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This challenges the idea that the law reflects what society thinks is just or right. Conflict theorists argue that the bourgeois or elite have significant influence over political and legal institutions, allowing them to pass laws that benefit their interests and avoid harsh punishments when they commit crimes. Moreover, the idea that law is an expression of collective consciousness has also been critiqued. For instance, it can be hard to argue that murder is functional for society solely because it reaffirms currently held social norms. Sociologists have critiqued Durkheim’s argument that deviance is functional for not being generalizable to all crimes.
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Modern theories have a few significant critiques of Durkheim’s perspective on crime. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.
![structural functional theory crime structural functional theory crime](https://image1.slideserve.com/2239895/crime-the-functionalist-view-l.jpg)
In large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the collective conscience, which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.ĭurkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1960). For instance, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence challenged people’s ideas about racial inequality in the United States. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. Lombroso’s visual guide to types of criminal, which used pseudoscience to argue that law enforcement could identify criminals through physical features 7.3.1.1 Durkheim and Functionalism These theories were quickly disproven and have received harsh critiques for their blatantly racist foundation. This school of thought is closely associated with the eugenics movement, discussed more in-depth in Chapter 11. A visual depiction of these features can be seen below in figure 7.4. He claimed that criminals can be identified by their abnormal apelike facial and physical features.
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For example, Cesare Lombroso (1911), the father of positivist criminology, claimed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks. Several characteristics were said to indicate criminality, including skull shape, size, body type, and facial features. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, early scholars trying to explain crime turned to the concept of evolution to understand differences among humans by claiming physical features were identifying markers of criminals. The focus of these theories reflects that society is much more concerned about crime than people who break other kinds of social or cultural norms. It is important to note that these theories focus primarily on why people engage in crime, why some behaviors are defined as criminal while others aren’t, and how people learn criminal behavior rather than on deviance more broadly. Sociologists have tried to understand why people engage in deviance or crime by developing theories to help explain this behavior. 7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime