Question

Crimes associated with anomie theory.

Answer 1

Crime is necessary; it serves a function in society. Although it is not preferable, with the progression and evolution of modernity and emphasis on monetary success, crime is inevitable because a perfectly stable, uniform, and able society is impossible. As the father of sociology and a functionalist, Emile Durkheim provides a variety of explanations of society’s ills, like crime and deviance, and accounts for the punishments and repercussions that follow. He asserts that man is a product of his social environment; thus, socialization begins at birth and continues through language and interaction with other people. The basis of his theory rests on the idea that the “conscience collective of a society varies alongside the division of labor. In less complex and more primitive societies, people tended to do and history in terms of crime and deviance was the industrial revolution. As this revolution evolved, there was a steep increase in immigrant migration into the United States. With this increase in immigration and the evolution toward a more modern society came rising levels of individualism, flexibility, and diversity amongst natural belief systems. This was the first sign of problems in the new society. Although these immigrants found no protest to their own belief systems, they failed to adapt them to the previously held norms the American people valued. Inevitably, there was a senseof imbalance between the previously held norms and values and the new and evolving ones. This imbalance, Durkheim deemed ‘anomie.’ According to Durkheim, anomie reflects a sense of normlessness, the lack of any societal norms that spurs the tendency to act in a deviant way. In general terms, Durkheim’s theory of anomie proposes that because of industrialization and the need for cheap labor in this newly modern society, the influx of immigrants inherently brought with them their own sets of norms and values. Thus came a temporary imbalance of norms, anomie, which enhances individual’s propensity to commit crime in search for a stable environment. In turn, Durkheim puts forth not just a theory for the social origins of crime, but also he theorizes about the social origins of law and punishment.

Before addressing Durkheim’s explanation for crime and deviance, it is necessary to discuss his theory regarding the origins of law and punishment. In its entirety, he describes “the law as a concrete and objective indicator of morality…the law is restitution rather than simply repressive” (Smith, 2008). From this comes the conclusion that law is a production of the collective society, a myriad of all beliefs of society, an embodiment of everything a society holds to be right, true, and just. This concept of the ‘collective conscience’ has everything to do with where societies lawsand ills, come from. Initially, Durkheim asserted that crime holds some religious qualities. Because “religion was a reflection of the force of a shared collective conscience…early legal codes were also religious codes,” thus providing Durkheim the ability to argue, “offenses against the gods were offenses against society” (Durkheim, 1964). Crime became a deeply meaningful thing, very passionate and powerful, that ultimately prompted for very strong emotions, anger and vengeance specifically. Because of this, punishment was less about the offense or the offender and held more weight in regard to restoring the cohesion and core values of society.
So what are these social origins of crime? As previously stated, the fragmentation amongst society from the evolution to a more industrial and modern society, and the anomic division of labor, provide the basis for crime and deviance. This division of labor emerged as a result of the “needs of society which has become larger through an increase in population and a more highly integrated interactive network” (Khorn, 1980). Durkheim theorized that there is a bundle of ‘social facts,’ or empirical facts describing societal tendencies, that determine individual qualities. Drawing on statistics, he drew a correlation between suicide rates and social variables. What he deemed egoistic or anomic suicide were those that described “weak social integration and failed moral regulation” as seen through the conclusion that protestants, intellectuals, and single people had higher suicide rates than religious folk, specifically Catholics and Jews. In other words, the individual and isolated people had a higher tendency for suicide than the collective and densely networked community because of their lack of cohesion and relationship with the collective conscience of society (Smith, 2008). More rare cases of altruistic and fatalistic suicide were common when an individual was too closely bound to the group. Ultimately, this study concluded that social cohesion, or group solidarity, and the values held to be true by the collective conscience could both prevent and generate deviant activity.  

Although there have been a small handful of direct examinations of Durkheim and his theories, there are a few studies that have analyzed more specific aspects of social disorganization and its effects. Theorists Gibbs and Martin, and later Miley and Micklin, focused on suicide and how the social integration enabled or inhibited such behavior. When Miley and Micklin developed the research, they theorized that “population and technological development will be directly related to the division of labor…and the division of labor will produce a decrease in status integration which, in turn, will increase suicide rates,” furthermore, supporting Durkheimian theory (Krohn, 1980). In contrast to Durkheim’s emphasis on the division of labor, research and analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau and the Uniform Crime Report done by Webb, found that relationship of population size, density, and proportion of communication, did not decrease the rates of crime. However, when analyzing Webb’s research it is necessary to recognize that he did not include the concept, or measure, of anomie (Krohn, 1980).