Society and Crime
How did anxieties about crime and deviance come to occupy much of our information consumption? How did it come to occupy centre-stage in our media and importantly in the entertainment that we see on our television screens. The ongoing drama played out in public discourse has raised considerable debate on how a society should respond to crime. How have theories of crime and deviance related to the actual practices of social control and punishment, and to the main currents of social conflict?
Sociologist Emile Durkheim's (1858-1917) views on crime departed from early conventional notions of his day. He believed that crime is "bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life" and serves a social function. He stated that crime implies, "not only that the way remains open to necessary change, but that in certain cases it directly proposes these changes... crime [can thus be] a useful prelude to reforms." In this sense he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. He further stated that "the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself...[even] the originality of the criminal... shall also be possible" (Durkheim, 1895).
Beyond the specific study of crime, criminal law and punishment, Durkheim was deeply interested in the study of law and its social effects in general. Among classical social theorists he is one of the founders of the field of sociology of law. In his early work he saw types of law (characterised by their punishments) as a direct reflection of types of social solidarity. The study of law was therefore of interest to sociology for what it could reveal about the nature of solidarity. Later, however, he emphasised the significance of law as a sociological field of study in its own right. In the later Durkheimian view, law (both civil and criminal) is an expression and guarantee of society's fundamental values which can be seen in the social order of a society. Durkheim emphasised the way that modern law increasingly expresses a form of moral individualism - a value system that is, in his view, probably the only one universally appropriate to modern conditions of social solidarity. Individualism, in this sense, is the basis of human rights and of the values of individual human dignity and individual autonomy. It is to be sharply distinguished from selfishness and egoism, which for Durkheim are not moral stances.
Social order is the how and why a society functions to maintain social systems by which we all adhere. Thomas Hobbes first recognized and articulated the structure of social order and conceived the notion of a social contract. Others, including Talcott Parsons, and Jürgen Habermas have proposed different explanations for what a social order consists of, and what its real basis is. For Durkheim, it is a set of shared social norms. For Parsons, it is a set of social institutions determining moral behaviour. For Habermas, it is all of these, as well as communicative action.
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