The Sociological Explanations of Crime

Biological and psychological explanations locate the cause of crime inside the offender. That has two costs. It cannot explain why crime rates differ systematically between places and between groups; and it cannot explain why the same individual traits produce crime in one setting and not in another.

The sociological answer is that the immediate social environment — the family, the peer group, the school — is where crime is produced, and that the larger social environment of community and society explains why some groups have higher crime rates than others.

The claim. Social disorganization theory seeks to explain community differences in crime rates. It identifies the characteristics of communities with high crime rates and draws on social control theory to explain why those characteristics contribute to crime. The names associated with it are Robert Sampson and W. Byron Groves, and Robert Bursik and Harold Grasmick.

The five characteristics. Crime is said to be more likely in communities that are economically deprived; large in size; high in multiunit housing such as apartments; high in residential mobility, with people frequently moving in and out; and high in family disruption, with high rates of divorce and single-parent families.

The mechanism. These factors reduce the ability or willingness of community residents to exercise effective social control — that is, to exercise direct control, to provide young people with a stake in conformity, and to socialise young people so that they condemn delinquency and develop self-control.

The chain runs like this. Residents of high-crime communities often lack the skills and resources to assist others; they are poor and many are single parents struggling with family responsibilities, so they face problems in socialising their children against crime and in providing a stake in conformity such as the skills to do well in school or the connections to secure a good job. They are less likely to have close ties to their neighbours or to care about the community; they typically do not own their homes, which lowers their investment; they may hope to move as soon as they are able, which lowers it further; and they often do not know their neighbours well because people frequently move in and out. As a consequence they are less likely to intervene in neighbourhood affairs — to monitor behaviour and sanction crime. Finally they are less likely to form or support community organisations, whether educational, religious or recreational, which further reduces control, since those organisations exercise direct control, provide a stake in conformity and socialise people, and also secure resources from the larger society such as better schools and police protection.

The historical argument. Social disorganization theorists and criminologists such as John Hagan point out that the number of communities with characteristics conducive to crime, particularly high concentrations of poor people, has increased since the 1960s. Three causes are given: a dramatic decline in manufacturing jobs in central city areas, partly through the relocation of factories to suburbs and overseas, with wages in manufacturing becoming less competitive; the migration of many working- and middle-class African Americans to more affluent communities, stimulated by a reduction in discriminatory housing and employment practices, leaving the poor behind; and certain government policies, such as the placement of public housing projects in inner-city communities and the reduction of certain social services.

The claim. People learn to engage in crime, primarily through their association with others: they are reinforced for crime, they learn beliefs favourable to crime, and they are exposed to criminal models, so they come to view crime as desirable or at least justifiable in certain situations. The primary version in criminology is Ronald Akers', itself an elaboration of Sutherland's differential association, with related work by Albert Bandura in psychology.

The three mechanisms.

1. Differential reinforcement. Crime is more likely when it is frequently reinforced and infrequently punished; when it produces large amounts of reinforcement and little punishment; and when it is more likely to be reinforced than alternative behaviours. Reinforcement may be positive, where the behaviour produces something good — money, the pleasurable feelings of drug use, attention from parents, approval from friends, a rise in status — or negative, where a punisher is removed, as where friends stop calling a girl a coward once she takes drugs with them. Sometimes the reinforcement is deliberate, as where parents of aggressive children encourage aggression outside the home; sometimes it is accidental, as where an embarrassed parent gives a screaming child a candy bar in the checkout line and, without intending to, reinforces the child's aggression.
2. Beliefs favourable to crime, which fall into three categories: general approval of certain minor crimes; conditional approval or justification of some serious crimes, as where fighting is thought justified after an insult or provocation; and general values conducive to crime, which Matza and Sykes list as an emphasis on excitement, thrills or kicks, a disdain for hard work with a desire for quick and easy success, and an emphasis on toughness.
3. Imitation of criminal models. Individuals imitate the behaviour of others, especially where they like or respect them and have reason to believe that imitation will be rewarded, and are more likely to imitate where they observe others receiving reinforcement for their acts.

Its standing. Social learning theory has much support and is perhaps the dominant theory of crime today. Data indicate that the people one associates with have a large impact on whether one engages in crime, and that this impact is partly explained by the effect those people have on one's beliefs, on the reinforcements and punishments one receives, and on the models one is exposed to.

Gary S. Becker, after his pioneering application of economic analysis to racial discrimination, showed that an economic approach can provide a unified framework for understanding all human behaviour, and applied it to social interactions, crime and punishment, marriage, fertility and the family, and to apparently irrational behaviour. The claim is not that offenders are calculating machines but that the same apparatus of costs, benefits and constraints that explains lawful choices explains unlawful ones.

The study of social deviance is the study of the violation of cultural norms in either formal or informal contexts. Social deviance is a phenomenon that has existed in all societies with norms, and sociological theories of deviance are those that use social context and social pressures to explain it. That framing matters because it detaches the question from the criminal calendar: what is studied is norm-violation, of which crime is one legally marked subset.

• Tautology. The learning family suffers a recurring circularity: behaviour is said to be repeated only where there is strong positive reinforcement, but the reinforcement is recognised only because of the repetition. That does not defeat the claim that reinforcement affects crime, but it does question the proof of the connection.
• Measurement. Behaviour and learning are complex, and it is difficult to pinpoint which events are linked to, or cause, what behaviour; most people's lives and learning are too complex to discern which aspect causes any particular behaviour.
• The individual disappears. The learning theories tend to treat people as vessels into which definitions are poured, leaving little room for free will, personality or differences in types of response.
• Determinism. The theories are basically determinate: if certain factors arise, criminality will occur; if others arise, law-abiding behaviour will result. That is a strength when predicting rates and a weakness when explaining individuals.
• Terminology. Sutherland himself thought social disorganization an unsatisfactory term and preferred differential social organisation, on the postulate that crime is rooted in the social organisation and is an expression of it: a group may be organised for criminal behaviour or against it, and most communities are organised for both, so the crime rate is an expression of the differential group organisation.

- On the schools question, this is the Sociological School: give the two levels — the community-level account of rates in social disorganization theory, and the individual-level account of transmission in social learning theory — and show that they are connected by the concept of control. - On causes of crime, use social disorganization to explain the ecology of crime, mobility and family background heads of the syllabus; use social learning to explain cultural conflict and peer influence. - On policy, the practical implications lie largely outside the criminal justice system: greater educational and job training opportunities, jobs with good wages and reasonable hours, cultural ideals focused on community and respect for humanity, and more weight given to the obligations of citizenship alongside individual freedom and rights. - On the limits, say plainly that these theories explain rates better than they explain persons, and that they do not by themselves tell you why one person in a high-crime community offends and his neighbour does not — which is the question Sutherland set out to answer. </content>