Subcultural

• Strain Theory argues that crime occurs when there aren’t enough legitimate opportunities for people to achieve the normal success goals of a society: it is a consequence of inequality. In such a situation there is a 'strain' between the goals and the means to achieve those goals, and some people turn to crime in order to achieve success.
• Key Responses to strain

  • Conformity -

  cultural goals / legitimate means

  • Innovation -

  cultural goals / illegitimate means

  • Ritualism -

  non-cultural goals / legitimate means

  • Retreatism -

  non-cultural goals / illegitimate means (try to escape society)

  • Rebellion -

  reject cultural goals and aim to replace them.
• Cohen agrees with Merton that deviance results from the lower classes' failure to achieve by legitimate means. However:

  • Cohen sees subcultural deviance as a group response to failure, not just an individual one.
  • He focuses on non-utilitarian crimes (ones not for financial gain) such as vandalism.

  Cohen notes that most working-class boys end up at the bottom of the school's official status hierarchy. Teachers may regard them as 'thick' and put them in the lower streams. As a result, they suffer from status frustration - a feeling of worthlessness.
• The subculture offers a solution by providing them with an alternative status hierarchy in which they can win respect from their peers through delinquent actions. It inverts society's values (turns them upside down): for example, society respects property, whereas the boys gain status in the group by vandalising property.
• Status frustration - everyone is encouraged to achieve a high status but chances are limited for those of the working class.
• Alternative social hierarchy - offers

  boys an alternate status hierarchy in which they can achieve. Failing in the legitimate opportunity structure, boys create their own illegitimate opportunity structure in which they can earn status from peers through delinquent actions.
• Inversion of social norms - formations of subcultures with values that were largely the reverse of mainstream values. What was deemed taboo or deviant in mainstream society was praiseworthy or good in the subculture.