Evaluating sociological

• Marxism weaknesses

  • focuses on class and largely ignores individual motivation and the connection Between crime and other inequalities such as gender.
  • over predicts the amount of working-class crime as not all poor people commit crime
  • not all capitalist societies have high crime rates e.g Japan‘s homicide rate is only about a fifth of the USA’s
• Marxism strengths

  • shows how poverty and inequality can cause working-class crime, and how capitalism promoted greed and encourages upper-class crime.
  • shows how both law-making and law enforcement are biased against the working class and in favour of the powerful. For example, corporate crime is rarely prosecuted
• strain theory weaknesses

  • deterministic - ignores crimes of the wealthy and over-predicts the amount of working-class crime as not all working-class individuals resort to crime
  • focuses on the individual and ignores group crime
• strain theory strengths

  • provides an explanation for how individuals in different positions in the social structure of society resort to different adaptations (innovations, ritualism, rebellion, retreatism)
  • explains reasons for crime and deviance as a result of social strain
• labelling theory weaknesses

  • fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place, before being labelled.
  • it fails to explain why the labels are applied to certain groups (working-class) but not to others.
  • deterministic - implies that once someone is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable.
• labelling theory strengths

  • highlights the differences in deviance between people and shows that rules can be applied in a discriminatory way.
  • shows how the police create crime by applying labels based on their stereotypes of the ‘typical criminals’. The selective law enforcement may explain why the working class are over-represented in te crime statistics
• Functionalism weaknesses

  • Claims society requires a certain amount of crime to function but offers no way of knowing how much is the right amount
  • while crime is functional for some, it is not for victims
• functionalism strengths

  • first to recognise that crime can have positive functions for society e.g reinforcing boundaries between right and wrong by uniting people against the wrongdoer.