Everything you need to know

1. Yet another clear and coherent PowerPoint by Haley

2. Durkheim’s Functionalist Theory
 To achieve solidarity society has two key mechanisms,
socialisation and social control.
 For Durkeim, crime is normal and an essential part of all
healthy societies (inevitability).
 The positive functions of crime: boundary maintenance,
the purpose of punishment is to reaffirm society’s shared
rules and reinforce social solidarity. Adaption and change,
all change starts with an act of deviance (troublemakers).
 Davis (1937) – Prostitution is a way to relieve stress that
doesn’t affect the nuclear family.
 Criticisms – Durkheim doesn’t say how much crime is the
right amount.

3. Merton’s Strain Theory
 People commit deviant behaviour when they can’t achieve
‘socially approved goals’ by legitimate means. (Strain)
 Structural factors – society’s unequal opportunity structure.
 Cultural factors – The strong emphasis on success goals and the
weaker emphasis on using legitimate means to achieve them.
 The American Dream – Americans are expected to achieve by
legitimate means, but many disadvantaged groups don’t have the
opportunities t achieve legitimately.
 Deviant adaptions to strain – conformity, innovation (theft),
ritualism(given up), retreatism (outcasts), rebellion (reject
societies goals)
 Evaluation – Deterministic, ignores ruling class, assumes that
everyone strives for money success.

4. Subcultural Strain Theories
 Cohen: Status Frustration – Cohen focuses on working
class boys, as a result of being unable to achieve status
by legitimate means (education), the boys suffer status
frustration.
 Cloward and Ohlin’s three types of deviant
subcultures: Criminal – apprenticeship for crime,
Conflict – High levels of social disorganisation
prevents a criminal network from developing,
Retreatists – ‘double failures’.
 Evaluation – Ignore crimes of the wealthy.

5. The Social Construction of Crime
 Not the act that makes it deviant, it’s the reaction of
society.
 Becker –A deviant is just someone who has been
successfully labelled.
 Whether a person is punished depends on their
reputation, background, appearance, situation and
circumstance.
 Cicourel – Police’s typifications (stereotypes) leads
them to focus on working-class areas = more arrests in
working class areas = confirming the stereotypes.

6. The Effects of Labelling
 Primary deviance – The act has not been publicly labelled
as deviant i.e. downloading songs.
 Secondary deviance – the result of society reaction (label
becomes master status)
 Deviance amplification – Trying to control deviance leads
to an increase in deviance (snowball effect)
 Triplett – Increase tendency to see young offenders as evil
and to be less tolerant of minor deviance.
 Two types of shaming; disintegrative – the crime and
criminal is labelled as bad, reintergrative – the act is bad
but not the actor.
 Evaluation – Deterministic, emphasis on the negative
effects of labelling, assumes offenders are passive.

7. Traditional Marxism
 The structure of capitalist society explains crime.
 Crime is inevitable in capitalism because capitalism causes
crime (criminogenic) Crime is the only way the working-
class can survive.
 The law benefits the capitalist system, Snider (1993) – the
state is hesitant to pass laws that affect a businesses’
profitability.
 Some laws appear to benefit the working-class i.e. health
and safety but Carson (1971) found that most firms have
broken health and safety laws at least once.
 Evaluation – Ignores other factors i.e. gender and race, and
not all capitalist societies have high crime rates.

8. Neo-Marxism: Critical Criminology
 Neo-marxists combine ideas from traditional marxism
and other approaches i.e. labelling.
 Taylor et al argue that traditional Marxism is
deterministic and that we have free will.
 A complete theory of deviance needs to unite six
aspects, the effects of labelling, the act itself etc.
 Evaluation – Feminists criticise it for being ‘gender
blind’. Critical criminology romanticises the working-
class. (Robin Hood)

9. Right Realism
 Right realist share the New Right outlook and support
policies that favour a ‘get tough’ stance.
 The causes of crime – biological differences (low IQ),
and inadequate socialisation in the underclass.
 Tackling crime – Right realist try to make crime seem
less attractive with a ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Crime
prevention policies should reduce the rewards and
increase the punishment. ‘Broken Windows’.
 Criticism – Ignores structural causes i.e. poverty, it
ignores crimes of the powerful.

