Chapter 4: Social Structure, Anomie, and Crime
- Emile Durkheim: founders of sociological criminology
- generalizations about social behavior can be made independent of individual variations in free will, psychological state, and motivation
- ==positivist method==
- make social facts the object of study
- manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual that exercise control over him
- social phenomena (law, crime, etc.) have an objective existence and exist independent of the individuals who experience them
- Law and Social Solidarity
- ==social development is on a continuum==
- mechanical solidarity
- simple societies with limited role specialization or division of labor
- collectiveconscience:collective life dominates individual beliefs and values
- organic solidarity
- advanced division of labor
- members have diffuse ways of acting, thinking, and feeling
- individualism dominates collective life
- social stability isn’t directly observable so we observe it through law, a visible symbol
- law exercises an organized pressure on individuals to conform to its commands
- repressive law
- mechanical solidarity
- religious and identical with penal / criminal law
- enforced by the whole of society
- no need for a special / organized institution
- restitutive law
- enforcement of status quo
- positive law: cooperation required in a complex division of labor
- includes contract, administrative, domestic, and commercial legislation
- %%negative law:%% rules between persons and objects than enjoin others not to interfere in certain proprietary rights of the owner
- The Nature of Crime
- crime: acts repressed by prescribed punishments
- punishment: a reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts over members who’ve violated certain rules of conduct
- crime is normal, inevitable, and useful
- why is crime useful? because crime is indispensable to the normal evolution of law and morality
- Anomie, Egoism, and Crime
- suicide is sociological, not psychological / biological
- egoistic suicide: weakening of bonds between an individual and society
- caused by excessive individualism
- altruistic suicide: individuals have insufficient inner strength to resist the demands of a social group that they are overly integrated into
- anomic suicide: sudden crisis in economic / familial lide
- individualized suicide: characterized by melancholy, passion, and irritation
- civilized people have a respect for life, property, and the honor of others
- homicide is the worst crime because it violates the individual and goes against the rules of society
- homicide rates decreased with modernity because of the growth of the respect afforded a person by public opinion
- The Evolution of Punishment
- societies are advanced and less developed societies are dominated by repressive laws and barbaric forms of punishment
- political power exists in different types of societies but only occurs when it’s seen as a right
- Social Structure, Anomie, and Deviance (Robert Merton)
- deviant behavior is a symptom of social disorganization (specifically, having aspirations but no way to reach them)
- responses to the strains and tensions of social life
- conformity: most common
- innovation: deviant behavior that uses illegitimate means to achieve socially acceptable goals
- ritualism: abandoning / scaling down of current goals
- retreatism: adaptation that relinquishes culturally prescribed goals and doesn’t conform to institutionalized means
- rebellion: alienation from illegitimate means and values as a collective group
- General Strain Theory (Robert Agnew)
- strain theory has a central role to play in explaining crime / delinquency
- analysis of relationships where an individual is not treated as they’d like to be
- can be brought on by
- failure to achieve positively valued goals
- removal of positively valued stimuli from the individual
- presentation of negative stimuli
- Messner and Rosenfeld’s Institutional Anomie Theory
- the American Dream is composed of values that are agreed on by a large majority of citizens
- noneconomic institutional functions / roles are devalued
- other social institutions are forced to accommodate to economic requirements
- economic norms penetrate most other institutional areas