The first of these is ‘Reaffirming the boundaries’, this takes place every time a person is taken to court and prosecuted for their wrong doing. This is particularly clear in societies where public executions take place.
The second of these positive aspects is ‘changing values’. Every now and again when a person is taken to court there is a degree of sympathy for the outcome of the case. This can result in a public outcry and a change in the law. An example of this comes from the case of R v R (1991) the first time rape within marriage was illegal.
The third and final positive aspect of crime is ‘social cohesion’ this is where a horrific crime draws the nation together in mourning and strengthens societies collective consciousness an example of this comes from the terrorist attacks on September 3rd in America.
In the 1930s Functionalist Robert Merton, he believed that crime and deviance was evidence of a strain between socially accepted goals and the socially approved means of getting those goals. The strain then resulted in deviance. He argued that all societies set their own goals and provide socially acceptable means of reaching those goals e.g. the American dream which is to work hard in order to rise to the top and be happy. However not everyone in society shared these goals as the goals were linked to a persons position in the social structure, the lower down the structure the more restricted the goals became. The problem is that if the majority of society cannot reach their goals by legitimate ways they may turn to deviant methods. This could result in people becoming disenchanted with society; Merton used Durkheim’s term anomie to describe this. As is shown here Merton’s theory is really a continuation of Durkheim’s theories.
There are five forms of behaviour which can be understood as a strain between goals and means.
Conformist- here the individual continues to adhere to both goals and means despite the limited chance of success.
Innovator- is a person who accepts the goals of society but uses criminal or deviant means to reach them.
Ritualist- is a person who uses accepted means but has lost sight of the actual goal.
Retreatist- is where the individual ejects both the goals and the means, often become homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol.
Rebel- again rejects both the goals and the means but this time replaces them with his own ones e.g. a political activist.
Merton was criticised by Valier for his stress on the existence of a common goal in society, he argues there are a variety of goals in any given society.
Some sub cultural theories are functionalist from origin, for example Albert Cohen (1955) who combined both structural and sub cultural theories of deviance. Cohen believed that deviance collective rather than an individual response and criticised Merton’s work for ignoring on0-utilitarian crimes such as vandalism which provide no financial reward. Cohen suggested that lower class working boys suffer from status frustration. He believed that the behaviour these boys expressed was not economically motivated, but simply done for thrill. Cohen suggested that the lower class boys strove to emulate middle class values but lacked the means to attain success. This led them to their status frustration which is a feeling of personal failure or inadequacy. This resulted in the rejection of those very values and patterns of acceptable behaviour that they could not be successful at.
Lower class children are much more likely to fail and constantly feel humiliated. This appears in the study of education, working class children are said to suffer from material deprivation. As they have less money they miss out on educational opportunities, they may not have the space or time at home to do school work. Their parents may be uneducated and unable to help with homework; they themselves may not see the value of education and pass this onto their children. Teachers often prefer to teach middle class children as they too are middle class and so share the same norms and values. An example of material deprivation comes from an 11+ exam which asked questions about famous classical composers which are much more likely to be known to middle class children than working class children.
Functionalists and Marxist views do share some similarities, whilst Marxists believe that greed, self interest and hostility generated by capitalist society motivates crime at all levels within society. Members of all classes use whatever opportunities they have to commit crime. It has been put forward that law enforcement in the USA supports capitalism in three ways. Individuals who commit crime are labelled as social failures and seen as responsible for their actions. The imprisonment of selected members of the working class neutralises opposition to the system. The last way being that, defining criminals as animals and misfits provides a justification for their imprisonment, keeping them hidden from public view or swept under the carpet. This is similar to the functionalist view that crime has a function in society.
Interactionalists argue that the approach used by functionalists which accept that there is a difference between those who offend and those who do not, are wrong. On the basis of this assumption they then search for the key factors which lead a person to offend. Labelling theory suggest that most people commit criminal and deviant acts but only some are caught and stigmatised. They believe the stress should be on understanding the reaction and to definition of deviance rather than what causes the initial act.
Howard Becker (1963) says that;
“Deviancy is not a quality of the act a person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’ label. Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.”
So what he is saying is that it is not the act itself which is deviant, it’s only deviant when someone puts a label on it. This view has been criticised for suggesting that deviants are no different than normal every day people.
Being labelled deviant has many consequences for that person, a clear example of this comes from Edwin Lemert who distinguished between primary and secondary deviance. Primary deviance is rule breaking with little importance and secondary deviance is the consequences of the response from others – this is significant. The person labelled as deviant will eventually see themselves as bad. Becker used the term master status to describe this and says that once a label had successfully been applied to an individual all other qualities become unimportant.
In conclusion it appears that the structuralist theorists do base too much emphasis on social structure and can be seen to ignore the individual. I feel that it is important to look at the factors why a person turns to crime as after all prevention is better than cure. Stucturalist theorists try too hard to put everyone into categories when everyone is different and has their own reasons for choosing to commit crime or not.