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-Functionalism:
The inevitability of Crime?
P= Social regulation
E= Can perform a boundary setting function- reminding the law. Pursuit, trial + punishment of criminals reassure people that society is functioning effectively.
E= Davies> prostitution provides economic support for unskilled women
E= Deviance is a warning signal that something in society is not properly working.
P= Social integration
E= Some crimes create public outrage which reinforce social solidarity + community values against offenders, argued it only becomes dysfunctional when its rate is unusually high or low.
E= London Riots, when particularly horrific crimes have been committed the whole community joins together in outrage.
E= Taking official crime statistics at face value
P= Social change
E= Everytime a person is prosecuted for a crime attention is drawn to that act. When the law is clearly out of step with the feelings + values of the majority, legal reform is necessary.
E= Sufragette movement
E= Assume that society has universal norms + values.
Structural Functionalism?
P= Bonds of attachment
E= Hirschi> crime is a result of poor/ a lack of socialisation into societies shared norms + values. Criminal activity occurs when an individual’s attachment to society is weakened.
E= Negative experience of discrimination, working-class students due to labelling- struggle to find a job, so turn to crime.
E= Blames the victim, ignores wider societal factors e.g. poverty, middle class commit crimes as well.
P= Strain theory
E= Merton> ‘if we work hard we will be rewarded with status + material health’. The problem is there are insufficient opportunities for all those who work hard to achieve, this is therefore a strain between what we think we should have + our ability to achieve this legitimately. Striving to achieve the ‘American dream’ could lead to criminal or deviant behaviours.
E= Retreatism> lack the means of achieving society’s goals but also don’t accept the goals.
Rebelion> people who reject the dominant social goals + the means the achieve them e.g. terrorist
E= Marxist> Ignores the powers of ruling class who enforce laws in a way that criminalise the poor but not the rich.
Subcultural functionalism?
P= Status frustration
E= Cohen> argues that lower class boys strove to emulate middle-class values + aspirations, but lacked the means to achieve success, this led to status frustration- a sense of personal failure + inadequacy.
E= Bourgois> Studied Latino + African-American drug dealers. Understandable that the youths in these subcultures + gangs did not work for minimum wage when there was a million-dollar industry on their doorstep.
E= Cohen ignores female delinquency + neglects police stereotyping.
P= An alternative status hierarchy
E= This delinquent subculture reverses the norms + values of mainstream culture, offering positive rewards (status) to those who are the most deviant.
E= Reggie Yates documentary> Boy joined a gang because he wanted to gain status + protection due to him being bullied.
E= Working-class boys actually conform at school despite eduction failure.
How does Murray (New Right) support?
Underclass> unemployed, lone parents, crime, sink house estates
Welfare has enabled single mothers to raise children without fathers in relative deprivation + without adequate socialisation.
Communities should be given the freedom to police themselves + drive out undesirables.
Example> NEETS= not in eduction, employment or training
Nearly 1 million people are classed as NEET in the UK
Evaluation of the New Right?
Marxist> there may be deeper structural causes of crime: we need to ask why there is an underclass in the first place.
Labelling perspective> the government, police + media may exaggerate + amplify the deviance of the subcultures + the underclass.
Crime prevention + control? (Durkheim)
P= Retributive justice
E= In traditional society, there is little specialisation + solidarity between individuals is based on their similarity to one another. This produces a strong collective conscience, which when offended, respondents with vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer.
E= Hangings, stocks, burnt at the stake
E= Marxist + feminists> not all criminals are treated in the same ways. Punishment given is in the hands of those in power.
P= Restitutive justice
E= Aims to restore things to how they were before the offence, its motivation Is to restore society’s equilibrium.
E= fines, community service, rehabilitation
E= We need to deal with the reasons people commit in the first place as part of the punishment process
-Interactionist:
Social construction of crime
P= Labelling - primary and secondary deviance
E= Becker> Illustrates how crime is the product of social interaction by using the example of a fight between young people. In a low-income neighbourhood, a fight might be defined by the police as evidence of delinquency; in a wealthy area as evidence of high spirits.The acts are the same, but the meanings given to them by the audience (in this case the police) differ.
Becker argues the two effects of a new law established by moral entrepreneurs:
1.The creation of a new group of ‘outsiders’ – outlaws or deviants who break the new rule.
2.The creation or expansion of a social control agency (such as the police, courts, probation officers etc.) to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders. Juvenile
Moral entrepreneurs- people who lead a moral ‘crusade’ to change the law.
Lamert> Primary deviance- deviance may be minor + doesn’t define who you are, secondary deviance- your deviance becomes your master status.
Young> Initially drugs were an example of primary deviance for the hippies, however prosecution + labelling led to the control culture (police) led the hippies seeing themselves as ‘outsiders’
E= Whether a person is arrested, charged and convicted depends on factors such as: interactions with agencies of social control, appearance and background, situation + circumstances of the offence.
E= Tends to be deterministic, implying that once someone is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable.
P= Negotiation of justice
E= Cicourel> Typifications – Police share common-sense theories or stereotypes, of what the typical delinquent is like.
Class bias – Working class areas and people fitted the ‘typification’ most closely.
Bias reinforced by other agents.
At each stage of the criminal justice system, agents of social control make decisions about whether or not to proceed to the next stage. The outcome depends on the label they attach to the individual suspect or defendant in the course of their interactions.
E= Black Americans are only 13% of the US population but 37% of the prison population
Lavinia Woodward- Pleaded guilty of stabbing her boyfriend but judge suspended her jail sentence, having said immediate custody would damage her career.
E= Victim surveys- sample of population are surveyed about their experiences of crime as a victim
Self-report studies- to determine real extent of crime + deviance.
