Sociology Of Crime Research Paper

1. Sociology Of Crime S. Sociology Of Criminalization

Although crime is discussed as early as Plato’s Laws, its empirical study really began at the turn of the last century with the Italian Positivist School. The most prominent members of this school articulated an objectivist perspective according to which crime was a universal fact that shared identical features across cultures. Hence, Garofalo developed his theory of the ‘natural crime’ and Lombroso his views on the ‘born criminal.’ In contrast, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined crime as a legal construct resulting from the social obloquy directed at certain forms of behavior (Durkheim 1958). Crucially, Durkheim not only asserted that social reaction varied according to context but that it was a force that asserted itself independently of the character of the behavior defined as deserving penal sanction: in a cloister of saints, the most benign misconduct would still attract harsh punishment. Both positions—crime as a natural fact and crime as a cultural construct—have shaped sociological thought on crime.

Sociologists tend to fall on either side of this divide largely on the basis of the type of crime that they study. The more predatory the crime the more realistic will be the perspective, either in respect to the crime itself or to its harmful consequences for victims (Young 1994). In contrast, the sociology of victimless crime and lifestyle delinquency stresses the constructive aspects of their legal definition. It must be emphasized that the sociology of crime has tradition-ally devoted a significant part of its inquiries to youth crime and juvenile gangs.

2. Predetermined Behavior vs. Learned Behavior

The concept of causation used in the sociological study of crime allows for many interpretations. On the one hand, the determinants of criminal behavior may be viewed as factual antecedents that do not depend on language communication to influence behavior. The various forms of deprivation associated with criminal behavior—such as lower-class status, unemployment, poverty and poor housing conditions, dysfunctional families and child sexual abuse, lack of education—are such relatively immediate determinants. On the other hand, criminal behavior can be seen as the result of a learning process which is progressively effected through language. In 1939, Edwin Sutherland famously objected to the causation through deprivation theory that it only applied to lower-class crime (if it did at all) and utterly failed to explain the crimes of the powerful (Sutherland 1983). In later work, he attempted to demonstrate that his own theory of differential association—according to which criminal behavior is learned in association with those who define such behavior favourably and in isolation from those who define it unfavourably—accounted as much for the crimes of the powerful as for the crimes of the powerless. The theory of differential association, which Sutherland and his collaborator, Donald Cressey, constantly refined, has exercised a powerful influence on the sociology of crime.

2.1 Multifactorialism vs. Generalizing Theorists

This opposition is closely related to the previous one. In his 1939 address on white-collar crime, Sutherland ridiculed sociological research that accrued so-called independent variables in order to produce a deterministic account of a selected part of criminal activities. As mentioned, he preferred to build an all-embracing general model that accounted in theory for all forms of crime. He was not the only sociologist of crime to favor theory building over the collection of heterogeneous sets of data. Most explanations of crime were developed by researchers who relied on broad single concept approaches, whether it was social dis-organization (the Chicago School), anomie (Durkheim 1952, Merton 1967, and the subculture theorists, Cloward and Ohlin 1960), cultural and class conflict (Sellin 1938, Marxist criminology), the labeling process (Becker 1963), or routine activities (Cohen and Felson 1979). However, despite Sutherland’s work, the crimes of the powerful have remained a largely underdeveloped field in the sociology of crime. The adherents of multifactorialism have pursued their unabated data collection in order to establish meaningful correlations between crimes of the powerless, which make up the overwhelming majority of reported crime, and various forms of deprivation.

3. Consensus vs. Conflict

There is one interpretation of social causation that stretches the concept of cause to its logical limit. It is the view that crime is the result of a conflict between different norms of conduct. Crime is then considered less as a thing per se—a given kind of behavior—than as a relationship between behavior and norms of conduct, where it is the latter that triggers the definition of certain kinds of behavior as being criminal (Sellin 1938). Within this framework, it is entirely conceivable that new rules of conduct may be established, which retrospectively define as being criminal certain kinds of behavior that were not previously seen as rule violating (e.g., private ownership in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia). In this case, it would appear that the causative element follows in time the crime that it paradoxically generates.

