the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist and characterized by a discriminatory canteen culture.

Myth of Black Criminality (Gilroy)

The neo-Marxist thesis that elevated minority crime rates are a racist social construction, and that minority law-breaking represents anti-colonial political resistance.

Policing the Crisis (Hall et al.)

A study demonstrating how a 1970s moral panic over black 'muggers' was constructed to divide the working class and divert public attention away from deep capitalist economic crises.

Chivalry Thesis (Pollak)

The proposition that male criminal justice personnel hold protective attitudes toward women, resulting in more lenient handling, fewer formal charges, and lighter sentencing for female offenders.

Double Deviance Thesis

The theory that women who commit offenses receive harsher judicial treatment because they transgress both legal statutes and traditional feminine gender roles.

Class and Gender Deals (Carlen)

The theory that working-class women conform due to promised material rewards from employment and domestic emotional rewards from family; when both fail, crime becomes more probable.

Liberation Thesis (Adler)

The argument that as women achieve greater social liberation and access to the labor market, their rates of offending, including corporate and violent crime, will rise to resemble men's.

Hegemonic Masculinity (Messerschmidt)

The culturally dominant, highly valued form of masculinity requiring paid labor, heterosexuality, and dominance over women, which men may turn to crime to construct when other means fail.

Bodily Capital (Winlow)

The physical prowess and intimidating bodily presence cultivated by men in deindustrialised nighttime economies to maintain status and monetize violence.

Law of Opposites (Surette)

The rule describing how media and fictional representations of crime systematically invert official crime statistics, over-representing violence and under-representing property crime.

Folk Devils

A specific social group demonised and exaggerated by the media as dangerous threats during a moral panic.

Semiology (Zemiology)

The study of social harm that broadens the scope of criminology to examine all legally permissible and illegal acts that cause substantial damage to people and the environment.

McMafia (Glenny)

Organised criminal networks originating in post-1989 Russia and Eastern Europe that franchised their operations globally following the deregulation of former state assets.

Primary Green Crimes

Direct environmental harms resulting from the destruction and depletion of the earth's natural resources, such as deforestation, water pollution, and species decline.

Secondary Green Crimes

Crimes that emerge from breaking laws or flouting rules established to prevent environmental catastrophes, including state violence against environmental activists.

Crimes of Obedience (Kelman and Hamilton)

State-sponsored atrocities carried out due to socialized obedience to authority, facilitated by authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.

Displacement (Crime Prevention)

The unintended outcome of situational crime prevention where criminal activity is not eliminated but merely shifted to different locations, times, targets, or methods.

Disciplinary Power (Foucault)

A modern form of societal power that manages behaviour by training the mind and soul through continuous surveillance, monitoring, and institutional control like the Panopticon.

Positivist Victimology

An approach to studying victimhood that uses quantitative patterns to identify lifestyle factors, victim proneness, and victim precipitation in interpersonal offenses.

Critical Victimology

An approach examining how wider social inequalities (patriarchy, poverty, racism) systematically produce victimisation and how the state uses its power to label or deny victim status.