Crime as normal — Durkheim and Merton

• Durkheim made the startling claim that crime is inevitable and even functional. Not everyone is equally socialised, and in modern societies the division of labour weakens the collective conscience, producing anomie (normlessness). Crime performs two positive functions: boundary maintenance — the public trial dramatises the line between right and wrong and reaffirms shared values — and adaptation and change, since all change begins as deviance. Too much crime tears society apart; too little means it is stagnant.
• Merton's strain theory adapts this. American culture urges everyone to pursue the 'American Dream' of money success, but the legitimate opportunity structure (education, decent jobs) is blocked for many. The strain between goals and means produces five adaptations: conformity; innovation (accept the goal, use illegitimate means — utilitarian crime); ritualism (abandon the goal, cling to the rules); retreatism (drop out — vagrants, addicts); and rebellion (replace both goals and means with new ones).

Evaluate: Merton explains utilitarian, individual crime but not vandalism, violence or crimes committed together in groups — and it ignores the crimes of the wealthy, who have not been denied opportunities. Durkheim never tells us how much crime is the right amount.

Merton's adaptations

Subcultures: status frustration and blocked opportunities

• Albert Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955) argued Merton cannot explain non-utilitarian crime like vandalism or joyriding. Working-class boys, judged by middle-class standards at school, end up at the bottom of the legitimate status hierarchy and suffer status frustration. The delinquent subculture inverts mainstream values, so that acts the school condemns win status among peers — an alternative status hierarchy.
• Cloward & Ohlin add that not everyone even has equal access to an illegitimate opportunity structure. Three subcultures follow: criminal (a stable adult criminal network offers an apprenticeship in utilitarian crime), conflict (no such network, so status comes from violence and territory), and retreatist (double failures who drop into drug use).
• Miller saw lower-class delinquency as a normal expression of focal concerns such as toughness, smartness, excitement and fate — not a reaction to middle-class values at all.
• Matza denies that delinquents are committed to a distinct subculture at all. They drift in and out of delinquency, using techniques of neutralisation (with Sykes) — 'he had it coming', 'nobody got hurt' — which shows they still recognise mainstream norms. Deviance simply expresses subterranean values (excitement, hedonism) that everybody holds but usually keeps in check.

Status frustration

Crime, law and class power

Traditional Marxism makes three linked claims:

• Criminogenic capitalism. Capitalism causes crime: poverty makes crime the only way to survive, consumerism creates wants it cannot satisfy, and the drive to profit produces corporate crime at the top.
• The state makes and enforces law selectively. Chambliss argued laws protecting private property are the cornerstone of the legal system. Snider notes the capitalist state is reluctant to pass laws that threaten profitability.
• Ideological functions. Selective enforcement — 'street crime' policed hard, boardroom crime rarely prosecuted — makes crime look like a working-class problem, dividing workers and legitimating the system. Tombs shows corporate crime causes very widespread harm yet attracts little enforcement.

Neo-Marxism. Taylor, Walton & Young (The New Criminology, 1973) reject the determinism of traditional Marxism. They call for a fully social theory of deviance that combines the wider structural origins of the act, its immediate origins, the act's meaning for the actor, and the reaction of society and the state. Crime, they argue, is often a conscious, meaningful choice with political content — the criminal is not a passive product of capitalism.

Evaluate: feminists point out the New Criminology is gender-blind — it is a theory about men; left realists accuse it of romanticising the working-class criminal, since most victims of working-class crime are working-class people.

Whose theory is it?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective that made it.

Labelling: nobody is deviant until somebody says so

• Becker (Outsiders, 1963): 'Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance.' No act is inherently deviant — it becomes deviant when a label sticks. Moral entrepreneurs campaign to create new rules; the deviant label can become a master status that overrides all others, so the person becomes an outsider.
• Lemert distinguishes primary deviance (rule-breaking that is not publicly labelled and has little effect on the self-concept) from secondary deviance (the response to the labelling) — the label, not the original act, is what creates the deviant career.
• Cicourel: justice is negotiable. Officers hold typifications of the 'typical delinquent'; those who fit are more likely to be stopped, arrested and charged, and middle-class parents can better negotiate their child out of the system. Crime statistics therefore record police decisions, not criminal behaviour.
• Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics) analysed the media reaction to the mods and rockers: exaggeration and prediction produce a moral panic, the deviants become folk devils, and the resulting crackdown can amplify the very deviance it condemns — the deviancy amplification spiral.

Evaluate: labelling is accused of determinism (not everyone labelled goes on to a deviant career), of romanticising deviants as victims, and of failing to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place. It ignores the structure of power that decides who does the labelling — a Marxist objection.

