Describe and Assess Functionalist Approaches to Crime

Secondly, A.K Cohen in ‘55 agrees with Merton that crime is largely committed by the working class and he says it results from the inability to achieve mainstream middle class goals through the institutionalised means such as educational achievement. Cohen focuses on working class boys who struggle to adapt to the middle class goals and values to achieve material success which leaves them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and as a result of this they suffer status frustration and they then resolve this by meeting up with other working class boys to form their own delinquent subcultures with the same values. These boys turn the values of mainstream middle class society upside down. For example where middle class praise good behaviour, these subcultures will praise bad behaviour, which offers them to achieve status in an alternate hierarchy system. The good thing about this theory is that Cohen explains, where Merton fails to, crimes that are not economic, such as truancy, fighting and vandalism. One problem with Cohen is that he assumes, like Merton that working class boys share middle class values in the first place and then they later fail. He doesn’t take into account that working class boys may not accept these values in the first place, therefore not failing.

Cloward and Ohlin merge the ideas of Merton and Cohen by saying that they agree that working class boys are denied the legitimate opportunities to achieve money success but they don’t all react to it the same way. They say that not everyone turns to innovation to achieve success, because they take into account Cohen’s view of the alternate status hierarchy. Some subcultures focus on vandalism and other non economic crimes whereas others focus on drug use. They also take into account that not everyone who fails to achieve goals by the legitimate means have the same illegitimate opportunities, for example not anyone who has failed the legitimate way can be a con artist because they will need to practice this ‘trade’. He identifies three subcultures: Criminal subcultures, where there is a lot of professional and organised crime that is stable which offers illegitimate means to achieve success by being picked by the adults. Secondly there is the conflict subculture, where both legitimate and illegitimate means are fragmented which leads to social disorganisation and made up of loosely organised gangs where their focus is much like Cohen’s , which is status frustration. The last one is retreatist subculture, which is the most closely linked to their theory that not everyone who succeeds the legitimate way, will succeed in the illegitimate way.  They are too deterministic of the working class and ignore the crimes of the wealthy, and fail to notice the class structure, as Taylor et al, noticed that during riots, the police were institutionally racist and arrested more working class black males than any other class and ethnicity, as the police needed a scapegoat, because the situation couldn’t be controlled. However, Cloward and Ohlin explain different types of working class crime and deviance, whereas functionalists such as Durkheim, Davis and Merton and Cohen fail to, offering a wider perspective on the explanations of working class crime.

Overall, the functionalist approach isn’t very good at explaining the wider context of crime that exists because they focus too much on the working class and are too deterministic of them. However, they are good at explaining the different types of subcultures and why they may commit crime.