HookDurkheim said a society of saints would still invent crime
In 1895 Émile Durkheim made a claim his students found absurd: crime is not a sickness in society but a normal, permanent and even necessary feature of every society that has ever existed. Picture, he said, a 'society of saints' — a perfect monastery of flawless people. There would be no theft, no violence, no fraud. And yet, Durkheim insisted, this society would still produce deviants. The faults that pass unnoticed among ordinary people would there loom enormous; a monk who spoke sharply, or ate too greedily, would be condemned as we condemn a criminal. Where the standard rises, the definition of deviance simply rises with it. Crime, in other words, is not a fixed set of acts — it is whatever a society has decided to punish, and no society ever runs out of things to punish.
That single idea reframes every question in this topic. If crime is socially defined rather than natural, then the official crime statistics are not a thermometer reading of how bad society is — they are a social construction, a record of which acts got noticed, reported, recorded and prosecuted, and which did not. The British Crime Survey has for decades found far more crime than the police ever record: a large 'dark figure' never reaches the statistics at all, while a shoplifter is far likelier to be counted than a City banker committing fraud on a vastly larger scale. So the real question this topic keeps asking is not simply 'why do people break the rules?' but the sharper, more sociological one: who makes the rules, who gets labelled when they break them, and whose crimes stay invisible?
ModelWhy the rules exist — functionalism, strain and subculture
The functionalist tradition starts from social order: how does a society hold together, and what keeps most of us conforming most of the time? Durkheim argued that crime performs positive functions. It carries out boundary maintenance — a public trial dramatises the line between right and wrong and reaffirms shared values; it enables social change, because today's deviant (the conscientious objector, the campaigner) is often tomorrow's reformer; and it acts as a safety valve and an early warning that something is wrong. Too little crime means a society is repressively over-controlled; too much signals anomie, a breakdown of the shared norms that normally restrain us.
Robert Merton turned anomie into a theory of why crime clusters where it does. American society, he argued, drills everyone to chase the same goal — the 'American Dream' of material success — but denies the legitimate means (good schools, secure jobs) to the poor. The strain between goals and means produces five adaptations: conformity, innovation (accept the goal, use illegitimate means — most utilitarian crime), ritualism, retreatism (drop out — addicts, vagrants) and rebellion (reject and replace both). Albert Cohen added that working-class boys who fail by middle-class standards suffer status frustration and invert those values into a delinquent subculture where vandalism and defiance earn respect. Cloward and Ohlin refined this into three subcultures — criminal, conflict and retreatist — depending on the illegitimate opportunities a neighbourhood offers. The weakness examiners want you to spot: these theories over-predict working-class crime and ignore the crimes of the powerful.
ModelWho gets caught — labelling, Marxism and the two realisms
Interactionists flip the question. Howard Becker argued that no act is inherently deviant; deviance is created when 'moral entrepreneurs' pass rules and those rules are applied to particular people. As he put it, the deviant is simply someone to whom the label has successfully been applied. Edwin Lemert distinguished primary deviance (rule-breaking nobody has labelled) from secondary deviance (the deviance that follows after a public label), and showed how a label can become a person's master status, triggering a self-fulfilling prophecy and a deviant career. Labelling explains why the crime statistics tell us more about the police than the criminals: Cicourel found officers' commonsense 'typifications' of the typical delinquent meant working-class youths were far likelier to be stopped, charged and thus counted.
Marxists ask who benefits. Law reflects ruling-class interests; enforcement is selective (street crime is policed hard, corporate crime softly); and the occasional prosecution of a powerful figure lets the system look fair. Right realists (Wilson, Murray) reject grand theory and treat crime as a rational choice by under-socialised individuals from a welfare-dependent 'underclass' — the answer is deterrence and control. Left realists (Lea and Young) take crime seriously as a real harm suffered mostly by the poor, explaining it through relative deprivation, marginalisation and subculture, and pushing practical reforms rather than revolution. Ranging a functionalist, a labelling, a Marxist and a realist account against each other is the backbone of a strong 30-mark answer.
DataThe social distribution — class, ethnicity and gender
The statistics say crime is overwhelmingly young, male, working-class and, on stop-and-search figures, disproportionately Black. The sociological skill is deciding how much of that pattern is real and how much is a product of the labelling process that produces the figures.
Class: official crime looks working-class largely because working-class crime is the crime that gets counted. Edwin Sutherland coined 'white-collar crime' precisely because respectable, high-status offending — fraud, tax evasion, corporate negligence — is under-policed and under-recorded despite doing far more financial and physical harm. Ethnicity: Black people in England and Wales are stopped and searched several times more often than white people, but Paul Gilroy argued the resulting statistics reflect a 'myth of Black criminality' manufactured by a racist criminal justice system, while Hall et al. (Policing the Crisis, 1978) read the 1970s 'mugging' panic as a way of diverting attention from capitalism's crisis onto a Black scapegoat. Left realists counter that some of the excess is real, rooted in marginalisation. Gender: women appear in the statistics far less. The chivalry thesis (Pollak) says the system treats women leniently, deflating their figures; Frances Heidensohn argued instead that women are simply more controlled — at home, in public and at work — so they have fewer opportunities to offend; Carlen linked women's crime to broken 'class and gender deals'. Messerschmidt reframed male crime as a resource for 'accomplishing masculinity' when legitimate ways of proving manhood are blocked.