Primary and secondary deviance

The realists: taking crime seriously

• Right realism. Crime is a rational choice (Clarke): people offend when the rewards outweigh the risks. Murray blames a growing underclass and welfare-created dependency culture, with absent fathers failing to socialise boys. Wilson & Kelling's 'broken windows' thesis argues that visible disorder — a broken window left unrepaired, graffiti, begging — signals that nobody cares, so decent people withdraw and crime moves in; the answer is zero-tolerance policing of incivilities. Felson's work on the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York is the classic case of situational crime prevention — redesign the environment and you cut opportunity.
• Left realism. Lea & Young insist crime is a real problem, and that its victims are disproportionately the poor, minorities and women. Their three causes are relative deprivation (feeling deprived compared with others — not absolute poverty), subculture (a collective response to that deprivation) and marginalisation (groups with no organisations and no clear goals express frustration through violence and rioting). Their solutions are democratic, accountable policing and, crucially, tackling structural inequality — not just tougher sentences.

Contrast them cleanly: both take crime seriously and reject the New Criminology's romanticism, but right realism looks for control and left realism looks for causes. Critics say right realism ignores structural causes and corporate crime entirely, and that zero tolerance simply displaces crime.

Relative deprivation

Who commits crime, who is punished, who suffers?

Gender. Recorded offending is heavily male.

• Pollak's chivalry thesis claims the criminal justice system treats women more leniently, so female crime is under-recorded — heavily criticised for its unsupported assumptions.
• Heidensohn applies control theory: patriarchal society controls women at home (domestic role), in public (fear of male violence and of a bad reputation) and at work (male supervision) — so women have fewer opportunities to offend.
• Carlen, using unstructured interviews with convicted working-class women, argued crime followed the breakdown of the class deal (rewards for working) and the gender deal (rewards for conforming to domesticity).
• Messerschmidt sees crime as a resource for accomplishing masculinity — different classes and ethnicities construct hegemonic masculinity in different ways. Winlow's study of bouncers in Sunderland shows how deindustrialisation turned physical masculinity into a paid commodity in the night-time economy.

Ethnicity. Black people are heavily over-represented in stop-and-search and prison figures. Is that offending or policing?

• Gilroy argues the 'myth of black criminality' is a stereotype; crime by minorities is a form of political resistance rooted in anti-colonial struggle. Lea & Young reply that most victims are themselves black, so this romanticises the offender.
• Hall et al (Policing the Crisis, 1978) analysed the 1970s 'mugging' moral panic: a capitalist state in crisis needed a folk devil, and the black mugger divided the working class and legitimated repressive policing.
• Phillips & Bowling document the cumulative effects of police racism and 'militarised' policing of minority communities.

Victimology. Positivist victimology (Hentig) looks for the characteristics that make people prone to victimisation, and risks victim-blaming. Critical victimology (Tombs & Whyte) argues that victim status is socially constructed: the powerless are more likely to be victimised and less likely to have their victimisation acknowledged, while corporate harm is redefined as accident. Repeat victimisation is a striking pattern: a small number of people suffer a large share of all crime.

Sociologist to concept

Match each sociologist to the concept they are famous for. These are the names that earn marks.

Crime beyond the nation state

• Globalisation and crime. Held et al describe a global criminal economy — arms trafficking, drugs, trafficking in people, money laundering, cyber-crime — with both a supply side (poor countries where drug crops are a rational survival strategy) and a demand side in the rich West. Castells argues these networks are now a genuinely global system. Taylor gives a Marxist reading: neoliberal globalisation created huge inequality, deregulated finance, and let TNCs move production to low-wage economies, which is criminogenic at both ends of the class structure. Hobbs & Dunningham describe crime as increasingly 'glocal' — locally rooted but globally connected.
• Green crime. Beck's global risk society: the greatest threats we now face are manufactured by our own technology, and they cross borders. South distinguishes primary green crimes (destruction of the earth's resources — air pollution, deforestation, species decline, water pollution) from secondary green crimes (breaking the laws made to regulate environmental harm, such as illegal waste dumping). Traditional criminology only studies what the law forbids; green criminology is a transgressive approach that starts from harm, not law, and uses the idea of environmental justice.
• State crime. Green & Ward define it as illegal or deviant activity perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies — genocide, torture, war crimes, corruption. McLaughlin gives four categories: political crime, crimes by security and police forces, economic crimes, and social and cultural crimes. Because the state defines what is criminal, it can conceal its own crimes; Cohen traces a spiral of denial — 'it didn't happen', then 'if it did, it's something else', then 'even if it is what you say it is, it's justified'.
• Media and crime. The media over-represent violent and sexual crime and exaggerate risk; Schlesinger & Tumber link media consumption to fear of crime. Cohen's moral panic remains the key concept, and Thomas & Loader map the new field of cyber-crime.

