Crime, Deviance and Society An Introduction to Sociological Criminology

This chapter focuses on subcultural theorists that explore collective collective responses to social inequality through crime and deviance. Subcultural explanations were not grouped into a formal subcultural paradigm until the works of American delinquency theorists who were attempting to account for the concentrations of crime and violence in poor, urban neighbourhoods. Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin and Miller were among the first of many cultural deviance theorists to develop the concept of a criminal subculture (e.g. gangs) and to link it to social structural problems such as poverty and inequality. Then in the 1960s the Birmingham School, a group of researchers and theorists based at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) posited that subcultures were a form of ‘resistance’ that did not have to be ‘criminal’. These two approaches are respectively referred to as the American and the British strands of subcultural theories. Each of these traditions has a distinct understanding of the role and place of subcultures in society broadly, and in the lives of predominantly young working-class males.