Functionalist Explanations Of Crime Flashcards
(15 cards)
What is Boundary maintenance?
It’s when crime helps reinforces values by people collectively reacting in the same way.
What is a safety valve?
Crime provides a way for individuals to express dissatisfaction or frustration without threatening overall social order.
What is a warning device?
An increase in crime signals that something in society isn’t functioning properly and needs attention.
What is social change?
It’s when crime arises highlighting issues in society that need fixing to stop the crime. For example relative deprivation.
What is strain theory?
Society encourages individuals to achieve success however not all individuals can do this legitimately, so to achieve this anyway they commit crimes like theft to avoid the strain they face.
What are the ways people react to strain?
Conform, retreat, rebel, innovate, ritualize.
What are opportunity subcultures?
Subcultures that give opportunities to achieve opportunity’s illegitimately.
1. Criminal Subculture: Found in stable, organized neighborhoods with adult criminal networks. Young people learn criminal skills and join these networks to make money through crime (e.g., theft, drug dealing).
- Conflict Subculture:
Develops in areas with little organized crime and weak social control.
Focuses on violence and gaining respect through toughness and fighting.
Often linked to gang violence and territorial disputes. - Retreatist Subculture:
Made up of individuals who fail in both legitimate and criminal opportunities.
They “retreat” from society, often through drug use or withdrawal from social goals.
What does Durkheim talk about?
Boundary maintenance, warning device, safety valve, social change and anomie.
What is anomie?
a state of normlessness or social instability where the usual social norms and values break down or become unclear.
Key points:
Happens during times of rapid social change or crisis.
People feel disconnected from society because rules no longer guide behavior.
This lack of clear norms can lead to confusion, frustration, and higher rates of deviance or crime.
What does merton talk about?
Strain theory
What is status frustration?
A concept to explain working class crime.
W.C face barriers to achieve therefore are likely to commit crimes that help or just resist society as a form of frustration. This helps them gain a different form of status.
What do Cloward and ohlin talk about?
Opportunity subcultures
What does cohen talk about?
Status frustration