Green criminology

Foucault, surveillance and punishment

• Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1977) contrasts sovereign power — spectacular, physical punishment of the body in the pre-modern era — with modern disciplinary power, which governs the mind through surveillance. His emblem is Bentham's Panopticon: prisoners visible at all times from a central tower but unable to see whether they are being watched, so they end up policing themselves. Self-surveillance spreads out of the prison into schools, factories, hospitals and barracks.
• Later surveillance theory. Feeley & Simon describe actuarial justice — the new penology does not seek to rehabilitate individuals but to calculate the risk profile of groups and manage them. Lyon calls this social sorting. Critics (Norris) find CCTV's actual impact on crime modest, and note that operators' decisions about whom to watch reproduce existing stereotypes.
• Punishment. Durkheim distinguishes retributive justice in traditional societies (expressive, harsh, expressing outraged collective conscience) from restitutive justice in modern ones (restoring things to how they were). Marxists (Rusche & Kirchheimer) tie the form of punishment to the economic system — imprisonment fits a capitalist economy in which time itself becomes the currency. The stated aims of punishment are deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution. Garland argues Britain and the USA have entered an era of mass incarceration and a culture of control.
• Prevention. Situational crime prevention (target hardening — but critics say it merely displaces crime); environmental crime prevention (zero-tolerance policing, from Wilson and Kelling); and social and community crime prevention, which attacks the root causes — the approach left realists prefer.

The Panopticon

Researching crime: positivism, interpretivism and the dark figure

• Positivism (after Durkheim) treats crime rates as social facts to be explained by correlation and statistical pattern; it favours official statistics, victim surveys and structured methods, prizing reliability and representativeness. Interpretivism (after Weber's verstehen) wants the offender's own meanings, so it favours unstructured interviews and participant observation, prizing validity.
• Official crime statistics are cheap, large-scale and comparable over time — but they record only crimes that are reported and recorded. The unrecorded remainder is the dark figure of crime. Interactionists (Cicourel) go further: the statistics are a social construct of police typifications, not a measure of crime.
• Victim surveys such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales ask people directly what has happened to them, capturing unreported crime — but they rely on memory, exclude crimes with no obvious individual victim (corporate, environmental, state crime) and historically undercounted domestic and sexual violence.
• Self-report studies catch offences the police never hear about, but depend on honest, accurate recall and tend to over-sample trivial offences.
• Covert participant observation gives extraordinary validity with criminal groups — Patrick's A Glasgow Gang Observed and Humphreys's Tearoom Trade are the standard examples — but the ethical costs are severe (no informed consent, deception, the researcher may witness or be pressured to commit crime) and there is real physical danger.

PET factors again: every methods answer weighs Practical, Ethical and Theoretical factors. With crime, the ethical and practical costs are unusually high, which is why so much crime research relies on official statistics despite their weaknesses.

The dark figure

Is criminology a science? Whose side is it on?

• Is sociology a science? Popper: a scientific statement must be falsifiable; he judged much grand theory unscientific because it can explain any outcome after the fact. Kuhn: a mature science shares one paradigm, and sociology, with functionalism, Marxism, feminism, interactionism and postmodernism all in play, is pre-paradigmatic. Realists (Sayer) argue society is an open system: we cannot control all the variables, but we can still identify underlying structures and mechanisms — that is science.
• Value freedom. Weber: values legitimately guide which topic you choose and how findings are used, but the research itself must be objective. Gouldner attacks value-freedom as a myth that lets researchers serve whoever pays. Becker: we inevitably take a side, so take the side of the underdog. Left realists reply that siding with the offender ignores the working-class victim.
• Sociology and social policy. Right realism has been highly policy-influential (zero-tolerance, situational prevention, tougher sentencing); left realism has shaped ideas about community policing and tackling relative deprivation; Marxists argue crime policy props up capitalism by targeting the powerless; feminists have transformed policy on domestic and sexual violence. Whether evidence shapes policy depends on funding, ideology and what is electorally popular.

Exam craft: in Paper 3 the Theory and Methods questions are worth 10 and 20 marks. Structure every one as perspective → named sociologist → concept → criticism, and finish with a judgement.

Falsification

The big ideas to know

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