Sociological points

• Functionalist


  • Durkheim is the first person to recognise that crime can have benefits on our society
  • Crime might be functional for society, but not for the victims
  • Durkheim does not offer how much crime or what type of crime is enough or too much
• Strain


  • Merton shows how normal and deviant behaviour arise from the same goals and different means
  • ST explains the crime patterns shown in official statistics. Most crime is property crime because society values wealth and w/c crime rates are higher
  • ST ignores the crime of wealthy and over predicts w/c crime
  • Merton sees crime as individual response to strain and ignores group crime and deviance
  • ST focuses on utilitarian crime and ignores crimes with no economic motive
• Labelling


  • It shows the law is not a fixed set of rules to be taken for granted, but something whose construction we need to explain
  • It shows police create crime by applying labels based on stereotypes of the 'typical criminal'. Selective enforcement may explain why the working class and minority groups are overrepresented in the crime statistics
  • It shows the role of the media in defining and creating deviance and for producing moral panics
  • It is deterministic. Wrongly implies that once someone has broken the law a deviant career is inevitable
  • Its emphasis on the negative effects of labelling gives offenders 'victim' status, ignoring the real victims of crime
  • It fails to explain why some people commit acts of crime and deviance before they are actually labelled
  • It doesn't explain where the power to label comes from. It focuses on the officials who apply the labels rather than the ruling class that create the rules in the first place
  • It doesn't really explain why labels are applied to certain groups but not others
• Marxism


  • It shows how poverty and inequality can cause working class crime and how capitalism promotes greed and encourages upper class crime
  • It shows how lawmaking and law enforcement are biassed against the working class and in favour of the powerful
  • It focuses on class and ignored other inequalities such as gender and ethnicity
  • Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates i.e japan's homicide rates are 5x lower than the USA
  • It over predicate working class crime- not all workers are criminal
• Right realism


  • Several studies support rational choice theory, the main supporting theory for right realism, Rettig gave students a scenario of an opportunity to commit a crime. He found the degree of punishment determined whether they said they would go ahead
  • Feldman found people made rational decisions. If a crime was considered low risk, high yield they said it would be worth committing
  • Bennett and Wright interviewed convicted burglars. The burglars considered the potential reward, difficulty of breaking in and risk of being caught. Risk was the most important factor influencing their decision to commit crime
  • Right realism explains opportunistic petty crimes such as theft
  • Rettig and Feldman's research was based on experiments which lack environmental validity. The result may not apply to real offenders
  • Bennett and Wright studied unsuccessful burglars. We don't know if successful burglars think the same way
  • Not all crime is the result of rational decisions. Violent crimes are impulsive
  • Offenders acting under the influence of drugs or alcohol may not be capable of making rational decisions
• Left realism


  • LR draws attention to the importance of poverty, inequality and relative deprivation as the underlying causes of crime
  • LR draws attention to the reality of street crime and it's effects on victims and deprived groups
  • It accepts the authorities' definitions of crime as being the street crimes of the poor. It fails to explain white collar and corporate crime and the harms done to the poor by the crimes of the powerful
  • By focusing on inner-city areas it gives an unrepresentative view and makes crime appear to be a greater problem than it is
  • It over predicts the amount of w/class crime. Not everyone who experiences relative deprivation and marginalisation turns to crime
• Surveillance


  • Foucault's work has stimulated research into surveillance and disciplinary power - especially into the idea of an 'electronic panopticon' using modern tech to survey us
  • Researchers are now identifying other methods of surveillance, including actuarial justice and profiling
  • Foucault exaggerates the extent of control. Goffman has shown how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals resist control
  • Surveillance theories don't actually take the idea of why crime occurs, only offering a solution to preventing it
  • There is evidence that surveillance is not as effective as Foucault claims, some studies show the effects of CCTV are limited, with criminality still occurring