Subcultural Strain Theories

• Cohen: Status Frustration; Criticisms of Merton


  Merton sees deviance as an individual response to strain, ignoring the fact that much deviance is committed in groups, especially by the young. Merton focuses on utilitarian crime committed for material gain, such as theft or fraud. Largely ignoring crimes such as assault and vandalism, which may have no economic motive.
• Cohen: Status Frustration


  Focusing on deviance among working class boys; arguing that they face anomie in the middle class dominated school system. They suffer from cultural deprivation and lack the skills to achieve, this then leaves them at the bottom of the official status hierarchy. A lack of legitimate means causes status frustration- they resolve this through inverting mainstream values and turn to other boys in the same situation to form a delinquent subculture.
• Cohen: Alternative Status Hierarchy


  The subculture is hostile to those outside of it. Inverting the values of mainstream society. E.g. society upholds rules of regular attendance and respect for property, whereas they boys gain status from truanting and vandalism. The subculture offers boys an alternative hierarchy where they create their own illegitimate opportunities to gain status from their peers through delinquent actions.
• Cohen: AO3

  It offers an explanation for non-utilitarian crimes such as vandalism and truancy. However, like Merton, Cohen assumes that the working class start off by sharing the middle class goals, only to reject these when they fail. It ignores the possibility that they didn't share these goals, and therefore never viewed themselves as a 'failure'.
• Cloward and Ohlin: 3 Subcultures

  Criminal Subcultures: provide youths with an apprenticeship for a career in utilitarian crime, arising only in neighbourhoods with a longstanding and stable criminal culture with an established hierarchy of professional adult crime. Allowing the young to associate with adult criminals, who are able to select those with the right attitudes and abilities to train them, giving them opportunities for employment on the criminal career ladder.
• Cloward and Ohlin: 3 Subcultures

  Conflict Subcultures: arise in areas of high population turnover. Causing high levels of social disorganisation and then prevents a stable criminal network from developing. Meaning that the only illegitimate opportunities available are within loosely organised gangs. Violence provides a release from their frustration at the blocked opportunities, and an alternative means of earning status through winning 'turf' from rival gangs (much like the subculture described by Cohen).
• Cloward and Ohlin: 3 Subcultures

  Retreatist Subcultures: in any neighbourhood, where people have failed to achieve in both the legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures, making them 'double failures'. Many turn to retreatist subcultures based on illegal drug use.
• Cloward and Ohlin: AO3

  The boundaries drawn between each subculture is too sharp. South found that the drug trade is a mixture of 'disorganised' crime (like the conflict subculture) and professional 'mafia' style criminal subcultures. Similarly, those living in retreatist subcultures are also professional dealers who make their living through utilitarian crime. Meaning people can belong to multiple subcultures.
• Cloward and Ohlin: AO3

  Miller argues that the lower class has its own independent subculture which is separate from mainstream culture, with its own values. It doesn't put emphasis on 'money success' meaning that its members aren't frustrated by failure. This theory is a reactive theory as it wrongfully assumes that there is a value consensus which leads to frustrations.
• Cloward and Ohlin: AO3

  Matza claims that most delinquents aren't strongly committed to their subculture, as strain theorists suggest, instead they merely drift in and out of delinquency.
• Recent Strain Theories: Institutional Anomie Theory


  Messer and Rosenfeld focuses on the American Dream; arguing that the obsession with money and the 'winner takes it all' mentality exerts pressure towards crime as it encourages an anomic cultural environment. People adopt an 'anything goes' mentality in the pursuit of wealth. Concluding that societies based on free-market capitalism and lack adequate welfare provision (like the US) have inevitably high crime rates.
• Recent Strain Theories: Institutional Anomie Theory

  Downes and Hansen did a study of crime rates and welfare spending in 18 countries and found that societies that spent more on welfare had lower rates of imprisonment. Demonstrating that these societies protect the poor from the free-market then have less crime.
• Recent Strain Theories: Institutional Anomie Theory


  Savelsberg applies the Strain Theory to post-communist societies in Eastern Europe, which saw a rapid rise in crime after the fall of communism in 1989. Claiming this is due to the communist collective values being replaced by Western capitalist goals of individual 'money success'.