This conflict of norms has been seen by sociology in opposite ways. Durkheim (1964) first proposed that conduct was criminalized because it strongly offended the collective sense of morality. His position implied that nearly all members of a given society shared a common ethos from which the lawbreakers were excluded. This view of the rules governing society as being the outcome of a consensus later came under increasing criticism. Rule definition was no more seen in the light of an opposition between the collective and the individual but in terms of power: those who were dominant within society, either through their numbers or, more importantly, through their status or their wealth, imposed their own definitions of proper behavior upon those whom they dominated. This latter perspective, known as ‘conflict sociology,’ reached its apex between 1960 and 1990 in Marxist studies, which upheld that criminalization was in-tended to perpetuate the domination of the ruling class over the working class (Greenberg 1981). Elements of the working class were actually defined as ‘dangerous classes’ in the sociological inquiries undertaken during the nineteenth century, and re-appeared under the designation of the ‘underclass’ in the twentieth century.

3.1 Labeling Theory

Labeling theory carried the logic of conflict sociology to its logical term by not only asserting that social groups created deviance in making the rules that defined it but also by concluding that deviance was not a quality of the act a person commits but a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to a labeled ‘offender’ (Becker 1963). Labeling theory was presaged in the work of Lemert (1951 and his concept of secondary deviance. According to Lemert, by being stigmatized as ‘criminals,’ offenders were excluded from mainstream society and left with no alternative but to sink deeper in crime. Thus the trapping of offenders in the ghetto of labeled criminals was a source of induced reoffending (secondary deviance).

4. Strain Theory vs. Control Theory

No dichotomy has attracted as much attention as the opposition between strain and control theories, which was articulated by Hirschi (1969). Strain theories rest on the concept of anomie, which was borrowed from Durkheim by Merton (1938) in an article that was revised several times in subsequent work (Merton 1967). Although Merton’s conception of anomie differs much from Durkheim’s, they are both framed in terms of a discrepancy between means and ends. For Durkheim, anomie is the hallmark of a troubled social predicament where people have unlimited cravings and limited means to fulfill them. This strain generates a normative vacuum which is for some conducive to self-destruction. For Merton, anomie results from a breakdown in the relationship between culture goals and the legitimate or institutionalized means to achieve them. This breakdown, particularly when it occurs between goals that are accepted and legitimate means to achieve them that are either unavailable or rejected, is a source of strain that may erupt in criminal behavior.

Anomie and strain theory basically tries to answer why and how people embrace criminal behavior. Therein lies the fundamental disagreement between strain theorists and control theorists such as Hirschi. For the latter, the question worth addressing is not why people break the law but why they actually conform to it. Then, the central concern of a sociology of crime should not be deviance but conformity. The sources of deviance can nevertheless be derived from breakdowns in the machinery that fosters conformity. Control theory originally answered its question about the roots of conformity with reference to civil society. Hirschi explained conformity by social bonding relationships that strengthened the ties between an individual and law-abiding society. These relation-ships consisted of attachment to family, school, and peers; commitment to conventional lines of action; involvement in conventional activities; and belief in the values that triggered these social bonding mechanisms and kept them functioning. Although that was not the path originally chosen by Hirschi, conformity could also be explained in political and legal terms, that is, by pointing to the fear of sanctions meted by the state upon lawbreakers. In this way control theory is connected with deterrence theory, and more generally with research into how people are coerced to conform by the state apparatus. In this process, the sociology of crime draws a full circle: it first begins as a sociology of deviance and then, striving to explain conformity, it is transformed into a sociology of social bonding and, ultimately, a sociology of the efficacy of the penal system. Furthermore, the notion of the positive delinquent whose behavior is impelled by multiple determinants is superseded by a perception of delinquents as individuals who exercise rational choice. Deterrence theory is predicated upon such a perception.

4.1 Delinquent Subcultures S. The Subculture Of Delinquency

As reinterpreted by Merton, anomie resulted from a breakdown between culturally valued goals and legitimate avenues of access to them. By combining the acceptance or the rejection of culture goals with the acceptance or the rejection of institutionalized means, Merton generated a typology of four modes of social adaptation to strain: ‘conformity’ (goals and means are both accepted); ‘innovation’ (goals are accepted, but means rejected); ‘ritualism’ (goals are rejected, but means accepted); and ‘retreatism’ (goals and means are both rejected). To these, Merton added a fifth mode of adaptation, ‘rebellion,’ which is triggered when goals and means are not only rejected but also replaced. In combination with differential association theory, Merton’s typology developed into the theory of differential opportunity and into the sociology of delinquent subcultures. Merton’s mode of innovation would then beget a subculture of crime against property, rebellion could lead to conflict and to a subculture of violence, and retreatism to a subculture of drug taking (Cloward and Ohlin 1960).

