c/d

• Theories of crime


  • Durkheim: crime can strengthen collective values, enable social change, act as a safety valve and act as a warning device
  • Merton: strain, or not being able to meet shared goals of society due to eg blocked opportunities, leads to crime individual response
  • Cohen: status frustration can lead to the formation of delinquent subcultures, with alternative status hierarchies explains group crime, and non-utilitarian
  • Miller: criticises Cohen arguing that working class boys do not subscribe to mainstream values in the first place working class subculture
  • Cloward and Ohlin: unequal access to illegitimate opportunities and three types of subculture - retreatist, conflict and criminal
  • Chambliss: law favours the ruling class eg in protection of private property
  • Snider: capitalist state rarely passes health and safety laws
  • Chambliss: one law for the rich, one for the poor - selective law enforcement
  • Taylor et al: 'fully social' theory of deviance needed combining both interactionism and Marxism
  • Hall et al: moral panic about black crime
  • Cicourel: police treated youths who they perceived as being from a 'good' background (white and middle class) more leniently
  • Lemert: primary and secondary deviance
  • Young: hippy drug users in Notting Hill had deviant careers
  • Braithwaite: disintegrative and reintegrative labelling
  • Heidensohn: criminology is 'malestream'
  • Lea and Young: main causes of crime are marginalisation, subcultures and relative deprivation
  • Young: individualism also explains crime
  • Murray: poor socialisation and control causes crime
  • Cornish and Clarke: people make rational; choices to commit crimes
  • Katz: pleasures and seductions of individuals cause crime (postmodernist)
• Crime, gender, ethnicity, class

  • Gilroy: black crime as a form of political resistance - 'myth of black criminality'
  • Hall et al: folk devil of the 'black mugger' exaggerated to create a moral panic and scapegoat economic and political crisis of 1970s Britain
  • Lea and Young: marginalisation, subcultures and relative deprivation are the reasons ethnic minorities commit crime
  • Bowling and Phillips: social exclusion explains black crime
  • Bowling and Phillips: stop and search creates a self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Heidensohn: women commit less crime due to patriarchal control in private and public spheres
  • Carlen: more working class women commit crime as they have not got the rewards of the class deal or the gender deal and have so little to lose
  • Pollak: the chivalry thesis
  • Carlen: women are seen as doubly deviant by the CJS
  • Adler: liberation thesis - women committing more crime due to feminism
  • Heindensohn and Silvestri: growing female crime a result of net-widening and criminalisation of girls
  • Messerschmidt: men turn to crime to assert their masculinity
  • Croall: white collar crime is less visible and there is less visible harm
  • Sutherland: differential association as an explanation of white collar crime
  • Box: corporate and white collar crime caused by criminogenic society
  • Nelken: white collar offences less likely to be labelled as criminal
• Globalisation and crime


  • Castells: globalisation has led to the creation of a new criminal economy and created transnational networks of organised criminals
  • Farr: two types of organised crime groups - established mafias, and newer organised crime groups
  • Hobbs and Dunningham: global crime is 'glocal' - global networks embedded in local contexts, use to criticse Glenny
  • Lash and Urry: globalisation has led to 'disorganised capitalism'
  • Taylor: economic globalisation has led to new opportunities for crime for the rich and the poor
  • Beck: people are more risk conscious in risk society - hatred fuelled by media and can cause hate crimes
  • Glenny: McMafia - collapse of communism led to no control over markets and setting up of mafia groups to protect money leading to global organised crime networks
  • White: transgressive approach to green crime - environmental harm
  • Beck: many green crimes are the result of manufactured risks
  • Potter: working class are often the victims of green crimes
  • South: primary and secondary green crime
  • Schwendinger and Schwendinger: state crimes should be defined as human rights violation
  • Kelman and Hamilton: most state crimes are committed as crimes of obedience, not disobedience - following orders
  • Cohen: states use techniques of neutralisation to justify state crimes
  • Tombs and Whyte: researchers likely to face official resistance when researching state crimes
• Media and crime


  • Jewkes: news values eg violence influence reporting of crime and deviance
  • Surette: crime in the media is often the opposite of real life
  • Hall et al: folk devil of 'black mugger'
  • Cohen: moral panic and deviancy amplification of the mods and rockers
  • McRobbie and Thornton: idea of a moral panic is outdated in the age the new media
  • Hunt: hard to separate moral and immoral behaviour
• Crime prevention and punishment; victimology

  • Garland: recent shift in focus in CJS to retributive justice
  • Foucault: shift from sovereign control to disciplinary power
  • Rusche and Kirchheimer: punishment as part of class domination in unequal society
  • Durkheim: positives of punishment, in that they provide an outlet for anger and reaffirm boundaries
  • Althusser: punishment in the form of prison is part of the repressive state apparatus
  • Weber: CJS has undergone rationalisation
  • Foucault: technologies of power are used to create this age of panopticism where surveillance is internalised
  • Lyon: surveillance in technologically advanced societies is enhanced by ICT
  • Wilson and Kelling: broken windows theory
  • Chaiken et al: crackdown on subway robberies with SCP displaced them to the streets
  • Lea: postmodernist view - crime resuction involves need for CJS to represent interests of a diversity of people
  • Tombs and Whyte: victims of corporate crime often denied label of victim
  • Tierney: positivist victimology involves victim proneness and victim precipitation