Crime, deviance and the relativity of both

• Crime — behaviour that breaks the criminal law and is subject to formal punishment.
• Deviance — behaviour that breaks social norms and attracts a negative reaction. The two overlap but are not the same: some crimes are barely deviant (mild speeding), and some deviance is not criminal (talking loudly to yourself on a bus).
• Social order — the patterned, predictable co-operation that makes social life possible. Social control — the formal and informal mechanisms that secure it.
• The relativity of crime and deviance — OCR names this explicitly. Whether an act is deviant depends on time (homosexuality was criminal in England and Wales until 1967), place (alcohol is legal here, criminal elsewhere) and situation (killing is murder — or, in war, a medal). Nothing is deviant in itself.
• The social construction of crime — it follows that crime is not a natural category but is made: by lawmakers who decide what to criminalise, by police who decide what to enforce, and by courts who decide whom to convict. As Howard Becker put it, deviance is not a quality of the act but a consequence of the application of rules and sanctions by others.

Three ways to measure crime — and why they disagree

• Official crime statistics. OCR notes these include police recorded crime and the Crime Survey for England and Wales. Police records are cheap, comprehensive and longitudinal — but they capture only crime that is reported AND recorded. Both stages involve discretion, and both leak.
• The dark figure of crime. The gap between crime committed and crime recorded. Crime goes unreported because victims think it trivial, fear reprisal, distrust the police, are embarrassed (sexual offences), do not realise they are victims (fraud), or are themselves involved. It goes unrecorded because police exercise discretion — Aaron Cicourel (1968) showed that officers work with typifications, commonsense pictures of the 'typical delinquent', and that justice is negotiated: the middle-class boy's parents can present him as a good lad who made a mistake, and he is sent home; the working-class boy fits the picture, and he is charged. Statistics record that process, not offending.
• Victim surveys. The CSEW asks people directly about their experience of crime, so it captures much unreported crime and is not distorted by police recording practice. But it relies on memory, excludes victimless and corporate crime, and misses those hardest to survey (the homeless, children in some categories).
• Self-report studies. Ask people to admit their own offending anonymously. They reveal how widespread offending is across social classes — powerfully undermining the official picture — but respondents may exaggerate, forget or conceal.

The synoptic point: each measure has a different method, and therefore a different bias. Triangulating all three gets you closer to the truth than any one alone — which is exactly the argument from Component 02.

What do official statistics measure?

Functionalism: crime is inevitable — and useful

• Émile Durkheim made the counter-intuitive claim that crime is normal and even necessary. No society can achieve total conformity, and a society of saints would simply criminalise smaller sins. Crime performs positive functions: boundary maintenance (the public trial dramatises the line between right and wrong and reunites the collective conscience against the offender) and adaptation and change (today's deviant is often tomorrow's reformer — every moral advance began as a crime). Too much crime, however, signals anomie and social breakdown.
• Robert Merton's strain theory (1938) explains the rate of crime. Society sets universal cultural goals (in America, monetary success) but distributes legitimate means (education, secure jobs) unequally. The resulting strain to anomie produces five adaptations: conformity; innovation (accept the goal, reject the means — crime for gain); ritualism (abandon the goal, cling to the rules); retreatism (reject both — dropouts, addicts); and rebellion (replace both with new goals and means).

Evaluation. Durkheim never says how much crime is the 'right' amount, and functional for whom? Crime is not functional for the victim. Merton explains utilitarian crime well but not non-utilitarian deviance (vandalism — this is where Albert Cohen's status frustration comes in), assumes a value consensus about success, and cannot explain the crimes of the wealthy, who suffer no strain at all.

Subcultural strain

• Albert Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955) — working-class boys who cannot achieve status by school's standards experience status frustration, invert mainstream values, and build an alternative status hierarchy in which rule-breaking earns respect. This explains the non-utilitarian delinquency Merton could not.
• Cloward and Ohlin (1960) — blocked legitimate opportunity is only half the story; what matters is which illegitimate opportunity structure a neighbourhood provides. Hence three subcultures: criminal (an established criminal hierarchy offers an apprenticeship), conflict (no such structure, so status comes from violence and territory) and retreatist ('double failures' who turn to drugs).
• Paul Willis's Learning to Labour (1977) shows the mechanism at school: the lads' anti-school subculture wins them status among themselves and delivers them to the factory floor.

Evaluation: subcultural theories are strongly deterministic (not every frustrated boy offends); they neglect girls almost entirely; and they assume the boys initially shared mainstream goals. But 'alternative status hierarchy' remains one of the most portable ideas in the topic — you can use it in gangs, in education and in youth subcultures.

