Crime and deviance

Crime and deviance

1. Methods for measuring crime

   • Official statistics
     • 1)Crimes recorded by the police
       • 2)Statistics of people that have been convicted of offences
     • Advantages- that they are cheap and readily available as they are published by the home office, They cover a large part of the population, and are seen to have a great deal of Validity as they are collected by the state, They are easily comparable with old stats, there quantitive nature allows trends are patterns to be easily found from region to region, another significant advantages is that it doesn't put sociologists at any risk
     • Disadvantages-for sociologists that want to study Deviance is that the data may not be readily available and it may mean that they would have to be in danger investigating deviance.
     • evaluations, Some people are unaware that crimes have taken place, such as a fight, when does it turn into assault? Another factor is that people may choose to deal with a crime themselves or are to frightened to report the crime to someone. Another factor is for people in rural areas of the uk, the police station may be in a far proximity.However crimes are not always under recorded, insurance company are encouraging people to report crimes, when in the past they may not have done so.
     • However 'coughing' and 'cuffing'- Coughing means people owning up to crimes they might not have committed in return for lower sentences, for example the south american drug dealers, Cuffing means not recording certain crimes that the police think the cant solve i.e a mugging.....Overall the official statistics represent an inaccurate picture of crime as it is affected by peoples awareness, willingness and ability to report crime, changes in stats overtime will be affected by theses factors, and the willingness of authorities to prosecute

2. Deviance-Going against the norms and values of society

   • Crime- an act against the laws of the country

3. Victim surveys

4. Functionalism View on data is uncritical, and use them to develop their ideas...Durkheim used them to measure suicide rates (a form of deviance) and developed theories about suicide.....Merton assumed that Valid and reliable and worked with them to explain working class crime...Due to the fact that functionalists view people as unthinking about the social structure it means that they can establish patterns and trends