Crime and Deviance: AQA A-Level Sociology Revision Notes

Crime and Deviance Overview

This topic explores ten major areas that explain criminal behaviour and society's responses. You'll examine different theoretical perspectives on why people commit crimes, from functionalist theories that see crime as serving a purpose, to interactionist approaches that focus on labelling and social reactions.

The content covers practical issues you see in the news daily - from gang violence and corporate scandals to cybercrime and environmental disasters. Each theory offers a different lens for understanding these phenomena.

You'll also explore how factors like social class, gender, and ethnicity influence both criminal behaviour and how the justice system treats different groups. This isn't just academic theory - it's about real patterns of inequality and discrimination in modern society.

Key Point: Crime isn't just about individual choices - it's shaped by social structures, media representation, and global economic forces that affect us all.

Functionalism and Strain Theory

Functionalists argue that crime actually serves important purposes in society. Crime acts as a deterrent when criminals get punished, shows when society needs to change (like laws around same-sex marriage), and even generates money through security industries.

Durkheim explained that every society has crime because people aren't socialised equally. In traditional societies, everyone shared clear values and punishments were harsh and public. Modern societies have weaker social control and less agreement about right and wrong, leading to anomie - a breakdown of social norms.

Merton's Strain Theory focuses on the American Dream idea that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough. When people can't achieve mainstream goals legitimately, they respond in five ways: conformity (following rules), innovation (crime to achieve goals), ritualism (giving up on goals but following rules), retreatism (giving up entirely), and rebellion (creating new goals and means).

Cohen studied working-class gangs experiencing status frustration - when academic failure leads to being labelled as 'losers'. These young people create their own values that celebrate anti-social behaviour, gaining respect through non-utilitarian crimes like vandalism that don't bring financial gain.

Key Point: Functionalists see crime as inevitable and sometimes useful - it's society's structure that creates the conditions for criminal behaviour.

Interactionism and Labelling Theory

Labelling theorists argue that no act is naturally criminal - it only becomes criminal when society labels it that way. Police decisions about who to arrest often depend on physical cues and stereotypes rather than actual behaviour, with officers focusing on 'typical' criminal types from working-class areas.

This creates a dark figure of crime - the gap between official statistics and the real crime rate. Many crimes go unrecorded because they don't fit police expectations or occur in areas that aren't heavily patrolled.

Lemert distinguished between primary deviance (acts that haven't been publicly labelled) and secondary deviance (behaviour that results from being labelled). Once someone gets a master status as a criminal, this identity overrides everything else about them and can lead to a deviant career.

Deviance amplification occurs when attempts to control deviance actually increase it. Media creates moral panics about groups like mods and rockers, turning them into folk devils. This leads to police crackdowns, more arrests, and ultimately more deviant behaviour.

The theory also explains mental illness and suicide as social constructs. Coroners' decisions about whether a death counts as suicide depend on their personal beliefs and assumptions about what 'typical suicide' looks like.

Key Point: Being labelled as deviant can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushes people towards more criminal behaviour.

Class, Power and Crime

Marxists argue that capitalism itself is criminogenic - it inevitably produces crime. Poverty forces working-class people into crime to survive, while the focus on consumer goods and competition creates frustration that leads to criminal behaviour.

The ruling class uses its power to shape laws in their favour. They prevent laws that would harm capitalist interests and ensure selective enforcement - police focus on working-class crime while ignoring corporate crimes. This creates false class consciousness where people think crime is mainly a working-class problem.

Corporate crime causes enormous damage - financially, physically, and environmentally - but remains largely invisible. The media rarely covers it, politicians lack political will to tackle it, and the crimes are often too complex for proper investigation. High-status professionals abuse positions of trust, like GP Harold Shipman who murdered hundreds of patients.

Strain theory explains corporate crime as companies turning to illegal methods when they can't achieve profit goals legitimately. Differential association suggests corporate cultures socialise employees into criminality through techniques of neutralisation.

However, Marxist approaches are criticised for being deterministic - not all poor people commit crime, and some capitalist societies have low crime rates. They also focus too heavily on class while ignoring other inequalities like gender and ethnicity.

Key Point: Corporate crime causes far more harm than street crime but gets much less attention from police, media, and politicians.

Realist Theories of Crime

Right realists see crime as a genuine threat that destroys communities. They argue some people are biologically predisposed to crime through personality traits like aggression, while poor socialisation in lone-parent families fails to teach proper moral values to boys.

Rational choice theory suggests criminals make calculated decisions based on likely consequences. Right realists support zero tolerance policies and the broken windows approach - dealing harshly with minor disorders like graffiti to prevent more serious crime.

Left realists focus on relative deprivation - how deprived people feel compared to others. Media and advertising make people more aware of inequality, leading to resentment and crime. Marginalised groups like unemployed youth lack clear goals and express frustration through violence and rioting.

Left realists support multi-agency approaches combining police, social services, and community groups. They want to tackle underlying inequalities through better housing, job opportunities, and anti-discrimination measures.

Both approaches have limitations. Right realism ignores structural inequalities and may increase discrimination against minorities. Left realism struggles to explain why not everyone experiencing deprivation commits crime, and focuses too little on corporate crime.

Key Point: Right realists blame individual choices and family breakdown, while left realists focus on social inequality and community solutions.

Gender, Crime and Justice

Men commit far more crime than women - 32% of males have criminal convictions compared to just 9% of females. The chivalry thesis suggests this reflects male reluctance to prosecute women, with female offenders more likely to get bail and avoid prison sentences.

