Crime

• Functionalist (Durkheim) Functions of Crime: social cohesion, boundary maintenance, social change (functional rebels e.g. Emeline Pankhurst, Rosa Parks, Stonewall)
• Functionalism: crime is a symptom of the organic analogy due to anomie and egoism and a disruption of the value consensus
• Functionalism (Davis): crime as a safety valve
• Marxism: Capitalism as crimeogenic as a 'Proletariat revenge'
• Marxism: Chambliss, Capitalism encourages self interest and greed leading to crime especially theft and financial crimes e.g. scams and hacking
• Marxism: Gordon 'dog eat dog world'
• Marxism: laws are selectively enforced, crimes that are likely to be committed by the higher classes (corporate crimes e.g. MPs expenses) are accepted and are less likely to be treated as a criminal offence
• Marxism: Reiman 'Rich get richer, poor get prison'
• Marxism: Althusser ISA & RSA
• Functionalism: Merton strain theory. There is a strain between goals of society and an individuals means to reach the goals. Conformist, innovator, ritualist, retreatist, rebellion
• Functionalism: Cloward and Ohlin Illegitimate opportunity structure. Criminal e.g. Mafia (deviant career), Conflict e.g. violent, turf war e.g. Glasgow Ice Cream Wars, Retreatist e.g. drug dealers, street crime (double failures)
• Functionalism: Cohen Status Frustration: working class boys cannot gain status through academic success so invert the values and create an alternative status hierarchy, turning to crime to gain status.
• Functionalism: Miller - focal concerns e.g. smartness, excitement, autonomy, toughness
• Functionalism: Matza Drift theory, certain individuals cannot contain their subterranean values and express them in incorrect situations leading to crime and deviance
• Lemert: primary and secondary deviance (Braithwaite - incest island)
• Cohen: Moral panics, deviancy amplification spiral, folk devils (distract from issues of capitalism) e.g. 1960s Mods and Rockers, Islamophobia
• Cicourel - negotiations of justice/ typifications
• Right realism: Wilson 'broken window thesis', crime is caused by a rational choice, crime breeds crime in unsurveyed areas. Socialisation and the underclass (Murray.
• Right realism: ASBO, three strikes rule, tougher prisons act as a short, sharp, shock, capable guardians, bobbies on the beat
• Left realism: Lea and Young, relative deprivation, marginalisation, subculture
• Left realism: remove the causes of crime, Blair government, EMA, youth clubs, Perry Pre-School project
• Official statistics: observed, reported, recorded, police
• Marxism: dark figure of crime
• Victim survey CSEW 40,000 participants (self-report study), find those who have been victims of crime but did not report it
• Feminism: Patriachal control theory (Heidensohn) - control at home, control in public, control at home all reduce opportunities to commit crimes. Islington crime survey 84% of women avoid going out at night due to fear of being a victim
• Feminism: Class and gender deals (Carlen) class deal provides material possessions, gender deal provides comfort through traditional roles
• Feminism: Liberation thesis (Adler) - women more free from patriarchal control and so commit more crime (e.g. ladettes, Elizabeth Holmes Tharanos) Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Equal Pay Act 1970
• Chivalry thesis (Pollack) - criminal justice system made up of majority of men who are socialised to treat women more leniently
• Normative masculinity (Messerschmidt) - the ideal of masculinity that is promoted by society and the media. Men feel the need to 'achieve' masculinity through work success, wealth and income, domination of females and sexuality
• Tony Sewell- Black boys raised in single parent households, paricularly matriarchal households lack positive male role models in a father figure
• Stephen Lawrence - institutional racism in police force shown in the McPherson report
• Gilroy 'myth of black criminality' - black youths are more likely to be arrested and convicted of crime (5 times more likely to be stop and searched)
• Hall et all - moral panic reaction to 'mugging'
• Castells and Glenny - global criminal networks: green crime, trafficking, sex tourism, cyber crime
• Crime as TNCs as they outsource production to countries with lower wages and lower labour standards
• Green crime: BP oil spill, Chernobyl, deforestation
• Definitions of green crime 1) actions that harm the environment and against the law 2) actions that are currently legal should be green crime 3) zemiology - all actions that harm the environment should be green crimes (anthropocentric)
• State crime: Guatanamo Bay, Holocaust, Rwanda
• Definitions of state crime 1) Breaks the law of society carried out by a state agency 2) Use definitions based on international law 3) Use notions of human rights (USHR)
• New media and crime: leads to new crimes such as cyber crime, internet fraud, trolling, pornography. Positive effects: solve crimes, boundary maintenance, alert public, CCTV, extradition agreements