Functionalist Perspective Of Crime

1. Durkheim was the main architect of the functionalist perspective of crime. A key idea of Functionalism is the Value Consensus. This is the idea that society shares the same Norms & Values.Durkheim believed that certain amount of crime and deviance is normal and an integral part of all healthy societies. He thought that crime in society is not genetically produced, but is natural in society. He found rates of suicide rose not only in times of economic hardship but also in periods of rapid prosperity. That’s because some hard period of times produce anomie and people’s normal expectations become changed. From Durkheim’s position crime is a social fact which means - the values, cultural norms, and social structures existing outside. Therefore

Symbolic Interactionist perspective on crime and deviance is when people are not deviant by nature but they are seen as deviant by others causing them to become deviant. It is not the act that is deviant but society’s reaction to the act. People create meaning based on their interaction with others. If we thing about crime and deviance we learn what is acceptable behaviour and what is deviant behaviour through our interactions with others. Deviant behaviour is learned behaviour. For example if a young person grows up in a environment where everywhere around steal, taken drugs, drink alcohol and so on, they think this is acceptable behaviour and learn this behaviour. This approach can explain why people who grow up in crime areas turn to crime and deviant and do as they associate and interact with criminals and deviant people. This is a micro sociological perspective and views society as a product of everyday social interactions between

A strength of this theory shows that trying to control deviance can push the deviant even deeper into deviance. For example, in Jock Young’s research of the labelling of the hippies as deviant caused them to get into a sub-culture and drug taking became a central concern. As a result, the hippies also showed other signs of deviance like a long hair which was not normal with social norms. A weakness of this theory would be that it does not consider the reasons why and from where is the deviant behaviour. It focus only on the deviant act its self and not on why the act took place. In relation to Jock Young’s research, this weakness does not consider for why the hippies were smoking marijuana in the first place and the most important and only looks at labelling them for smoking marijuana in the first place and as the most important. Another weakness would be that the theory suggests people accept being labelled as deviant but again, this is not always the case as people have different views on what deviant behaviour actually is. A lot of marijuana smokers don’t feel like they are being deviant as they see marijuana as acceptable