How Crime and Deviance Can Be Seen As Functional for Society Essay

Crime and deviance are acts that will elicit dissent from society. They take various forms and involve various concepts and theories. It will be the aim of this paper to explore those that are considered to be functional for society. It was Emile Durkheim who first clearly established the logic behind the functional approach to the study of crime and deviance[1] when he wrote The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labour[2]. In those works, Durkheim argued that crime and deviance is â€Å"an integral part of all healthy societies†. He reasoned that crime and deviance are not only inevitable, but also functional for society and that they will only be considered dysfunctional when they reach abnormally high or low levels. His theory of functionalism rooted from his amazement with how society was able to keep itself intact amidst the social, political and economic upheaval provoked by the Industrial Revolution. He found that the social glue holding everything in place was: value consensus, social solidarity and collective conscience; and that crime and deviance had a role in this equation. â€Å"Deviance† is a wide-ranging term used by sociologists referring to behaviour that is off-tangent from social normalities[3], and that â€Å"crime† is a variant of deviance, only that it â€Å"comprises activities or actions which are deemed so damaging to the interests of the community† (Pease, 1994) that some form of identification and action must be done against the perpetrator. It follows that all crime are, by definition, deviant behaviour, but not all forms of deviance are criminal[4]. In the pre-industrial days, societies were sm... ... Publishers Ltd., Chapter 6, pp. 330 – 403 8. Kai T. Erickson (nd) Notes on the Sociology of Deviance, in Howard S. Becker (ed) (1967) The Other Side, Perspectives on Deviance, Glencoe, The Free Press 9. Robert A. Nisbet (1975) The Sociology of Emile Durkheim, London, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., Chapter 7, pp. 209 – 237 Notes: [1] (Criminology, nd) [2] (Robert A. Nisbet, 1975) [3] (Chris Livesey,nd) [4] Ibid [5] Ibid [6] (Anthony Giddens, 2001) [7] (Durkheim, nd) [8] (Chris Livesey,nd) [9] (Haralambos and Holborn, 2004) [10] Ibid [11] (Emile Durkheim, nd) [12] (Criminology, nd) [13] (Robert A. Nisbet, 1975) [14] (Kai T. Erikson, nd) [15] (Chris Livesey,nd) [16] Ibid [17] (Chris Livesey,nd) [18] Ibid