The deviancy amplification spiral
P= Moral panic
E= Moral panic- press exaggeration + distorted reporting of the events begin a moral panic, with growing public concern + with moral entrepreneurs calling for a 'crackdown’
Deviance amplification spiral- process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase level of deviance.
Folk devils- opposite of the dark figure, ‘over labelled’ + over-exposed to the public view + the attentions of the authorities.
E= Fawbert> great hoodie panic that followed the ban of wearing hoodies in Blue water shopping centre. Word hoodie was used excessively in association with any negative behaviour by young people.
E= Realists argue that this theory ignores real victims of crime
Focus is on less serious crimes
Applying interactionism to crime prevention and control:
De-labelling?
Labelling and surveillance?
Reintegrative shaming?
P= de-labelling
E= Triplett> Shown how increases in the attempt to control + punish young offenders can have the opposite effect. We should avoid publicly naming + shaming offenders, since this is likely to create a perception of them as evil outsiders.
E= Criminal justice system- has re-labelled status offences such as truancy as more serious offences, resulting in much harsher sentences, this has resulted in an increase rather than a decrease of offending.
E= Goffman> prisons have their own subculture which provide training grounds for criminals to confirm the ‘criminal label’
P= Labelling and surveillance
E= Feeley + Simon> new ‘technology of power’ is emerging. It focuses on groups rather than individuals, its not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending.
E= Airport security screening checks are based on known offender ‘risk factors’- using information gathered about passengers e.g. age, sex, religion.
E=
P= Reintegrative shaming
E= Labels the act but not the actor- as if to say ‘ he has done a bad thing’ rather than ‘he is a bad person’.
Avoids stigmatising the offender as evil while at the same time making them aware of the negative impact of their actions.
E= Restorative justice- naming, shaming + facing the victim- Process which brings together victims of crime + the offenders responsible, usually in face-to-face meetings, to help repair the harm done.
E=
-Marxist:
Traditional marxism
P= Capitalism is criminogenic- values are manipulated and laws created to aid capitalism.
E= Capitalism is a social and economic system in which the pursuit of profit leads to crime and criminal behaviour.
Althusser> Ideological state apparatus- socialisation into the ruling class ideology to maintain false class consciousness.
Repressive state apparatus- criminal justice system operates to ‘force’ people to support capitalism.
Society is controlled by those who own the means of production + therefore they get to dictate the law to the subject classes.
E= Fox hunting is associated with upper class whereas badger bating is associated with lower classes and badger bating was made illegal sooner.
Snider> ruling class crimes are often ‘hidden’.
E= Economically deterministic- are all laws for the bourgeoise?
P= Ideological function- capitalism causes greed
E= For Marxists, crime is inevitable because capitalism is criminogenic; but it’s very nature it causes crime- poverty may mean crime is the only way to survive, alienation and lack of control may lead to non-utilitarian crimes to release anger and frustration.
Gordon> Capitalism causes crime because it promotes values such as consumerism and materialism and encourages people to be greedy. Explains why poorer people commit crime because it creates a ‘culture of envy’- always want more.
E= Nike has a marketisation method where children want to buy because it will make them look cool, this leads to people robbing and stealing.
E= Inequality has increased but the crime rate has been falling, suggesting there is no link between inequality and crime.
Neo-Marxism
P= The capitalist system and its impact on labelling
E= Critical criminology is made up of traditional marxism- ideas about the unequal distribution of wealth and also interactionist- labelling theory, meaning of the deviant act.
Taylor et al> the new criminology, rejects the view that workers are driven to crime by economic necessity, instead they believe that crime is a voluntary act.
Criminals are not passive puppets, instead they are deliberately striving to change capitalism.
E= Gilroy> Crime by black people, particularly in the 1970s, was a form of political action representing a culture of resistance and oppressors in the form of police racism and harassment.
E= Feminists> gender blind or ‘male stream’
Left-realists> Doesn’t take crime seriously and ignores its effects on working class victims
P= Young people resist the dominant capitalist culture through deviance.
E= CCCS- Birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies. Saw social class was crucial to influencing youth culture. Developed a specific explanation for the existence of subcultures among the working class.
Resistance- Hall and Jefferson> deviant subcultures could reject and resist the dominant, capitalist culture.
Exaggeration- Hebdige> subcultures exaggerated their style and leisure activities, resisting the boredom of their working class lives (drugs, fights).
E= 1970s Punks- Hebdige> punk was a form resistance to the dominant cultural values of British society, punks set out to deliberately shock the establishment and society.
E= Feminists> only focuses on deviant behaviour of boys
Functionalism> youth subcultures are functional for transition, not resistance subcultures.
Applying Marxism to crime prevention and control:
Punishment maintains the existing order of capitalism?
Surveillance is targeted on the working classes?
P= Punishment maintains the existing order of capitalism
E= To reduce causes of crime, politicians need to make structural adjustments to the organisations of capitalism.
Althusser> Punishments part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’- formal social control to maintain capitalism.
Rusche and Kirchheimer> Changes to forms of punishment over time are the result of the changing interests of the dominant class.
E= The US prison systems soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed.
It ceases to be the incarnation of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of population.
Transcarceration- Individuals become locked into as cycle of control, shifting between carceal agencies during their lives.
P= Surveillance is targeted on the working classes
E= Surveillance of the working class through: working class crime is given media headlines, working class crime is labelled, working class crime is over-reported and investigated.
E= Where as upper class crime is less likely to be reported in the media, upper class crime is ‘sanitised’ and labelled as accidents, upper class crime is complex and difficult to investigate.
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