Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

(Teachers: If you like the resources on this page and want to edit and use them with your students then visit the downloads page.)

Warning! This page is not yet complete!

The contents of this page are aimed at those of you studying Crime & Deviance for either OCR or AQA specifications. (If you are doing AQA, the only topic missing is Suicide). This page will contain material on the various perspectives on Crime and Deviance that have evolved over time:

• Crime & Deviance: key terms and concepts
• Criminal Statistics
• Patterns of crime
• Advantages & problems of crime statistics
• Marxist views on crime and deviance
• New Criminology
• Functionalist views of crime and deviance
• Realist Criminology
• Ecological Approaches
• Sub-cultural theories
• Marxist sub-cultural theories
• Interactionist theories
• Labelling theory
• Power and Control
• Policing
• Social reactions to crime and deviance

As well as studying the material on this website and your notes you also need to keep an eye on the news to keep up to date on government policies on crime and deviance as well as social reactions to crime and deviance – these can be used to illustrate particular theories or perspectives. (A government policy is anything that the government does to achieve an outcome – this might be a change in the law, guidelines on how organisations should behave, guidelines on how individuals should behave, the promotion of schemes and programmes, the creation of institutions …….)

Crime & Deviance: key terms and concepts

One of the distinctions that you need to get straight right from the beginning of this topic is the difference between “crime” and “deviance”. They are not always the same thing.

Deviance occurs when people do not conform to social rules – norms and values. So for example, this could be something as minor as wearing the wrong kind of clothes to a party or as major as killing someone – deviance is behaviour that is not seen as acceptable or normal.

Crime occurs when somebody does something which is against the formal laws of society – something illegal.

Sometimes an action may be deviant but not criminal, or criminal but not deviant, or neither, or both, below is a table which may help:

Remember that values will change from group to group within society and over time, and that therefore what is deviant will also change. A hundred years ago it was deviant for adult women to show their ankles – not something we’d see as a problem today!

There are a number of key terms that you will need to learn to use, click here for a sheet which you can print out and fill in as you go along.

Criminal Statistics

Official statistics on crime are collected by the government and published several times a year. These statistics are extensive and will include the following:

• numbers of arrests
• statistics on the prison population and its make-up
• numbers of convictions
• types of crimes committed
• proportion of crimes solved
• regional variations in crime
• trends in crime

Patterns of crime
Offending and victimisation varies according to:

• age - the peak age range for offending is 14-18, and young men are also the most likely to be victims of crime
• gender
  
• social class
• ethnicity
• region

Reliability of crime statistics
Many sociologists are sceptical about the value of official statistics on crime and deviance - after all many crimes are never reported, some crimes are more likely to be reported and recorded than others, there is also evidence that police processes are insitutionally racist ….. in other words, many would argue that crime statistics are social constructions, telling us more about the institutions that create them than about crime itself.

To find out more about some of the issues surround official statistics on crime, click here (PDF).

Marxist views on crime and deviance

With your existing knowledge of sociological viewpoints you should be able to work out for yourself what the basic Marxist viewpoint of crime and deviance would be.

Marxists essentially see crime and deviance as defined by the ruling class and used as a means of social control – if you don’t conform then you will be punished. Institutions such as the police, the justice system, prisons and schools, the family and religion are there to encourage you to conform. They argue that white collar crimes (which tend to be committed by the more powerful in society) are ignored, while crimes committed by the less powerful in society such as burglary and street crime are focussed on and seen as more serious.  Marxists would also argue that different social classes are policed differently, with the working class heavily policed in the expectation that they will be more criminal and therefore raising the chances of their crimes being detected.
To find out more, click here.

New Criminology

New Criminology was an approach which evolved out of Marxist and neo-Marxist criminology, it aimed to update those ideas and combine them with interactionist approached to create a more holistic approach. New Criminology was largely abandoned when its key theorists went on to establish Left Realist criminology, however, its ideas are useful in understanding the changes in criminology and in contributing to later theories and policies.

For a PowerPoint on New Criminology, click here.

Functionalist views of crime and deviance

Functionalists believe that everything within society has a function. It follows therefore, that even deviance (in limited amounts) has a part to play.

Realist Criminology

Realist criminology sees crime as a real problem which affects individuals in society; it emerged in the 1980s as a response to rising crime rates and the failure of traditional criminology to present feasible solutions. Realist criminology therefore aims to create a theoretical framework for practical solutions to the problem of crime. There are two forms of realist criminology – Right Realism and Left Realism. Left Realism evolved from New Criminology and therefore has its roots in Marxist ideology. Right Realism has functionalist roots and is closely associated with the New Right.

To find out more about realist criminologies, click here.

Ecological approaches, as the name suggests, look at the ways in which individuals’ environments can affect their offending patterns.  The factors include the degree to which an area has a close-knit community, the types of housing, the degree of poverty in an area and an individual’s knowledge of an area. This approach is commonly linked to the Chicago school and emerged in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sub-cultural theories

Subcultural theories argue that some social groups form criminal or deviant subcultures, with norms and values which differ from and even oppose those of maintream society.

Marxist sub-cultural theories

Interactionist theories

Labelling theory

Labelling Theory is an interactionist theory and was the brainchild of Howard Becker.  It can be applied to many different areas of sociology (particularly education).  Labelling theory argues that in society we tend to give ‘labels’ to individuals describing how we expect them to behave - for example we may label someone as ‘deviant’ or ‘lazy’ or ‘responsible’.  All of us can probably think of times in our lives when we’ve been labelled - by our peers, by teachers, by our parents.  The labelling can also be applied to groups - I can remember that my year group at school was labelled as ‘badly behaved’ by our teachers!

Becker’s argument is that once an individual has been labelled and has certain behaviour expected of them they tend to live up to that label, acting in the expected way.  So someone labelled ‘deviant’ will tend to act in a deviant way.  In other words people tend to commit criminal and deviant acts because that is what is expected of them - their behaviour is a product of their interactions with others around them who have decided that they are ‘deviant’.

Power and Control

This looks at Policing and social reactions to crime and deviance - the ways in which Social control is maintained in society.