10. Left Realism
 Left realism developed as a response to right realists
influence on policies and rising crime rates. Left realists
accuse others of not taking crime seriously.
 Young (1984) three causes of crime: relative deprivation,
subcultures, and marginalisation.
 Young argues we now live in a society where stability,
insecurity, and exclusion make crime worse.
 Tackling crime – Policing and control (Lea and Young
argue that the public need to get more involved deciding
policies), structural causes (deal with inequality in
opportunity)
 Evaluation – Fails to explain corporate crime, not everyone
who experiences relative deprivation commits crime.

11. Gender Patterns in Crime
 Most crime appears to be committed by males (4/5).
 Female crime like shoplifting are less likely to be
reported.
 The chivalry thesis argues that men hate accusing
women = criminal justice system is more lenient with
women. But, they may be less likely to be prosecuted
because their crimes are less serious than men’s.
 The court treat females more harshly than males when
they deviate from gender norms i.e. double standards,
court punish girls but not boys for slutty activity.

12. Explaining Female Crime
 Lombroso said that criminality is innate and there are very
few born female criminals.
 Functionalist sex role theory (Parsons) – because Dad’s go
to work, and boys turn to all-male street gangs as a source
of masculine identity.
 Heidensohn: Patriarchal control – Women don’t have many
chances to offend because society controls them (domestic
role, male bosses, fear of sexual violence)
 Carlen: class and gender deals – women conform because
they are offered material rewards, and emotional rewards.
 The liberation thesis – As women become more liberated
from patriarchy, they will commit more crimes.

13. Why do men commit crime?
 White middle-class have to obey teachers in order to
achieve middle-class status = masculine in school.
 White working-class have less chance of educational
success.
 Black working-class may have few expectations of a
reasonable job and may use gang membership and
violence to express masculinity.
 Globalisation has led to the loss of many of the
traditional manual jobs that allowed working-class
men to express their masculinity.

14. Ethnicity and Criminalisation
 Black people make up 10% of the prison population.
 Alternative sources of statistics – victim surveys and self-
report studies.
 Oppressive policing, members of ethnic minorities are
more likely to be searched because of police racism.
 Arrests were more likely for black than for whites, ethnic
minorities are more likely to elect for trial.
 Black and Asian defendants are less likely to be found
guilty.
 25% of prison population were from ethnic minority
groups.

15. Explaining Differences in Offending
 Left Realist: Lea and Young (1993) argue that ethnic
differences in the statistics reflect real differences in
the levels of offending by different ethnic groups.
 Neo-Marxist: Gilroy argues that the idea of black
criminality is a myth created by racist stereotypes.
(First gen immigrants were very law abiding)
 Neo-Marxist: Hall et al – the myth of black criminality
was a distraction from the true cause of problems such
as unemployment.

16. Ethnicity and Victimisation
 Racist victimisation occurs when an individual is
selected as a target because of their race, or religion.
Mixed ethnic groups have higher risk.
 Responses to victimisation range from situation crime
prevention measures such as fireproof doors and
letterboxes, to organised self-defence campaigns
aimed at physically defending neighbourhoods from
racist attacks.

17. Media Representations of Crime
 The media over-represent violent and sexual crime.
 The media portray criminals and victims as older and
more middle-class.
 News is a social construction and there are news values
which journalists and editors decided whether a story
is newsworthy. (i.e. immediacy and dramatisation)
 Fictional representations from the media are
important sources of information of crime.
 Property crime is under-represented and violence,
drugs and sex crimes are over-represented.

18. The Media as a Cause of Crime
 GTA has been criticised for encouraging violence.
 Some of the ways media causes crime are imitation,
arousal, desensitisation, and by transmitting
knowledge of criminal techniques.
 The media exaggerate the risks of certain groups of
people becoming its victims.
 Gerbner et al found that heavy users of TV had higher
levels of fear of crime.
 Left realists argue that the mass media hep to increase
the sense of relative deprivation.

19. Moral Panics
 A moral panic is an exaggerated over-reaction by society to a
perceived problem.
 Cohen looked at mods and rockers, they were throwing stones, a
few windows were broken etc. The disorder was relatively minor,
but the media over-reacted.
 The media produced a deviance amplification spiral by making it
seem as if the problem was getting worse. This produced
marginalisation of the mods and rockers as deviants.
 Moral panics often occur during social change, reflecting the
worries many people feel when accepted values seem to be
challenged.
 Criticism – It assumes that the societal reaction is over-reacting.

