6.4.3: Illegitimate Opportunity Structures

 6.4: The Functionalist Perspective PT 

6.4.3: Illegitimate Opportunity Structures: 

Social Class and Crime Over and over in this text, you have seen the impact of social class on people’s lives—and you will continue to do so in coming chapters. 

Let’s look at how the social classes produce different types of crime.

 Street Crime In applying strain theory, functionalists point out that industrialized societies have no trouble socializing the poor into wanting to own things. 

Like others, the poor are bombarded with messages urging them to buy everything from iPhones and iPads to designer jeans and new cars. 

Television and movies spew out images of middle-class people enjoying luxurious lives. 

The poor get the message—full-fledged Americans can afford society’s many goods and services.

Yet, the most common route to success, education, presents a bewildering world to the poor.

 Run by the middle class, schools are at odds with their background. 

In the schools, what the poor take for granted is unacceptable, questioned, even mocked.

Their speech, for example, is built around nonstandard grammar. 

It is also often laced with what the middle class considers obscenities. Their ideas of punctuality and their poor preparation in reading and paper-and-pencil skills also make it difficult to fit in. Facing such barriers, the poor are more likely than their more privileged counterparts to drop out of school.

 Educational failure, of course, slams the door on many legitimate avenues to success.

Not all doors slam shut, though. Woven into the inner city is what Cloward and Ohlin (1960) called an illegitimate opportunity structure.

 This alternative door to financial gain includes burglary, robbery, drug dealing, gambling, prostitution, and pimping (Anderson 1978, 1990, 2000; Charmes 2019). 

To those growing up poor, pimps and drug dealers are often seen through the lens of a glamorous life—people who are in control and have plenty of “easy money.” For some, then, the “hustler” becomes a role model

It should be easy to see why street crime attracts disproportionate numbers of the poor. In the following Down-to-Earth Sociology, let’s look at how gangs are part of the illegitimate opportunity structure that beckons disadvantaged youth.

Down-to-Earth Sociology Islands in the Street: Urban Gangs in the United States Gangs are part of urban life, but why do people join gangs?

 For more than ten years, sociologist Martín Sánchez-Jankowski (1991) did participant–observation of thirty-seven ethnic gangs: African American, Chicano, Dominican, Irish, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican. The members of these gangs in Boston, Los Angeles, and New York City earned money through gambling, arson, mugging, and armed robbery. 

They also sold drugs, guns, moonshine, stolen car parts, and protection. Sánchez-Jankowski ate, slept, and fought with the gangs, but by mutual agreement he did not participate in drug dealing or other illegal activities. He was seriously injured twice during the study.

Contrary to stereotypes, Sánchez-Jankowski did not find that the motive for joining a gang was to escape a broken home (there were as many members from intact families as from broken homes) or to seek a substitute family (the same number of boys said they were close to their families as those who said they were not). 

Rather, the boys joined to gain access to money, sex, and drugs, to maintain anonymity in committing crimes, to get protection, and to help the community. 

This last reason may seem surprising, but in some neighborhoods, gangs protect residents from outsiders (Sonnevelt 2019). 

The boys also saw the gang as an alternative to the boring, dead-end jobs held by their parents. 

Neighborhood residents are ambivalent about gangs. Although they fear the violence, the gang members are the children of people who live in the neighborhood, and many of the adults once belonged to gangs. In addition, some gangs provide better protection than the police.

Particular gangs will come and go, but gangs are likely to remain part of the city. 

Why? 

As functionalists point out, gangs fulfill needs of poor youth who live on the margins of society. 

For Your Consideration 

→ What functions do gangs fulfill (what needs do they meet)?

White-Collar Crime 

As with the poor, the forms of crime of the more privileged classes also match their life situation. 

And how different their illegitimate opportunities are! 

Physicians don’t hold up cabbies, but they do cheat Medicare. 

Investment managers like Bernie Madoff don’t rob gas stations, but they do run fraudulent schemes that cheat people around the world. 

Mugging, pimping, and burgling are not part of this more privileged world, but evading income tax, bribing public officials, and embezzling are. 

Sociologist Edwin Sutherland (1949) coined the term white-collar crime to refer to crimes that people of respectable and high social status commit in the course of their occupations. When it comes to white-collar crime, we usually think of individuals, such as an embezzler. 

 The most predatory and profitable white-collar crime, though, is corporate crime, executives breaking the law in order to benefit their corporation. 

