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Outline and assess the view that the law is used to oppress (keep down) women, ethnic minorities and the working class generally.
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In order to understand how law is used to oppress any act of crime and deviance, it is important to first understand the explanations that sociologists have offered for crime and its related concept of deviance. Before even that it is important to know how crime and deviance is defined. Crime is an aspect of social life that affects everyone at some time. To sociologists crime means the breaking of rules that have been made into laws by the rulers or government of a society. Whereas Deviance means behaviour that most or all people disapprove of in the society. Such behaviour will not conform to the society’s norms and values. The main issue related to crime and deviance is how do class, gender, ethnicity and social controls within a capitalistic society lead to increase in crime due to the criminal laws and criminal justice system imposed on the lower middle class. “Social conflict theory” is the most important criminology theory that deals directly with this problem. This approaches has been taken from the traditional Marxism, who believes that capitalist societies exists for the benefit of the owners of capital therefore it has divided the poor and the rich. Marxist analysis of crime is defined as crime from the result of the values, which the ruling classes have forced upon society. The law reflect and support these values. Laws require workers’ rights or controlling corporate crime, which are seen as less important than those controlling the activities of youth in inner- city areas. Therefore policing and public concerns are centred on particular types of crime. People assume that real criminals are those in the inner- cites. They therefore look for the causes of crime in the differences between the normal (middle class) and deviant individuals (lower class, young, male). The law is seen as a reflection of the interests of the powerful in society, and does not exist, as most functionalist claim, to reflect the will and needs of the majority of the population. There are other sociologists’ explanations as to why crime occurs such as The Functionalist theory, where it is suggested by Durkheim that deviance and crime were beneficial to society in two ways. Firstly, crime can bring about social changes by proving a public court where public acceptance of the law is constantly being tested. The second way is that if general disagreement that the law is out of date, and then law is changed. On the other hand, crime can be strengthening social agreement in that it draws people together in mutual horror at particular crimes. A more detailed version of functionalist theory that helps to explain actual behaviour is taken from Merton. He suggests that all societies set clear goals for people to reach. Societies also give socially improved resources of obtaining these goals. Merton argues that as long as there is seen to be a reasonable chance of achieving success through agreed goals, the society will function well. If, however, there is little chance of success through these goals, then a situation of anomies is created. In this situation, people response to the fact that they have very little chance of achieving social agreed goals by adapting to their situation. For Merton, crime and deviance are the results of the situation of anomie. Cloward and Ohlin, who argue that there is not only a set of socially agreed resources to achieve the society’s goal, developed Merton’s work. They believed there is also an illegitimate sub culturally agreed set of goals. They suggest that there are also different response to success and failure in this parallel illegitimate opportunity structure. Therefore, he majority of criticisms of Merton has been that there is an assumption that the society has only one commonly hold goal (financial success).
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