1. Reaffirming boundaries - every time a person breaks the law and is taken to court, the resulting court ceremony and publicity in the media, publicly reaffirms the existing values. This is much like the primary socialisation given to a child by the family. When a child breaks the boundaries of what is acceptable, they are punished.
2. Changing values - every so often, when a person is taken to court and charged with a crime, a degree of sympathy arises for that person. The resulting public objection indicates a change in values.
3. Social Cohesion - crime, according to Durkheim, strengthens social cohesion. He points out that when particularly appalling crimes have been committed, the whole community draws together in mutual outrage, and the sense of belonging to a community is by this means strengthened.
Durkheim argues that people are shaped by their social experiences and it follows that if the collective conscience is weakened, by for example, too much criminal behavior, the moral ties that bind people together are also weakened. The concept used by Durkheim to express this weakening of moral ties was that of anomie. Where a collapse of the collective conscience occurs and anomie exists, crime rates rocket. Only by re-imposing collective values can the situation be brought back under control.
The theoretical nature of this type of approach to studying criminal behaviour comes across numerous criticisms. One of the major criticisms of Durkheim's work in relation to crime has been the idea that he ignores the way in which power is a significant variable in relation to the way in laws are created and maintained in any society. Consequently, whilst Durkheim argued that the collective conscience was the objective expression of the values held by everyone in society. Erikson attempted to develop Durkheim's basic ideas about such things as the boundary setting function of law. He did this by arguing that powerful groups within any society were able to impose their views upon the majority by a process of ideological manipulation.
Merton also criticised Durkheim’s idea of anomie as being too vague. Merton argued that anomie was a situation where the socially approved goals of society were not available to a substantial proportion of the population if they followed socially approved means of obtaining these goals. According to Merton, people turned to crime and deviance in this situation because there is a tension between what people have been socialised to desire and what they are able to achieve through lawful means. Merton argued that the strain between wanting "success" and the relative lack of legitimate opportunity for success did not mean that people simply gave-up wanting to be successful. This was not possible because the whole thrust of their socialisation was geared towards the value of success. In a situation whereby people desired success - yet were effectively denied it - he argued that people would find other, probably more unlawful, means towards desired ends. Merton is therefore, arguing that individuals can experience anomie not because normative guidelines do not exist, but rather because they are unable to behave in ways that conform to such norms.
However, Merton was criticised by Valier, amongst others, for his stress on the existence of a common goal in society. Valier argues that there are, in fact, a variety of goals that people strive to attain at any one time. Whilst Merton’s theory does provide some explanation, there are also a number of problems:
1. It assumes that people share similar ends.
2. It sees the socialisation process as being the vital aspect for both conformity / deviance and the type of deviation that someone takes. There is, for example, little sense of the deviant making a conscious decision.
3. It relies to some extent on official statistics. Crimes statistics don't tell us very much about "hidden" forms of crime (crimes that are committed but for which no-one is arrested) therefore theories based on these statistics are not especially valid.
The overall functionalist theory on crime and deviance is criticised by Marxists. They claim that the criminal justice system is built in favour of the ruling class and that they use institutions like mass media and the educational system to divert people’s attention away from their situation. Thinking synoptically, the educational system is also said to be an ideological state apparatus, whose main function is to reproduce class inequalities, therefore there will always be a communities, such as the working class, which are stereotyped as criminal. This helps the ruling class by maintaining their ideology of working class crime.
Crime too plays a part in transmitting ruling class ideology as it diverts attention away from the exploitative nature of capitalism and focuses attention of the frightening nature of certain criminal groups in society. Which justifies heavy policing of working class areas and stop searches on young people, whereas the functionalist approach does not provide an explanation for this.
Functionalists also have the view that socialisation is a positive process that never fails. Nevertheless, if this were the case then crime and deviance would not be the social problems that they are.
