Sociology

The American prison system employs more than 500,000 people and costs $35 billion annually to maintain.

Since the mid-1990s, the overall number of crimes committed in England and Wales appears to have levelled off, with additional measures, such as the British Crime Survey, showing a considerable fall in the overall amount of crime (see figure 21.1).

ritualist would be someone who dedicates herself to a boring job, even though it has no career prospects and provides few rewards

Merton tried to explain the well-established observation from official statistics, that a high proportion of crimes for immediate financial gain are committed by the lower working class' - those from manual, blue-collar families , But why should this be so?

Seventy years after Durkheim’s work appeared, the sociologist Kai Erikson published Wayward Puritans (1966), a study of deviance in New England in the United States during the seventeenth century.

innovative force, bringing about social

CRIME AND DEVIANCE
and cultural change. Second, deviance promotes boundary maintenance betv^^een 'good’ and 'bad’ behaviours; a deviant or criminal act can provoke a collective response that heightens group solidarity and clarifies social norms. For example, residents of a neighbourhood facing a problem with drug-dealers might join together in the aftermath of a drug-related shooting and commit themselves to maintaining the area as a drug-free zone. Durkheim’s ideas on crime and deviance were influential in shifting attention from individual explanations to social forces and relations.
Subcultural explanations
Following Merton's work, Albert Cohen also saw the contradictions within American society as the main cause of crime. But while Merton emphasized individual deviant responses, Cohen saw such adaptive responses as occurring collectively tlirough the formation of subcultures. In Delinquent Boys (1955), Cohen argued that boys in the lower working class who are frus -trated with their positions in life often join together in delinquent subcultures, such as gangs.

Durkheim also argued that deviance is necessary for society, as it fulfils two important functions. First, deviance has an adaptive function; it can introduce new ideas and challenges into society and therefore can be an innova

four sociological approaches that have been most influential within the sociology of deviance: functionalist theories, interactionist theories, conflict theories and control theories.

Hare Krishna cult, a religious group whose beliefs and mode of life are different from those of the majority of the population. The cult was first established in the 1960s, when Sril Prabhupada came to the West from India to spread the word of Krishna consciousness. He aimed his message particularly at young people who were drug-users, proclaiming that one could 'stay high all the time, discover eternal bliss' by following his teachings. The Hare Krishnas became a famUiai* sight, dancing and chanting in the streets, running vegetarian cafes and distributing literature about their beliefs. They are generally regarded in a tolerant light by most people, even if their views seem somewhat eccentric.

Muscular active types (mesomorphs), the theory went, tend to be more aggressive and physical, and therefore more likely to become delinquent than those of thin physique (ectomorphs) or more round, fleshy people (endomorphs) (Sheldon 1949; Glueck and Glueck 1956).
Again, such views have been widely criticized. Even if there were an overall relationship between bodily type and delinquency, this would not necessarily show the determining influence of heredity People of the muscular type may be drawn towards criminal activities because these offer opportunities for the physical display of their athleticism. Moreover, nearly all studies in this field have been restricted to delinquents in reform schools, and it may just be that the tougher, athletic-looking delinquents are more liable to be sent to such schools than fragile-looking, skinny ones. Some individuals might be inclined towards irritability and aggressiveness and this could be reflected in crimes of physical assault on others.