It was quickly objected to subculture sociology that there may be a subculture of delinquency but that it was not a delinquent subculture (Matza 1964). The main point of this objection is that the notion of a delinquent subculture obscures the similarities be-tween the conventional culture and the subculture of delinquency. In the subculture of delinquency, the acceptance of norms and, particularly, of legal norms is undermined by techniques of neutralization such as the negation of the offense, the sense of injustice, rudimentary conceptions of the sense of tort, and the primacy of custom. Yet the result of the application of these techniques is generally provisional. Delinquency is characterized by its deep ambivalence, the values promoted by conventional culture, and by the sub-culture of delinquency being convergent on key points.

4.2 Microsociology vs. Macrosociology

The critique of the sociology of delinquent subcultures was also indirectly critical of the general theories that underlaid this sociological trend, that is, the theory of anomie and of differential association. Such criticism caused a further split in the sociology of crime. In Matza’s subsequent work, and in phenomenological and ethno-methodological research, the search for explanations was not only replaced by descriptive work but the descriptions eschewed quantitative generalizations for qualitative in-depth investigation of cases selected for their significance. Such investigations were influenced by the methods of ethnography and ethnolinguistics.

Concurrently, however, grand theorizing was being rediscovered with a premium by the Marxist sociology of crime. Sociologists influenced by Marxism attempted to develop a political economy of crime that ranged over the whole field of the social sciences; they also tried to articulate the notion of a structural or systemic mode of causation. Since it is impossible to divorce Marxist science from a Marxist project of class emancipation, this trend in the sociology of crime began to lose strength with the collapse of communist societies.

5. Recent Trends

The sociology of crime has evolved from a dichotomous field into a fragmented and an eclectic one. At least, the theories proposed on either side of the divides that we have been acknowledging were often highly integrated. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sociology of crime is in the grip of various centrifugal forces.

5.1 A Wealth Of Objects

A factor that favored the theoretical integration of the sociology of crime during a long period of its development was that research focused on relatively few objects, youth crime providing an enduring reference. Social and political concern about forms of deviance as diverse as organized crime, terrorism, computer crime, and collective violence is now splintering the field into various specialties that defy integration. Some of these objects, such as organized crime and terrorism, strongly resist definition and they are nearly impervious to empirical research.

5.2 The Shock Of The Feminist Critique

There are too many strands of feminism to present it as an integrated approach. Moreover, the sociology of women’s crime is still in its infancy, despite important pioneering work (Carlen 1988). A significant part of feminist research has been directed at women considered either as victims of male predators or as subjects of oppression by criminal justice rather than as crime perpetrators. Nevertheless, the feminist critique has succeeded in casting a doubt on whether extant sociological theories of crime apply as much to women’s crime as to men’s and whether they account for the obvious gender difference in the perpetration of crimes. The answer to such questions will require a serious effort in research. It is dubious that in the short term this effort will foster the integration of the sociological theory of crime.

5.3 Beyond The Sociology Of Crime?

One innovative theory that was developed during the late 1970s was the ‘routine activities’ theory (Cohen and Felson 1979). ‘Routine activities’ refer to the set patterns of behavior within the spatial environment of three kinds of social actors: (a) motivated offenders; (b) capable guardians of persons or property; and (c) suitable targets of criminal victimization (targets may be persons or places). The interconnection of these patterns may account for criminal activities. For instance, the growth of the service industry since the end of World War II has multiplied evening work shifts that keeps people away from home as guardians of their property, while increasing their accessibility as targets when they come back home at night. Routine activities theory include ‘guardians’ as a variable explaining the occurrence of crimes. Guardians, who may be public police or private security agents, are however as much a factor in explaining crime as they are in accounting for crime prevention. This is why routine activities theory may act as a bridge between the sociology of crime and the sociology of crime control and of the production of security. This bridge is problematic as it may serve to integrate both disciplines into a consistent whole or to dissolve any claim to consistency that either of them has made.

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