Marxism: whose law, whose crime?

• Capitalism is criminogenic. It generates crime at both ends: poverty and need at the bottom, and the relentless pursuit of profit at the top. Crime is not a malfunction of the system; it is a normal product of it.
• The law serves the ruling class. William Chambliss (1975) argued that laws protecting private property are the foundation of the legal system in capitalist societies. Ask who writes the law, and what it protects.
• Selective enforcement. The crimes of the powerful — corporate crime, tax evasion, fraud, workplace deaths, environmental damage — do enormous harm, yet are policed lightly, prosecuted rarely and punished mildly. Steven Box and Frank Pearce argued that this is not oversight but ideology: focusing public fear on street crime committed by the poor diverts attention from the far greater harms committed by the powerful, and legitimates the policing of the working class.
• Neo-Marxism / radical criminology. Taylor, Walton and Young (The New Criminology, 1973) rejected the determinism of traditional Marxism. They demanded a fully social theory of deviance combining the wider structural origins of the act, the immediate origins, the act itself, the reaction to it, and the wider origins of that reaction. Crucially, they insisted the criminal is not a passive product of the system but makes a conscious, often political, choice. Stuart Hall et al's Policing the Crisis (1978) is the classic application.

The crimes of the powerful

Labelling theory

• Howard Becker (Outsiders, 1963) states the founding principle: social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance. Deviance is not a quality of the act but a consequence of the application of rules by others. The deviant is simply someone to whom the label has successfully been applied. Moral entrepreneurs campaign to create new rules; enforcement then follows their crusade.
• Edwin Lemert (1951) distinguishes primary deviance (rule-breaking that goes unlabelled and has no effect on self-concept — almost everyone does it) from secondary deviance (the deviance that follows from being publicly labelled). Once labelled, the person may acquire a master status that overrides all their other identities; conventional opportunities close; and they may join others who share the label. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a deviant career.
• The radical implication: the societal reaction to deviance can cause more of it. Stanley Cohen's deviance amplification spiral is this argument scaled up to society, and Cohen's later work warns of net widening — well-meaning interventions catch more people in the system.

Evaluation: labelling theory is superb on the consequences of the reaction, weaker on the causes of the original act — it says almost nothing about why someone commits primary deviance in the first place. It can also seem to remove responsibility from the offender and forget the victim. And it is deterministic in reverse: not everyone labelled goes on to a deviant career, and some reject the label outright.

Whose theory of crime?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective that would make it.

Left realism and right realism

Both emerged in the 1980s, and both accused earlier theories of not taking crime seriously — but they mean completely different things by that.

• Left realism. John Lea and Jock Young (What Is To Be Done About Law and Order?, 1984) accepted that crime is a real problem — and that its victims are overwhelmingly working class, minority ethnic and poor, not the powerful. They identified three causes: relative deprivation (not poverty as such, but feeling deprived relative to others — which is why crime rose as living standards rose), subculture (a collective response to that deprivation) and marginalisation (groups with no organisation and no voice express frustration through crime). Their square of crime insists on analysing four elements together: the offender, the victim, the state and the public.
• Right realism. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's broken windows thesis (1982): if minor disorder — a broken window, graffiti, aggressive begging — is tolerated, it signals that nobody cares, and serious crime follows. The policy is zero tolerance. Ron Clarke's rational choice theory adds that offenders weigh costs and benefits, so the answer is to raise the costs: better locks, CCTV, target hardening. Charles Murray supplies the New Right cause — the underclass, welfare dependency and absent fathers.

The crucial contrast: left realism asks why people offend and wants to change the conditions that produce offending. Right realism gives up on causes and asks only how to stop them. That is why left realism proposes structural change and community policing, and right realism proposes locks, cameras and prison.

Relative deprivation

Gender: the biggest pattern of all

Recorded offending is overwhelmingly male — a bigger difference than class or ethnicity produces. Explanations:

• The chivalry thesis. Otto Pollak (1950) claimed women's crime is hidden, because a male-dominated justice system treats women leniently. Evidence against: women who breach gender expectations — as mothers, as sexual beings — are frequently treated more harshly, not less. This is the 'double deviance' argument.
• Control theory. Frances Heidensohn (Women and Crime, 1985) offers the strongest explanation: women commit less crime because they are far more controlled — at home (domestic responsibility, and the sheer time it consumes), in public (fear of harassment and violence restricts where women go and when) and at work (male authority and the glass ceiling). Patriarchy limits both the opportunity and the freedom to offend.
• Class and gender deals. Pat Carlen (Women, Crime and Poverty, 1988) interviewed convicted working-class women and argued they had been offered two 'deals' — the class deal (work hard and you will be rewarded) and the gender deal (be a good wife and mother and you will be provided for) — and that both deals had visibly failed them. With nothing to lose by conformity, crime became rational.
• The liberation thesis. Freda Adler (1975) predicted that as women became liberated, their crime would rise to male levels. The evidence is at best mixed, and the thesis has been widely criticised — women's offending remains overwhelmingly linked to poverty, not to emancipation.
• Masculinity and crime. James Messerschmidt (1993) turns the question round — the real puzzle is not why women offend so little but why men offend so much. He argues crime can be a resource for accomplishing masculinity when legitimate routes (a job, a wage, respect) are unavailable.

