A2 Crime and Deviance: "The New Right"

Guest Blogger: Janine Taylor

When you look at the picture on the right, what do you see? A plus-sized family of four? The girl from the X-Factor who had the awful dress? A dirty cotton bud on the floor? A family, which was forced to live in a car after being evicted for all night karaoke sessions? While all of the former are indeed true, what you are actually looking at the Chawners - a family who weigh 83st between them, claim £22,000 a year in benefits and have chosen not to work for 11 years. They are the embodiment of the underclass, the “scum of the depraved elements of all classes” – Marx.

Before I delve in to the sociology behind the phenomenon of the underclass, I’m sure you are wondering about why they are “entitled” to all the money they receive. Mrs Chawner receives an extra £330 a month, because she has epilepsy and asthma – the latter being caused by her obesity. Mr Chawner receives £71 a month, as he developed type 2 diabetes because of this weight. Samantha – the girl on the right, receives £168 a month in jobseeker’s allowance and the wannabe pop star who has is so elegantly placed herself on the arm of the sofa receives £116 a month as a student, due to the “poverty” of her family.

The New Right seek to reduce the welfare state which have allowed families like these to thrive on benefits as they believe that individuals have a social responsibility, a moral obligation to provide and be responsible for themselves. Because of this, ‘scroungers’ along with young offenders and other ‘undesirable’ social groups, in the eyes of the New Right, are labelled the ‘enemy within’.

Control theory influences the New Right and even thought it is most commonly applied to criminal and deviant behaviour, it can also be applied to the study of the Chawners and the underclass (although I would argue that the behaviour of the Chawners is criminal):
1/The Reasoning Criminal
→ Actions are calculated and rational
o Chawners – We can make more money by staying at home, and watching Jeremy Kyle than if we get a job.
2/Society influences the individual
→ People are influences by those in their neighbourhood
o Chawners -3,924 people are on benefits in Blackburn, why should we have to work?
Lastly, although the Chawners are yet to realise it:
3/People have a moral duty to work
→ Dependence on others decreases happiness and freedom.
→ Marsland – “welfare hand outs create incentives for staying unemployed”

So how does this link to crime and deviance?

Murray, a New Right Realist blamed the welfare state for “sapping moral fibre, eroding Christian ethics and threatening family values” (link to religion - Weber – The protestant ethic – hard work, spending money wisely). He believed that England would be come a nanny state where there was an over dependency on welfare, which has become the case now more than ever due to the recent economic recession. Murray also believed that the result of a nanny state was ‘social sickness’ which is the reduction of the strength of moral values and mechanisms of social control – anomie, which in turn leads to crime.

The New Right believes that crime is not a cause of poverty, but by “selfish and wicked people” – Wilson. The choice to turn to crime is always linked to the ease of committing the act, the opportunities available, the risk involved in the crime and the possibility of being detected. Because of this Wilson concludes that people are less likely to commit crimes if there is surveillance e.g. CCTV and ‘target hardening e.g. marking goods, such as laptops. They also advocate a policy of Zero Tolerance (Wilson and Kelling – Broken Windows, train jumpers), which means that minor crimes should be punished harshly, to stop larger ones from being committed, as the attributed the rise in crime to the lack of fear the criminal had about being caught.

Although the picture I have portrayed of the New Right may lead you to think that they are heartless, they are not. They do believe that the benefit system should be kept in place to help those who genuinely cannot help themselves. Anyway, if your dreams of making it big don’t work, I know how you can make £22,000 a year with minimal effort…

USA Trip

Hollywood Baby!!!

Next year (February) the sociology department are in the early stages of planning an excursion of the west coast of America. Included in the trip are a visit to the most famous prison in the world Alcatraz, a tour of Hollywood City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Other sites that we will be visiting are Stanford University, one of the most successful and beautiful universities in the world. Please see your subject teacher to get further details of what is going to be an amazing experience. You can also log your internet on the "comment section" of this post.

AS Education: Grammar School Fails Inspection

Are all Grammar Schools Good? Read Article.

For the first in English history a grammar school has failed an Ofsted inspection. Stretford Grammar School was placed in special measures after inspectors found that it was "inadequate" in its overall effectiveness.

Trafford council has responded by saying that there are enough positives for the future, and the Children's Minister directed her criticism at the management of the school accusing the Conservative leadership of the council of trying to brush the failures if the school "under the carpet". Girls particularly were failing in the school with high ability candidates making "very slow progress".

For AS students this opens the debate of whether students benefit from the state or grammar/public experience. Presumptions are made that with their entrance tests and their "selectivity" grammar schools should rule the roost when it comes to results, compared to national benchmarks. Yet Stretford Grammar school faced a range of problems which don't usually impact on grammar school institutions. Over 30% of their students spoke English as a second language, and a decline in numbers (which meant less funding). The school is currently facing closure and highlights how quickly a school can go on a downward spiral especially when at the mercy of changing social surroundings which they have very little control over. Last year it recorded 92% of it students achieving "good GCSE grades".

A2 Synoptic Link: Methods and Deviance

"At shortly after five o'clock on a weekday evening, four men enter a public toilet in the city park..."

The above statement hardly sounds like the beginning of one of the most controversial pieces of sociological reseach ever done, but Laud Humphrey's research has divided researcher for the best part of forty years. During the A2 Sociology course students are asked to make the link between the methods of collecting data and why these particular methods are suitible for the study of crime and deviance. During the course you will hear names such as William Whyte and Eileen Barker, but the case which grabs the attention of the modern sociology student is that of Laud Humphreys. For Humphrey's choice of PhD topic he decided to study the "Tearoom" trade, which was the male-male sexual encounters in public toilets, a term known in US slang as "Tea Rooming", Humphrey's basic hypothesis was that men participating in this activity in such activity came from diverse social backgrounds, they also had a variety of reasons for seeking homosexual contact in such venues.

Humphrey's first method was to observe these men by acting as a "watch queen" at the venues which was to prevent individuals interupting the activity or raising the alarm if the police were present. In the 1960s this activity was illegal. He gathered information from approx. 100 men and then obtained personal information on the individuals, by copying down their license plate. He then interviewed these men under the disguise as someone conducting a "health" survey.

What Humphreys found was that there was very little was different between the men engaging in these activities from typical adult males (Reynolds, 1982). What the Sociology student must address is the ethical issues involved in this research. Did Humphrey's have any right to conduct the research in this manner? Humphrey's defence was that there was no alternative on offer to study this "deviant" group (or criminal). A questionnaire or an interview with the respondents would have revealed no valid information, as subjects would not have admitted their behaviour, especially to a researcher noting down the results! There was a heated debate which followed this research and for many years researchers within Washington University argued that the PhD should not be awarded.