The strain theory of crime

The argument

The strain theory essentially places the cause of crime on the strain that societal pressures put on individuals. Society defines what counts as a successful life — money, status, the markers of respectability — and presses everyone to pursue those ends, while distributing very unequally the legitimate means of reaching them. Crime, on this account, is what happens in the gap between the goal and the means. That explains a feature the theory treats as central: offending is often conformist in its aims even while it is deviant in its methods. People may turn to deviant behaviour in order to achieve goals that are the norm for general society. Many drug dealers, for instance, sell drugs in order to gain money, which is a common social value — so those who sell drugs are rebelling against one social norm in order to achieve another, rather than rejecting society's goals outright. The theory has been developed through direct observation. The criminologist Albert Cohen observed juvenile offenders and noted that lower-class children lacked the economic and social support to be on the same level as middle-class children at school. Schooling is where the competition for legitimate success begins, and the children Cohen studied entered it already behind. Because of that lack of support, Cohen believed these children were more susceptible to failure and often unable to reach middle-class expectations — expectations they were nonetheless measured against and had absorbed as their own. The inability to succeed legally places a societal strain on these people, and because of this they turn to crime. The cause identified is therefore social rather than individual: the same society supplies both the ambition and the obstacle, and crime is one of the routes left open when the two do not meet.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents of this theory argue that the Strain Theory does not explain crimes that are unrelated to gaining material goods. One of these crimes is vandalism. Committing an act of vandalism would bring the criminal no closer to the "American Dream" and would not grant them any material value.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That society sets goals is compatible with the individual position: what the theory leaves unexplained is why, under the same pressures, some people offend and most do not. [Rejecting P2] Blocked opportunity is at best a contributing condition rather than a cause, since the great majority facing it never offend — and white-collar offending by people who already possess the legitimate means is unaccounted for. [Rejecting P3] The mechanism struggles with offences yielding no material gain, as the counter notes of vandalism, and with expressive or impulsive violence; Cohen's own extension conceded this by recasting the goal as status rather than money, which weakens the original account.