Functionalism

• Durkheim

  • Law reflects value consensus - based on what society sees as important
  • Small amounts of crime is positive: Social change, Brings people together, Deters from more crime.
  • Too much crime creates Anomie

  2 main functions of crime

  Boundary Maintenance

  • Punishment reaffirms society shared norms and values and reinforces social solidarity

  Adaption and Change

  • Crime creates social change
• Merton

  • Anomie occurred when people were unable to achieve the ‘American Dream’ - Strain theory

  5 Ways members responded to success goals

  • Conformity - Accepting both the goals and the means of achieving them
  • Innovation - Accepting the goals but rejecting the means - Deviance
  • Ritualism - Rejecting the goals but going along with the means
  • Retreatism - Rejecting both the goals and means, leads to alcoholism and drug abuse
  • Rebellion - Seek to replace the cultural goals and means with new ones that meet norms and values of particular group
• Cohen

  • Dead-end jobs mean that working class boys can’t achieve mainstream success / values, leads to status frustration.
  • Crime was a lower class phenomenon, not always for monetary gain.

  Subcultural Theory

  • Subcultures reject mainstream norms and values and turn to delinquent norms and values. Another way to achieve success
  • Have high value placed on criminal acts
  • Explains non utilitarian crime
  • Assumes working class boys start off sharing middle class goals only to reject these when they fail
  • Doesn’t consider they didn’t share goals initially
• Walter Miller

  • Deviant subcultures do not arise from inability of the members to achieve success but that lower class subcultures have different norms and values to the rest of society
  • Named them focal concerns