Crime : Cohen AO3

• +helps us understand non-utilitarian crime.
• +explains higher crime rates among young, working class males.
• -gaining status from peers this way doesn't always work.
• -ethnic and gender differences are ignored.
• -people who do well in school may resort to the antischool subculture too.
• +Cohen explains vandalism, he shows that deviance is a rational response to life and indicates how it can be learnt through peer groups.
• +He links deviance to status and explains how the working classes and youthful deviance is in fact a collective response, therefore explaining why crime is reported as a white, young working-class thing.
• -Short and Strodbeck found little evidence to suggest that gangs reject the middle-class values of society. The delinquents would have to be brilliant sociologists to work out middle class values and then turn against them.
• -Bordua suggests that working class subcultures are not passed on: each generation creates a new culture relating to society at that time.
• -Box believes that Cohen's theory only explains a small number of delinquents. He believes that what is occurring in fact is a group of people who never accepted mainstream standards of success and felt resentment at being seen as failures by teachers and middle-class youths, whose values they do not share. They simply turn against those who look down on them.
• -Matza suggests that delinquency is a temporary and normal part of growing up -many young people 'dabble' in criminal or deviant behaviour but then grow out of.
• -The emphasis on 'malice' misses the fact that delinquency is often carried out for fun. Fails to explain crimes committed by females or middle classes (e.g. white-collar crime or corporate crime). Does not explain individual acts of crime (e.g. serial killer).