2. Lesson Objectives
• Recap Cohen’s Status Frustration and
Alternative Status Hierarchy explanations of
crime
• Introduce Cloward and Ohlin’s theory of crime
committed by young people
• Evaluate this subcultural theory
3. Last Lesson Recap
• What reasons are there for young men
committing more crimes than any other group?
• What is Status Frustration and why does it
occur?
• How does Alternative Status Hierarchy explain
delinquency?
• What are some of the evaluation points of
Cohen’s theory?
4. Cloward and Ohlin: 3 subcultures
• Agree with Merton that WC youths are
denied legitimate opportunities to achieve
and that deviance stems from the response
to this.
• However not everyone adapts to lack of
legitimate opportunities by turning to
innovation (utilitarian crime). Some resort
to violence, others to drugs
5. The key reasons for these differences is not only unequal access to the
legitimate opportunity structure, but unequal access to illegitimate
opportunity structures e.g. not everyone who fails at school can
become a successful safecracker
Can you take my son
under your wing? I
want him to know
everything there is to
know about
protection
racketeering.
Peoples’ opportunities to be deviant are different: not everyone gets
the same chances to be crooks; some have better opportunities to
enter into a criminal career, particularly if they have access to a
criminal subculture.
6. Depending on their access to the illegitimate opportunity structure,
young people can enter into one of three deviant subcultures:
Criminal subcultures are established and organized criminal networks
which provide a learning environment for young criminals from criminal
role models. They are largely concerned with utilitarian crime that
derives financial rewards.
7. Conflict subcultures develop in areas of limited access to either the
legitimate or the illegitimate opportunity structures.
There is little organized adult crime to provide an apprenticeship in
criminality
These are usually areas of high turnover of population and have little
social unity or informal social control.
Gang violence is a predominant response.
8. Retreatist subcultures have failed to succeed in both the
legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures and are
therefore double failures.
Their activities centre mainly around illegal drug abuse.
And we’re too soft
and stupid to be
I’ve no qualifications,
gangsters. So we just
no job and no future
get wasted instead.
in the normal world...
9. What similarities and differences are
there between Cloward’s and Ohlin’s
retreatist subculture and Merton’s
idea of a retreatist adaptation
10. • Members of different types of deviant subculture might engage in
different acts of deviant behaviour.
• In small groups, discuss which of the following offences you think
would be most likely to be committed by members of ‘criminal’,
‘conflict’ or ‘retreatist’ subcultures.
• Are there some offences that might be committed by members of
all three subcultures?
Vandalism hooliganism
illegal possession of knives street fighting
using ‘crack’ cocaine theft from shops
car theft burglary
illegal possession of guns dealing in stolen goods
robbery with violence murder
taking ecstasy joy riding
dealing in drugs
11. Evaluation
Like Merton and Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin ignore
crimes of the wealthy and the wider power structure
and over predict the amount of W/C crime.
Unlike Cohen they try to explain different types of
W/C deviance in terms of different subcultures.
However they draw the boundaries too sharply
between the different types. Actual subcultures
often show characteristics of more than one ‘type’
(can you think of any examples?)
12. Like Cohen’s theory, Cloward and Ohlin’s is a reactive
one- they explain deviant subcultures as forming in
reaction to the failure to achieve mainstream success
goals. This wrongly assumes that everyone starts off
sharing these same goals
Walter Miller- lower class has its own independent
subculture separate from mainstream culture with its
own values. This culture does not value success in the
first place so its members are not frustrated by failure. He
agrees that deviance is widespread in lower class but
argues this arises out of an attempt to achieve their own
goals not mainstream ones (focal concerns)
among middle class people
13. Burke identifies criticisms of their work also:
1) the idea of the criminal subculture is based on
gangs in Chicago in the 1920s and 30s so isn’t
particularly applicable to modern British society;
2) the idea of retreatist subcultures is a ‘grossly
simplistic’ explanation of drug abuse which is
actually really common
15. Overview of Key Sociologists
• Create a glossary of what the key sub
cultural sociologists have said.
• Summaries each of them in no more than
25 words.
Different neighbourhoods provide different illegitimate opportunities to learn criminal skills and develop criminal careers. They identify 3 types of subcultures that result
Adult criminal select and train youths with the right abilities and provide youths with opportunities on the criminal career ladder
Drug Trade is a mixture of disorganised crime like conflict subculture and professional mafia style criminal subculture. Also some supposedly retreatist users are professional dealers making a living from this utilitarian crime
Like Cohen’s theory, Cloward and Ohlin’s is a reactive one- they explain deviant subcultures as forming in reaction to the failure to achieve mainstream success goals. This wrongly assumes that everyone starts off sharing these same goals Walter Miller- lower class has its own independent subculture separate from mainstream culture with its own values. This culture does not value success in the first place so its members are not frustrated by failure. He agrees that deviance is widespread in lower class but argues this arises out of an attempt to achieve their own goals not mainstream ones (focal concerns)
MIC worksheet from spiral ringbound book
1. Boundary maintenance – reinforcing norms and values for the majority; adaptation – facilitating social change; safety-valve, warning of a societal malfunction. 2. The feeling created when individuals find their access to legitimate means of achieving status is blocked+-. 3. Ritualists have lost sight of society’s goals, but still follow the legitimate means or rules; retreatists have rejected both society’s goals and the legitimate means to achieve them. 4. It assumes that all those who experience a strain to anomie will deviate, but many who experience strain do not deviate. 5. Crime that has no economic motive, such as vandalism. 6. Because some people are not effectively socialised and because in complex societies there are subcultural differences in norms and values. 7. Goals are the things we are expected to want and strive for, such as success, money, fast cars; means are the ways in which a person may obtain or achieve these goals. 8. Because not everyone who fails in mainstream society has equal access to an illegitimate opportunity structure; e.g. some areas have an organised professional criminal structure but others do not. 9. The emphasis on money and economic success; the lack of a supportive welfare system; the lack of clear norms about how wealth should be pursued legitimately.