20. Crime and Globalisation
 Globalisation = the widening, deepening and speeding up
of the world.
 The global criminal economy – estimated £1 trillion per
year, arms trafficking, smuggling illegal immigrants,
trafficking in women and children, sex tourism etc.
 Globalisation creates new insecurities and produces a new
mentality of ‘risk consciousness’ in which risk is seen as
global i.e. migration.
 It has allowed companies to switch manufacturing to low-
wage countries, it has also created criminal opportunities
on a grand scale for elite groups.
 The way crime is organised is linked to the economic
changes brought by globalisation.

21. Green Crime
 Green crime = crime against the environment.
 Beck: increase in productivity has created new ‘manufactured
risks’ (harm to the environment and its consequences for
humanity i.e. global warming)
 Green criminology: White (2008) - the proper subject of
criminology is any action that harms the environment /the
human and animals within it. Even if no law has been broken.
 Two views of harm: anthropocentric (human-centred) and
ecocentric (environment first)
 Primary green crimes directly effect the environment, secondary
green crimes indirectly affect the environment.
 Evaluation - strengths and the weaknesses of green criminology
come from its global environmental concerns.

22. State Crimes
 State crime is the illegal or deviant activities committed by,
or with the help of state agencies.
 State crime is one of the most serious forms of crime
because the scale can be extremely large with widespread
victimisation, and the state is a the source of law.
 Definitions of human rights: natural rights – rights to life,
liberty and free speech. Civil rights – rights to vote, privacy
etc. We should define crime in terms of the violation of
basic human rights, rather than the breaking of legal rules.
 The social conditions of state crimes – authorisation,
routinisation (pressure to turn the crime into a routine so
you can perform it again in a detached manner),
dehumanisation (enemy is portrayed as sub-human).

23. Crime Prevention and Control
 Clarke: situational crime prevention reduces opportunities for
crime, he identifies three features of measures aimed at
situational crime prevention: they are directed towards specific
crimes, they involved managing or altering the immediate
environment of the crime, they aim at increasing the effort and
risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards. Criticism –
they do not reduce crime, they displace it.
 Wilson and Keeling: disorder and the lack of control leads to
crime. Their solution is and ‘environmental improvement
strategy’ and a zero tolerance policing strategy.
 Social and community prevention strategies focus on potential
offenders and their social context. Perry Pre-school project
showed that an intellectual enrichment programme worked.

24. Surveillance
 Surveillance = The monitoring of public behaviour for the
purposes of population or crime control.
 Faulcoult: Birth of the Prison – two difference types of
punishment: sovereign power (physical punishment i.e.
branding) and disciplinary power (seeks to govern the mind by
surveillance) Criticisms – Exaggerates the extent of control
(Goffman shows how some people can resist control).
 Synoptic surveillance – the media enables the many to see the
few (synopticon – where everyone watches everyone i.e.
dashcams)
 Labelling and surveillance – CCTV operators judge who would
be potential suspects = massively disproportionate targeting of
young black males.

25. Punishment
 Reduction - One justification for punishing offenders
is that it prevents future crime. This can be done
through deterrence (punishing the individual),
rehabilitation (to change offenders), and
incapacitation (remove the offenders capacity to
offend again i.e. execution)
 Retribution – ‘paying back’
 Durkheim argues that the function of punishment is to
uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values.
 Marxism: capitalism and punishment – The function
of punishment is to maintain the existing social order.

26. The Victims of Crime
 Positivist victimology – positivists aim to identify the social
and psychological characteristics of victims that make
them different/more vulnerable. Criticism – ignores
structural factors i.e. poverty.
 Critical victimology- Based on conflict theory. Focuses on
structural factors and the states power to apply or deny the
label of victim. Evaluation – Ignores the role that victims
play i.e. not locking their door.
 Patterns of victimisation – the poor, young, ethnic
minorities and men are more likely to be victimised.
 The impact of victimisation – Crime may have serious
physical and emotion impacts on its victims.