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Crime and Deviance - Coggle Diagram

- - - - This in turn creates SOCIAL SOLIDARITY - as it binds individuals together to see right and wrong
        
        Functionalists argue that in order to achieve social solidarity, society has 2 key mechanisms:
        
        1) Socialisation = Sharing the same norms and values within society.
        
        2) Social control = Mechanisms / strategies that include rewards for conformity and punishments for deviance. This is used to maintain social control and a way society is brought up.
    - - 2) Adaptation and change
        
        For individuals that want change, there must be some scope for them to challenge and change existing norms and values which is deviance. However, in the long run their values may give rise to a new culture and morality. If those with new ideas are suppressed, society will stagnate and be unable to make necessary adaptive changes. Thus for Durkheim, neither a very high nor a very low level of crime is desirable.
      - 1) Boundary maintenance
        
        In Durkheim's view, the purpose of punishment is to reaffirm society's shared rules and reinforces social solidarity, this is done through the rituals of the courtroom which dramatises the wrongdoing and stigmatises the offender. This reaffirms the values of the law-abiding majority and discourages others from rule breaking.
    - - It can be argued that functionalists explain the existence of crime in terms of its supposed function but this doesn't mean society actually creates crime in advance with the intention of strengthening solidarity.
      - Functionalism looks at what functions crime serves for society as a whole and ignores how it might affect different groups or individuals within society. - Is solidarity reinforced within the victim?
      - Durkheim doesn't explain how much of deviance is needed for society to function successfully.
      - Crime doesn't always promote solidarity. It may have the opposite effect leading to people becoming isolated e.g. forcing women to stay indoors for fear of attack.
    - - Cohen identifies another function of deviance; a warning that an institution is not functioning properly. Functionalists such as Erikson build on Durkheim's point and argue that if crime and deviance perform positive social functions, then perhaps it means society is actually organised so as to promote deviance.
  - - - 1) Structural factors- society's unequal opportunity structure.
      - 2) Cultural factors- the strong emphasis on success goals and the weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.
      - For Merton, deviance is the result of a strain between two things; 1. The goals that a culture encourages individuals to achieve. 2. What the institutional structure of society allows them to achieve legitimately.
    - - The ideology of the 'American Dream' tells Americans that their society is a meritocratic one where there is opportunity for all. However, in reality many disadvantaged groups are denied opportunities e.g. inadequate schooling.
      - The resulting strain produces frustration and this in turn creates a pressure to resort to illegitimate means such as crime.
      - the goal creates a desire to succeed, and lack of opportunity creates a pressure to adopt illegitimate means, while the norms are not strong enough to prevent some from succumbing to this temptation. So this results to crime
    - - Merton argues that an individual's position in the social structure affects the way they adapt and respond to the strain to anomie. Logically, there are five different types of adaption:
        
        Innovation- Individuals accept the goals of money success but use ‘new’, illegitimate means such as theft to achieve it.
        
        Retreatism- Individuals reject both the goals and the legitimate means and become dropouts.
        
        Ritualism- Individuals give up on trying to achieve the goals, but have internalised the legitimate means and so they follow the rules for their own sake.
        
        Rebellion- Individuals reject the existing society’s goals and the legitimate means, but replace them with new ones in a desire to bring about revolutionary change and create a new kind of society.
        
        Conformity- Individuals accept the culturally approved goals and strive to achieve them legitimately. This is most likely amongst the middle class.
    - - He explains patterns shown in official crime statistics; e.g. most crime in property crime because American society values material wealth so highly.
      - His theory is criticised as it takes official statistics at face value. These over-represent working-class crime, so Merton sees crime as a mainly working-class phenomenon.
      - Marxists argue that it ignores the power of the ruling class to make and enforce the laws in ways that criminalise the poor but not the rich.
- - - - This leads labelling theorists to look at how and why rules are made. They are particularly interested in the role of moral entrepreneurs. These are people who lead a moral ’crusade’ to change the law in the belief that it will benefit those to whom it is applied.
        However, Becker argues that this new law invariably has two effects:
        
        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 (police) to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders.
    - - Whether a person is arrested, charged and convicted depends on factors such as:
        
        Their appearance, background and personal biography
        
        The situation and circumstances of the offence.
        
        Their interactions with agencies of social control e.g. police
    - - Cicourel found that officers’ typifications- their common sense theories or stereotypes of what the typical delinquent is like- led them to concentrate on certain ‘types’. This resulted in law enforcement showing a class bias, in that working class areas and people fitted the police typifications most closely. Cicourel found that other agents of social control within the criminal justice system reinforced this bias.
      - In Cicourel’s view, justice is not fixed but negotiable. E.g. when a middle class youth is arrested, he is less likely to be charged because his background doesn’t fit with the police’s ‘typical delinquent’.
      - Cicourel's study has implications for the use we make of official crime statistics. He argues that these statistics do not give us a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource. Instead we should treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate.
  - - - Primary
        
        Primary deviance refers to deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled. Lemert argues that it is pointless to seek the causes of primary deviance since it is so widespread that it is unlikely to have a single cause.
      - Secondary
        
        Secondary deviance is the result of societal reaction- that is, of labelling. Once an individual is labelled, others may come to see him only in terms of the label. This becomes his master status or controlling identity, overriding all others.
        
        Secondary deviance is likely to provoke further hostile reactions from society and reinforce the deviant’s ‘outsider’ status. This may lead to the individual joining a deviant subculture that offers deviant career opportunities and role models, rewards deviant behaviour, and confirms his deviant identity.
        
        This may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the individual acts out or lives up their deviant label, thereby becoming what the label says they are. Lemert refers to the further deviance that results from acting out the label as secondary deviance.
    - - The deviance amplification spiral is a term used to describe a process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase in the level of deviance.
        
        This leads to greater attempts to control it and, in turn, this produces yet higher levels of deviance.
    - - Labelling theory has import policy implications. They add weight to the argument that negative labelling pushes offenders towards a deviant career. Therefore logically, to reduce deviance, we should make and enforce fewer rules for people to break.
      - Labelling theory implies that we should avoid publicly ‘naming and shaming’ offenders, since this is likely to create a perception of them as evil outsiders and, by excluding them from mainstream society, push them into further deviance.
    - - By assuming that offenders are passive victims of labelling, it ignores the fact that individuals may actively choose deviance.
      - It fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place, before they are labelled.
      - Its emphasis on the negative effects of labelling gives the offender a kind of victim status. Realist sociologists argue that his ignores the real victims of crime.