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functionalist on crime - Coggle Diagram
functionalist on crime
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Émile Durkheim (1964)
pointed out that crime happens in even the most advanced communities and that this is normal. Not everyone will be equally devoted to conforming to society’s shared norms and values.
isks harming society and causing dysfunction, or anomie. Durkheim urged his readers to imagine a society without crime.
smallest level of deviance would elicit a major reaction because the deviant behaviour would seem all the more unacceptable.
Social integration refers to the cohesion that members of society experience when they share a collective expectation of the norms and values within their community.
People tend to come together in this way when, for example, someone has committed a terrible crime. There is a shared sense of anger towards the breach of morals that the criminal has committed.
Social regulation is one of the functions that societal structures carry out in managing public interests like the environment, health, education, and more. A common example of using crime as a form of social regulation is through staging public trials.
By punishing someone for their crimes in this way, enforcers of the law are sending a warning message to the rest of society that such deviant behaviour won’t be tolerated.
3.Social change
Another important function of crime is in the fact that it can bring about social change. Deviant behaviour causes people to reflect on what is or isn’t allowed within a particular society, allowing them to discover when the law doesn’t line up with the collective sentiments of the majority.
This can lead to necessary legal reform which ends up benefiting the community and its members.
merton
Strain theory was pioneered by Robert Merton (1949). He took on Durkheim’s idea of anomie and applied it to his examination of contemporary American society. He argued that the vision of success in American culture is attached to material and financial gain, achieved through legitimate means like skill-building and formal qualifications.
material success is a part of the American Dream - an ethos that states that every American has the opportunity to advance their careers and make it to the top.
- Conformity: following the normative means of achieving success regardless of structural setbacks. This can look like working hard, getting a promotion, and becoming successful in the 'traditional' way.
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- Innovation: turning to criminal activity to achieve success.
- Ritualism: abandoning the goal of success but still conforming to the means to achieve it.
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- Retreatism: rejecting both the goal and the means to achieve it.
- Rebellion: adopting alternative goals and aiming to bring revolutionary change to society.
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The main argument of strain theory is that anomie is caused by the pressure (known as ‘strain to anomie’) to accomplish these goals, and is felt most by those who have trouble in accomplishing them. There is a strain between society’s expectations, and the means to live up to them.
Therefore, people turn away from legitimate means of achieving material success and take up crime as a way to achieve it.
Albert Cohen 1955
subcultural status frustration.- young, working-class males
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demographic group channelled their frustration into the creation of a subcultural solution. The solution involved the group using their shared problem to collectively form a deviant subculture which turned the norms of the dominant culture upside down.
male, working-class delinquents engage in deviant behaviours to gain each other’s respect - but also as a means to strike back at the society which has rejected these young men by framing them as ‘failures’.
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