Changing values can also affect the law in the sense that every so often the public with have sympathy for someone who is being prosecuted for a certain crime and the law may eventually be changed to reflect the changing attitudes of society. This was evident when the illegal drug cannabis was down graded to a class C drug. Durkheim also points out that a sense of social cohesion can be created by particularly heinous crimes. A sense of shared outrage can bring a community closer together.
Assess Functionalist Approaches to the Study of Crime and Deviance Functionalists such as Emile Durkheim, Robert Merton and Albert Cohen all attempt to explain the nature and extent of crime in today’s society. In essence, Functionalists argue that society is based on value consensus and social solidarity which is sustained via socialisation and social control mechanisms within society. Emile Durkheim states that whilst crime is obviously a social negative with the ultimate power to destabilise society, he stands by the claim that crime is inevitable, universal, and integral to a healthy society and even having positive benefits. He claims that crime occurs in society due to two fundamental reasons; firstly, not everyone is effectively socialised to the same norms and values which leads to people being prone to deviation and secondly, due to the diverse lifestyle and subcultures in contemporary society, subcultures act out different norms and values and what members of that subculture regard as normal, mainstream culture may deem it as deviancy. The Functionalist approach to the study of crime states that crime has two positive functions for society.
Whereas, Marxists believe that capitalism creates potential criminals. Functionalists believe that all crimes are functional and has both positive and negative effects to society. Durkheim, French sociologist, hold beliefs that “too much crime or deviance constitutes to a threat, too little is unhealthy”. The three main positives are that it reaffirms boundaries by the public degradation ceremonies such as criminal trails to remind everyone of social norms and to reinforce society’s toleration to deviance. Another positive is that crimes change values, when someone is prosecuted it results in public outcry which triggers sympathy, this changes values in society.
they believe in shared values and consensus in society and talk about the march of progress which is that everything is getting better. The founding father of sociology, Durkheim who is a functionalist tries to explain the causes and extent of deviance in society as well as Merton who puts forward his strain theory. Durkheim believed that crime is necessary, inevitable and functional for society so much that without it society wouldn’t function without a certain amount of crime. However, he does recognise that too much crime is bad for society and causes it to be dysfunctional and break down. He therefore says the amount of crime is the important factor.
The first explorations of deviance and crime was done by Durkheim who identified two different sides of crime for the functioning of society: positive and negative. According to Durkheim, crime was necessary for society. He argued that the basis of society was a set of shared values that guide our actions, which he named the collective conscience. The collective conscience provides boundarie which distinguishes between actions that are acceptable and those that are not. The problem for any society is that these boundaries are unclear and change over time.
So when applying social institution status on organized crime is because organized crime exhibits the same characteristics as some of the examples giving for social institutions. Again organized crime does the opposite of what the other social institution have done and continue to do, but it does resemble the same traits in producing productive criminal individuals for the organizations. For this reason many persons are drawn to organized crime because it exhibits value for those persons, whereas in other areas those persons feel rejected (Lyman & Potter, 2007). The next part of
Herbert Packer mentioned two values inherent in the Criminal Justice System; The crime control model and the due process model. Which model do you prefer, and why? The Crime Control Model and the Due Process Model both intend to serve a similar purpose: To reduce crime and protect the public. The crime control model places emphasis on reducing the crime in society through increased police and prosecutional powers. The criminal process exists to investigate crimes, screen suspects, detain dangerous defendants, and secure convictions of guilty parties.
Critical Point 1: The theory about lynch mobs being an adaptive response has strong evidence to support it. Boyd and Richerson found that groups in which cooperation thrived were also those that flourished. Therefore, this explains why, when a majority group is more at risk as a consequence of social change, individual self-interest would give way to “groupishness.” Consequently, proving this theory can be applied to real life examples. 5. Critical Point 2: However, there is difficulty testing the power threat model of
Although he feels that this way of looking at crime is not fair to the victim or the justice system, but that the media over the years has influenced this way of thinking, giving the conception that certain conditions surrounding when, where, or how the crime took place may be the factor in why it happened in the first place. He terms the issue as a “feedback loop” meaning that as a society we are aware
This is referred to as “social control” and its intent is to force those living in the communities to act in a way that is in line with the social norms and in accordance to society rules. “Of those various ways that societies and their members try to control behavior, criminal punishment is the most formal, for crime is perhaps the most serious type of behavior over which a society must gain control” (Clear, Cole, Reisig, and Petrosion, 2012, p. 8). This implies that corrections assist our society in determining those behaviors that are considered acceptable. However, as Emil Durkheim suggest, “crime is normal and that punishment performs the important function of spotlighting societal rules and values” (Clear, Cole, Reisig, and Petrosion, 2012, p. 8). I am in agreement of this, because it is obvious that crime will continue to happen, and as a society we must find productive ways of address the issues and dealing with those individuals in violation of established