Subcultures

• Cohen

  • Subcultures reject the mainstream norms and values and turn them into the norms of a delinquent
  • Higher value is placed upon criminal acts
  • Explains non utilitarian crimes for example vandalism, joy riding
  • Yet it doesn't consider they don’t share initial goals
• Cloward and Ohlin

  • Working class are denied legitimate opportunities to achieve, do not believe they turn to utilitarian crime

  3 types of delinquent subculture

  • The criminal subculture - develop in areas of will established adult crime (learn to commit utilitarian crimes)
  • The conflict subculture - no professional criminal network so only opportunities are within loosely organised gangs (status is gained through violence)
  • The retreatists subculture - those who have failed illegitimately and legitimately from gangs based on drug use
• Matza

  • Subterranean values
  • Everyone has deviance in them not just subcultures
  • Young people are less skilled at suppressing them
  • Techniques of neutralisation to justify them

  Techniques of neutralisation

  • Denial of responsibility - Denies it was their fault
  • Denial of victim - Claims victim was in the wrong
  • Denial of injury - victim was not really hurt
  • Appeal to higher loyalties - claims rule of law had to be ignored
  • Condemnation of condemners - Sense of unfairness
• Walter Miller

  • There was delinquency subculture, argued that it arose entirely from the lower class way of life.
  • lower class parents were more concerned with ensuring their children stayed out of trouble
  • lower class saw excitement of crime and was a welcome relief
  • middle class saw family, work and school as valuable
  • working class saw crime as a way to achieve status they cannot easily achieve.
• Walter Miller


  Sociologist who studied working class deviant subcultural values
• Focal concerns of working class subcultural values

  • Fate
  • Excitement
  • Autonomy
  • Smartness
  • Trouble
  • Toughness
• Fate


  Lower class males tend to be fatalised about life, whereby whatever happens is the result of 'chance' or 'fate'
• Excitement


  The idea of having fun is significant mainly because Miller argued that, through their working lives, lower class males were effectively denied much sense of self-expression
• Autonomy


  Acceptance of their lot in life is the desire for personal respect within their immediate subculture groups and not to be pushed around by others
• Smartness


  Ability to look good
• Trouble


  Lower class boys quicker learn how to identify 'trouble' and how to handle it
• Toughness


  Ability to handle 'trouble'; requires the need for toughness, the ability to 'take care' of both yourself and your mates
• Matza

  • Subterranean values - expression of deviance or unconventional behaviour that young people engage in:
  • Enjoying yourself
  • Acting on the spur of the moment
  • Self - expression
  • Being aggressive
  • Seeking excitement
  • People may drift into subterranean values like the young
  • Difference between subterranean values expresses by criminals and law abiding citizens is how often they express them and in what circumstance
  • when the values emerge pep use techniques of neutralisation to justify their actions, making behaviour criminal.