Explaining the gender gap

Class, age and ethnicity — offending and victimisation

• Class. Official statistics show offending concentrated among the working class; self-report studies show offending is far more evenly spread. What differs most is who is policed — and, as Marxists insist, which crimes are counted. Corporate crime does not appear in the street-crime figures at all.
• Age. Recorded offending peaks in the late teens and falls sharply thereafter. Explanations: status frustration and peer group influence; the visibility of young people's leisure in public space (where it is policed); and the fact that most young people simply grow out of it as they acquire jobs, partners and stakes in conformity.
• Ethnicity. Black people are markedly over-represented in stop-and-search, arrests and the prison population. Two rival readings: differential offending, or differential policing. The evidence weighs heavily towards the second. Macpherson (1999) found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist; police discretion in stop-and-search is enormous; and Paul Gilroy argued that the very idea of Black criminality is a myth — a construction of a racist state, in which what is criminalised is often a form of resistance to colonial and racist policing. Hall et al show the media manufacturing the folk devil.
• Victimisation. The people most likely to be victims are the same people most likely to be offenders — the young, the poor, minority-ethnic groups, those living in deprived areas. Left realism insists you keep this in view: crime hits hardest exactly where life is already hardest.

Global organised crime and green crime

• Global organised crime. Manuel Castells argues there is now a global criminal economy, networked like the legitimate one — trafficking in drugs, weapons, people and body parts; money laundering; cybercrime. It has both a demand side in rich countries and a supply side rooted in poverty, weak states and conflict. Globalisation created the infrastructure — deregulated finance, container shipping, the internet — that organised crime uses.
• Green crime. Nigel South's green criminology distinguishes primary green crimes (direct destruction of the environment: air and water pollution, deforestation, species decline) from secondary green crimes (crimes arising from the flouting of environmental regulation: illegal waste dumping, breaching pollution law).
• The crucial theoretical move. Green criminologists distinguish a traditional criminology (which studies only what the law defines as crime) from a transgressive criminology built on harm — because much of the worst environmental damage is entirely legal. If your definition of crime is set by lawmakers, and lawmakers are lobbied by polluters, then the most damaging acts will never be crimes at all. Ulrich Beck's risk society supplies the frame: the greatest dangers we now face are manufactured by our own industrial activity, and they cross every border.

Green criminology's challenge

Match the sociologist to the idea

Tap a sociologist on the left, then their idea on the right.

Policy: left wing and right wing

OCR splits crime policy explicitly into two columns. Learn them as columns.

• LEFT WING. Social and community crime prevention — tackle the root causes: poverty, poor housing, unemployment, exclusion from school. Invest in communities rather than merely policing them. Restorative justice — bring offender and victim together so the offender confronts the harm done and makes amends. John Braithwaite (Crime, Shame and Reintegration, 1989) gives the theory: reintegrative shaming condemns the act while accepting the person back into the community, whereas disintegrative shaming rejects the person entirely — creating exactly the master status and deviant career that labelling theory predicts. Structural change — the most radical position: reduce inequality itself, because crime is generated by the structure.
• RIGHT WING. Situational crime prevention (Clarke) — design out opportunity: target hardening, locks, CCTV, better street lighting. Environmental crime prevention — the broken windows approach; zero tolerance of low-level disorder to prevent escalation. Retributive justice — punishment as deserved, proportionate suffering: the offender must pay. Punitive punishment and control — deterrence and incapacitation; prison works because those inside cannot offend outside.

Evaluating each. Situational prevention is cheap and can work — but critics point to displacement: crime moves rather than stops. Zero tolerance risks criminalising the poor and worsening police-community relations, and the causal claim of 'broken windows' has been strongly contested. Prison has extremely high reoffending rates and, per Foucault, may function less to reduce crime than to discipline the population. Restorative justice shows real promise in reducing reoffending but is politically vulnerable to the charge of being 'soft'. Structural change would address the causes — and no government will do it.

Why restorative justice might work

Crime and deviance — the big ideas

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