MechanismCrime beyond the street — globalisation, media, green and state crime
The spec pushes you past the burglary-and-vandalism image of crime toward harms that are bigger, more global and less visible. Globalisation and crime: Manuel Castells describes a global criminal economy — drugs, trafficking, cybercrime, money laundering — worth over a trillion pounds, while Hobbs and Dunningham show crime is now 'glocal', its local forms plugged into global networks. Media and crime: Stanley Cohen's study of the 1964 Mods and Rockers seaside clashes (Folk Devils and Moral Panics) is the classic case — media over-reaction created 'folk devils', which through a deviancy amplification spiral produced more of the very behaviour it condemned, as exaggerated coverage drew in more youths and provoked a heavier police response. The media also distort the picture of crime and inflate the fear of it.
Green crime: Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' argues that the biggest threats are now human-made environmental ones that cross borders; Nigel South distinguishes primary green crime (direct destruction of the earth — pollution, deforestation) from secondary green crime (breaking the rules meant to prevent it). A 'transgressive' criminology counts environmental harm even where no law is broken. State crime — genocide, torture, war crimes — is, as Green and Ward note, the most serious crime of all yet the least prosecuted, because the state both commits it and defines what counts as crime. The Schwendingers argued sociologists should therefore define crime as the violation of human rights, not merely of the law, and Cohen mapped the 'spiral of denial' by which states neutralise their atrocities.
MechanismControlling crime — surveillance, punishment and victims
The final leaf covers what society does about crime. Situational crime prevention (Ron Clarke) 'designs out' opportunity through target-hardening — CCTV, locks, barriers — but critics note it often just displaces crime elsewhere. Environmental prevention grows from Wilson and Kelling's broken windows thesis: untended disorder signals that no one is in control, so it must be tackled with 'zero tolerance' policing. Surveillance: Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish) argued modern control shifted from the public spectacle of the scaffold to the disciplinary gaze of the panopticon — a prison design in which inmates, never sure whether they are being watched, police themselves. Mathiesen updates this to a 'synopticon', where the many now watch the few; others describe 'actuarial justice' that manages whole risk categories rather than individuals.
Punishment has its own sociology: Durkheim saw it as expressing collective outrage and reaffirming values (retribution), Foucault as disciplining bodies, and Garland as increasingly driven by 'penal populism' and mass incarceration. Finally, victims: positivist victimology (Miers) looks for the characteristics that make some people 'victim-prone', whereas critical victimology argues that structural powerlessness shapes both who is victimised and who even gets recognised as a victim — the state routinely withholds the label from those it harms. Repeat victimisation is concentrated on the already-disadvantaged, so victim status, like offender status, follows the lines of power.
CasePutting it together — a 30-mark essay paragraph, annotated
The Paper 3 essay hands you an Item and a view to evaluate — say, 'Applying material from the Item and your knowledge, evaluate the view that the causes of crime lie in the unequal structure of capitalist society.' The examiner is watching for four things happening at once: knowledge (AO1), use of the Item (AO2), and analysis plus evaluation (AO3). Below is one middle paragraph doing all four, followed by the reasons it works.
Model paragraph: 'A Marxist would argue that crime is built into the very structure of capitalism, as the Item hints when it refers to a system that generates both great wealth and great want. For traditional Marxists such as Gordon, the poverty and alienation produced by capitalism push some into utilitarian crime simply to survive, while the greed the system celebrates drives the corporate and white-collar crimes of the powerful — crimes that, as Snider notes, the capitalist state is reluctant to police or even to criminalise. This has real explanatory power, because it accounts for the crimes of the boardroom that strain and subcultural theories ignore entirely. However, the view is arguably too deterministic: it implies capitalism more or less forces the poor into crime, yet most poor people are law-abiding, a point left realists such as Lea and Young press when they insist crime is caused by relative deprivation and marginalisation rather than absolute poverty alone. Feminists add a further limitation — a purely class-based account cannot explain why, across every social class, it is overwhelmingly men who offend.'
Why it earns marks: the opening sentence explicitly 'hooks' the Item ('as the Item hints when it refers to…'), which is the single move that unlocks the top AO2 band — a brilliant essay that never touches the Item is capped. The AO1 is precise and attributed (Gordon, Snider), not a vague 'Marxists say'. Crucially, the evaluation is not a bolted-on final sentence but is woven in: each theory is answered by a named rival (left realism, then feminism), so the paragraph reads as an argument rather than a list. That combination — signposted Item use, attributed knowledge, and evaluation developed into a two-sided line of reasoning — is exactly what separates a Band 4 answer from a Band 6 one.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Paper 3 (Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods) rewards three assessment objectives: AO1 knowledge, AO2 application, and AO3 analysis and evaluation. Match your effort to the mark tariff. The short 'outline two ways' (4) and 'outline three reasons' (6) questions want crisp, developed points — identify, then develop each with a reason or example; do not evaluate and do not waste time on an introduction.
The 10-mark 'analyse' question and the 30-mark essay both give you an Item, and the most costly mistake candidates make is ignoring it. You must 'hook' the Item — quote or paraphrase a phrase from it and build on it — because application marks are gated on doing so; a strong essay that never touches the Item is capped in the middle bands however good the theory. On the 30-marker, plan two or three theories as a debate, not a list: set functionalism, labelling, Marxism and realism against each other so that evaluation is woven through the essay rather than tacked on at the end. Name your sociologists (Merton, Becker, Hall, Lea and Young) and, where you can, a study or figure — precise attribution is what pushes an answer from the analysis band into the evaluation band. Finish with a genuine, reasoned conclusion that reaches a judgement rather than restating both sides.