Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs.

Clinard, Marshall B.; Cloward, Richard A.; Ohlin, Lloyd E.

doi:10.2307/2090685

Cited by 369 publications

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“…In turn, this situation is more likely to create criminal activities. Cloward and Ohlin (1961) and their ideas correspond with Merton's central thesis concerning strain. They (1961) discussed how man's desires for wealth are virtually unlimited.…”

Section: Micro Anomiesupporting

confidence: 55%

“…They (1961) discussed how man's desires for wealth are virtually unlimited. They (1961) stated that despite the dominant system of equal opportunity, every individual who has differently According to Cloward and Ohlin (1961) conflict among that share values and norms with those of the larger culture are different from each entity. In this regard, strain can lead to shared feelings of oppression among individuals as well as criminality.…”

Section: Micro Anomiementioning

confidence: 99%

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Functionalist perspective on deviance

Ziyanak

Williams

2014

IJHS

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This paper focuses on and summarizes the functionalist perspective of deviance, the function of crimes, and how these perspectives have influenced the development of Durkheim's work, anomie, for example. In this regard, our aim is to carefully describe the contributions of important functionalist thinkers such as Emile Durkheim and Robert K. Merton, by providing a brief historical discussion that highlights their contributions to deviance and crime research. Further, we are also primarily interested in how the functionalist tradition has influenced contemporary works. In this regard, this paper focuses on the most relevant theories that are related to sources of strain including Robert Merton's "structural strain theory," Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld's "institutional anomie" and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's "differential opportunity theory. This paper presents these contemporary thinker's views and in addition to that it presents a detailed discussion of their major studies published since 2000.Keywords: Functionalist perspective; deviance; Durkheim; Merton; anomie; institutional anomie; micro anomie; differential opportunity Functionalist PerspectiveThe structural perspective was the dominant understanding in the sociology literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Durkheim, whose writings have played a central role in the understanding of deviance, argued that crime and deviance are not created by a small number of sick individuals, nor are these situations unnatural in any way, rather they are an essential part of society. In turn, crime performs an absolutely crucial function. Durkheim's main argument was based on the functionality of deviance in any society. Durkheim (1951) confirmed the obvious negative effects of deviance. Besides negative influences of deviant behavior, he also identified that deviance yields positive benefits for society.

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Section: Micro Anomiesupporting

confidence: 55%

Section: Micro Anomiementioning

confidence: 99%

Functionalist perspective on deviance

Ziyanak

Williams

2014

IJHS

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“…These include social ecology arguments that gangs are partial replacement structures for institutions such as families that have become dysfunctional as a result of the 'social disorganization ' of poverty and social exclusion, 43 cultural theories that gangs are reflections of lower class ' subculture ', 44 political visions of gangs as forms of resistance to 'blocked ' opportunities, 45 economic conceptions treating gangs as informal business enterprises, 46 and psychological interpretations of gangs either as the result of gang members' deviant sociopathological personality traits, 47 or else as vehicles for youth maturation processes and identity creation. 48 It is beyond the scope of this article to attempt to consider which of these approaches is most persuasive.…”

Section: Gangs Violence and Social Order In Urban Nicaraguamentioning

confidence: 99%

Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence, and Social Order in Urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002

Rodgers¹

2009

Youth Violence in Latin America

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Abstract. This article explores the dynamics of the youth gang (pandilla) phenomenon in contemporary urban Nicaragua, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted with a Managua pandilla in 1996-97 and in 2002. Pandillas and their violent practices are conceived as constituting a form of local social structuration in the face of broader conditions of high crime, insecurity, and socio-political breakdown. This form of ' street-level politics ' changed significantly between 1997 and 2002, however, evolving from a form of collective social violence to a more individually and economically motivated type of brutality. This transformation is related to wider structural processes, which are described as coming together and precipitating a form of ' social death ' in contemporary Nicaragua. IntroductionThe past two decades have seen crime become increasingly recognised as a critical social concern. Crime rates have risen globally by an average of 50 per cent over the past 25 years, 1 and the phenomenon is widely considered to contribute significantly to human suffering all over the world. In many ways it can be argued that there has been a shift in the political economy of violence in post-Cold War Latin America, with the most visible expressions of brutality no longer stemming from ideological conflicts over the nature of politics, as in the past, but from more ' prosaic' forms of violence such as crime. 8 Although it is important not to underestimate the continuities between the past and the present -crime is not a new phenomenon, and political violence is by no means extinct -violence in Latin America has arguably become 'democratised', ceasing to be ' the resource of only the traditionally powerful or of the grim uniformed guardians of the nation and increasingly appear [ing] as an option for a multitude of actors in pursuit of all kinds of goals '. 9 These new dynamics are widely seen to be linked to a regional ' crisis of governance', whereby economic liberalisation, weak democratisation and intensifying globalisation have undermined states and their ability to command a monopoly over the use of violence. The emergence of

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“…Conceptual efforts to establish offender typologies able to characterize different career patterns and specialties (Clinard and Quinney, 1973;Cloward and Ohlin, 1960;Gibbons, 1965), as well as numerous offender subtypes (Conklin, 1972;Guttmacher, 1960;McCaghy, 1967;Neustatter, 1957) and classification schemes for institutionalized offenders (Roebuck, 1966;Schrag, 1944Schrag, , 1961Sykes, 1958), were each designed to overcome the behavioral exceptions found in an individual, all-encompassing theory and to provide for differential treatment according to offender and offense type. Following his comprehensive review of offender typologies, Don Gibbons (1975) conceded that these classifi-cation schemes generally have been deficient in clarity and objectivity, have often failed to develop mutually exclusive and comprehensive categories, and seldom have been examined empirically.…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Offense Specialization: Does It Exist?

Kempf¹

1986

The Reasoning Criminal

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Editors' NoteAs explained in the Introduction to this volume, the requirement that rational choice models of crime be specific to rather closely defined types of offense makes no assumptions about the degree of specialization or generalization in offenders' careers. Thus, even if an offender were a "generalist," the factors influencing decisions about some of the offenses he or she committed (residential burglary, for example) might be quite different from those factors influencing others of his or her offenses (shoplifting, for example). This being so, crime-specific modeling is needed if effective ways of preventing or controlling crime are to be developed. The virtues of rational choice approaches would be easier to communicate, however, the greater the degree of specialization that could be demonstrated. For this reason Kimberly Kempfs findings, using unrivalled data from the second Philadelphia birth cohort, of a greater degree of specialization in offending careers than has been shown before are helpful. As she points out, however, the issue is by no means settled. In particular, it would be interesting to see if greater specialization would be found if more complete information were available about the nature of offenses committed, if much finer subclassifications of offense types were used, and if offenders' careers were subdivided into more discrete periods. It is conceivable, for example, that a juvenile offender might for a few months (or even a year or two) have a small repertoire of offenses, including, let us say, shoplifting from local stores and smoking marijuana. Subsequently he or she might graduate to burglaries of local residences, and later still to mugging. Looked at over an entire career span of several years, this pattern of offending might well be characterized as generalist in nature. Considering, however, the complete range of crime types in which the offender could have become involved and contrasting this with the limited number of types actually committed at particular points in the offender's career, one could equally well make the case for a form of "serial specialization." The issues are definitional as well as empirical.

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Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs.

Cited by 369 publications

References 0 publications

Functionalist perspective on deviance

Functionalist perspective on deviance

Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence, and Social Order in Urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002

Offense Specialization: Does It Exist?

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