However, evidence is mixed. Some studies show no difference in sentencing, while others reveal bias against women who don't conform to traditional gender roles. Women are often judged more on their character as wives and mothers than on the seriousness of their crimes.

Heidensohn argues patriarchal control limits women's opportunities for crime. Women face control at home through domestic responsibilities, in public through fear of male violence, and at work through male supervision and sexual harassment.

The liberation thesis suggests that as women gain equality, their crime rates will increase and become more like men's. However, apparent increases may reflect net-widening - arresting women for behaviours previously ignored rather than actual increases in female crime.

Masculinity theories explain why men commit more crime. Messerschmidt argues that when men can't achieve hegemonic masculinity through legitimate means, they turn to crime to demonstrate toughness and dominance. Different social groups express masculinity through different types of crime.

Key Point: Gender differences in crime reflect both different opportunities and different ways of expressing identity - particularly masculine identity through dominance and risk-taking.

Ethnicity, Crime and Justice

Black people make up 3% of the population but 13% of the prison population. Victim surveys show black people over-represented in crimes like mugging, but self-report studies suggest similar offending rates across ethnic groups.

Institutional racism affects every stage of the criminal justice system. Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched, three times more likely to be arrested, and receive harsher sentences. However, they're also less likely to be found guilty, suggesting weaker evidence against them.

Left realists argue these differences reflect real crime patterns caused by marginalisation and relative deprivation. Racism leads to economic exclusion, creating higher crime rates in ethnic minority communities, though they acknowledge police racism exists too.

Neo-Marxists like Gilroy argue that black criminality is a myth created by racist stereotypes. Hall described moral panics about black youth as distractions from the real causes of social problems like unemployment.

Racist victimisation affects 76,000 people annually, with mixed ethnic groups at highest risk. Ethnic minorities often have to organise their own protection due to police under-protection, as seen in the Stephen Lawrence case where institutional racism affected the investigation.

Key Point: Whether ethnic differences in crime statistics reflect real differences or discrimination remains hotly debated, but evidence of bias in the justice system is clear.

Crime and the Media

Media coverage of crime is completely distorted. 46% of media reports cover violent crime, but it makes up only 3% of recorded crime. The media also portrays criminals as older and more middle-class than reality, and exaggerates police success rates.

News values shape crime coverage - stories need immediacy, drama, and novelty to get published. This creates the dramatic fallacy where extraordinary crimes get most attention while routine crimes are ignored.

Fictional representations are even more distorted. Property crime is under-represented while violence, drugs and sex crimes dominate. Real homicides usually result from domestic disputes, but fictional ones involve calculated greed.

The media may cause crime through imitation, arousal, and desensitisation. It also increases fear of crime beyond realistic levels, with heavy TV viewers showing higher fear despite lower actual risk.

Moral panics occur when media exaggerates problems and creates folk devils. Cohen's study of mods and rockers showed how media coverage created a deviancy amplification spiral - more people adopted these identities precisely because they were negatively labelled.

Cybercrime represents new opportunities for both conventional and novel crimes, from hacking and identity theft to online harassment. Policing cybercrime is difficult due to its global scale and limited resources.

Key Point: Media doesn't just report crime - it shapes public understanding, creates moral panics, and may even influence criminal behaviour itself.

Globalisation and Green Crime

Globalisation has created a global criminal economy worth over £1 trillion annually. Poor countries often depend on illegal production for rich western markets - 20% of Colombia's population depends on cocaine production.

Global risk consciousness emerges from increased movement of people and media-fuelled moral panics about international crime threats. Transnational corporations create unemployment and poverty that feeds into criminal activity, while financial deregulation enables money laundering and tax avoidance.

Green criminology studies environmental harm whether or not laws are broken. Primary green crimes include air pollution (causing twice as many breathing deaths as 20 years ago), deforestation (one-fifth of rainforest destroyed 1960-90), and species decline (550 species extinct daily).

Secondary green crimes involve state and corporate responses to environmental issues, like French secret service bombing a Greenpeace ship or illegal toxic waste disposal by eco-mafias.

State crimes can be massive due to state power. Rwanda's genocide killed 800,000 Tutsis, while war crimes in Iraq included illegal warfare and prisoner torture. State-corporate crime occurs when businesses and governments collude, as in the Challenger disaster and Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Different definitions of state crime exist - some focus on domestic law, others on human rights violations or international law breaches.

Key Point: Crime is increasingly global, involving states, corporations, and environmental destruction on a scale that affects millions of people worldwide.

Control, Punishment and Victims

States use a culture of denial to justify their crimes through three stages: "it didn't happen", "if it did happen, it wasn't our fault", and finally "it was justified". This shows how powerful institutions protect themselves from accountability.

The authoritarian personality explains how people follow orders without question, as seen in Nazi Germany and corrupt police forces. Crimes of obedience occur when following authority leads to harmful acts - conformity becomes criminality.

Modernity itself enabled the Holocaust through bureaucracy, division of labour, and scientific rationality that made mass murder efficient and psychologically easier for perpetrators.

Understanding control, punishment and victims requires recognising how power operates at every level - from individual interactions to global economic systems. Victims often lack voice and power, whether they're environmental disaster survivors or genocide targets.

This connects back to all the theories you've studied. Functionalists might see punishment as maintaining social order, Marxists as protecting ruling-class interests, and interactionists as creating deviant identities through labelling processes.

Key Point: Crime, control and punishment are fundamentally about power - who has it, how they use it, and how society responds when it's abused.