 One of the most deplorable was committed by Sears executives who increased company profits (and their own bonuses) by stealing $100 million from victims so poor they had filed for bankruptcy. 

Executives at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s did the same (McCormick 1999). 

Not one of these corporate thieves spent even one day in jail.

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You might find the names of other white-collar criminals familiar: Bank of America, which paid $76 billion for its lawbreaking; JP Morgan Chase, which paid $44 billion in fines; and Citigroup, which paid $19 billion.

 These are the top three of a long list of banks that defraud their customers (Greenstein 2018). Not one of these corporate crime chiefs have spent even a single night in jail. They just pay the fines from their bloated profits, considering it another cost of doing business.

Can you imagine what would have happened if these same executives had used guns to rob people on the street? 

I want to point out that some Ye Olde Universities also get into the criminal act. 

Duke University, for example, was caught with its hands still picking pockets when the feds caught up with it. 

Duke “knowingly included fake data in applications for federal grants” (Stempel 2019).

Duke brought in $200 million with its fake data and paid $112 million in fines. 

$88 million in profits isn’t too shabby. 

I’m sure other criminals wish they were as good as Duke at manipulating the criminal justice system.

White-collar crime is not limited to theft. 

Some white-collar crime results in death, but even then seldom is it taken seriously. 

In the 1930s, workers were hired to blast a tunnel through a mountain in West Virginia. 

The company knew the silica dust would kill the miners, and in just three months about six hundred died (Dunaway 2008). 

No owner or manager went to jail. 

In the 1980s, Firestone manufactured tires so faulty they would blow out, causing crashes that killed drivers and passengers. 

Firestone executives recalled their faulty tires in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, but they allowed them to remain on U.S. vehicles. 

When those tires blew out, about two hundred Americans died (White et al. 2001).

 Incredibly, not a single Firestone executive went to jail for their murders. 

In 2001, General Motors found out that a jarring of the ignition key could shut down the car’s engine and electrical system and disable the car’s air bags

. Did they fix the ignition? No. For a dozen years GM kept quiet. 

What did these decision makers care, as long as the profits—and their bonuses—kept rolling in? 

Their decision cost the lives of 174 people. 

Not one executive was even arrested. 

GM just paid a fine (Harwell 2015).

Consider this: Under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison. 

Yet to harass a wild burro on federal lands is punishable by a year in prison (Barstow and Bergman 2003).

 In dollar costs, “crime in the suites” apparently costs the public more than “crime in the streets.” 

The physical and emotional costs are another matter.

 For example, no one has figured out a way to compare the suffering of a rape victim with the pain of an elderly couple who lost their life savings to Madoff’s white-collar fraud.

It is street crime, though, that people fear, especially the violent stranger who can change your life forever. 

As the Social Map shows, the chances of such an encounter depend on where you live. 

You can see that entire regions are safer—or more dangerous—than others. 

In general, the northern states are safer, the southern states more dangerous. 

Figure 6.1 How Safe is Your State? Violent Crime in the United States

NOTE: Violent crimes are murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. 

The chance of becoming a victim of a violent crime is six and a half times higher in Alaska, the most dangerous state, than in Maine, the safest state.

 Washington, D.C., not a state, is in a class by itself. 

Its rate of 1,206 is ten times higher than Maine’s rate. 

SOURCE: Statistical Abstract of the United States. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2019. Published annually. Table 336

Gender and Crime 

Gender is not just something we do. 

Gender is a feature of society that surrounds us from birth. 

Gender pushes us, as male or female, into different corners in life, offering and nurturing some behaviors while it withdraws others. 

The opportunity to commit crime is one of the many consequences of how society sets up a gender order. 

The social changes that opened business and the professions to women also brought new opportunities for women to commit crime.

 From stolen property to illegal weapons, Table 6.2 shows how women have taken advantage of this new opportunity.

NOTE: As the U.S. government continues its profligacy, its gigantic deficit spending, research has slowed. For these totals, 2015 is the last reported year. The 2019 Statistical Abstract omits these data. SOURCE: Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 1994 and 2018:Table 357.

In Sum Functionalists stress that just as the social classes differ in opportunities for income and education, so they differ in opportunities for crime. 

As a result, street crime is greater among the lower social classes and white-collar crime greater among the higher social classes. The growing crime rates of women illustrate how changing gender roles have given women more access to what sociologists call “illegitimate opportunities.”