Class Flashcards
(6 cards)
Functionalism - Miller
E - Miller argues that the lower class have developed an independent subculture with its own distinctive norms and values that clash with those mainstream society, explaining why they have a higher crime rate.
E - This means that conforming to these subcultural norms, such as toughness and pursuit of excitement can lead to conflict with the law.
E - However, Marxists would criticize this as they argue that the law is not a reflection of a value consensus among society’s members
Strain theory - Merton
E - Merton argues that American society class structure denies WC people that opportunity to achieve ‘money success’ that the American culture values highly.
E - This highlights how WC are more likely to be denied legitimate opportunities to achieve success and how they are. ore likely to seek illegitimate means of achieving it. Merton calls this innovation, meaning the use of ‘new’ deviant means to gain wealth.
E - However, critics argue he blindly accepts that there is a common core set of shared values.
Subcultural theories - Cohen
E - Cohen sees WC youths as culturally deprived as they have not been socialized into MC culture.
E - This results in them lacking means to achieve an education and finding themselves at the bottom of official status hierarchy. This failure causes a status frustration which then leads them to form a delinquent subculture that inverts mainstream values in which they can gain status by committing crimes e.g. vandalism.
This is useful as explains why the WC appear more likely to commit non-utilitarian crimes.
E - However, critics argue that this view is far fetched as these WC people would have to be great sociologists to figure out what MC mainstream values are and how to invert them.
Labelling - Becker (1963)
E - Becker states that a deviant is someone to who the label had been successfully applied. the WC are labeled as criminal due to the law enforcement agencies stereotypes that see them as ‘typical delinquents.’
E - This could lead to these WC people accepting these labels, having it become a SFP and lead them to commit crimes.
E - However, Marxists criticize this as it fails to examine the wider socio-economic structure in which law making enforcement and offending takes place.
Marxism - Gordon (1976)
E - Gordon argues that crime is rational response to capitalism, so it is found in all classes, not just WC statistics suggest.
E - Regardless of this, crime is the only way the WC can afford the products that capitalism is advertising as essential, leading to alienation and lack of control over their own lives so that frustration and aggression results in them committing a non-utilitarian crime.
E - However, it can be argued that not all capitalism have high crime rates e.g. Japan’s homicide rate is only a fifth of the US’s
Neo-marxism - Gilroy (1982)
E - Gilroy found that critical criminology argues that WC crime is a political act of resistance to capitalism.
E - This would lead to negative stereotypes of WC and result in police focusing on crimes of the WC leading to overrepresentation.
E - However, Lea and Young argue, like the critical criminologist, Gilroy romanticises street crime as somehow evolutionary when its nothing of the sort.
