Crime thrives where community identity is weak | Albert Bell

Dr Albert Bell, Youth and Community Studies

Despite being penned more than a century ago, Emile Durkheim’s ideas on crime and deviance still hold relevance today.

For this eminent French sociologist, deviance and crime – the latter existing at the extreme end of the deviancy continuum – are universal: they exist in all societies, irrespective of their size and form.

Deviance and crime are also relative to, and contingent upon social and historical context. So what is considered as deviant or criminal varies across societies and time, even within the same society.

Moreover, Durkheim also asserts that crime and deviant behaviour can somehow prove functional to society – for example, they help re-evaluate, clarify, and re-affirm moral boundaries.

However, when a society’s institutional and regulatory framework fails to provide and maintain the requisite moral compass to keep its members in check, crime and deviance can escalate beyond control and may contribute to social collapse. In other words, in such circumstances, societies fall prey to normlessness, or what Durkheim terms Anomie. Here, crime and deviance become dysfunctional in nature.

Anomie, for Durkheim, is more common in industrialised, complex modern societies as due to their fragmented and segmented nature, heterogeneous social structures find the task of keeping a watertight collective conscience increasingly challenging.

Perhaps, more controversially, for Durkheim, crime and deviance are normal and are to be expected wherever human beings conglomerate. This is because humankind’s nature is governed by what he terms the homo duplex, where the impulse to

deviate is central.

It is the person’s social being – built through interaction with significant others and where ideas on normative and non-normative behaviour are internalised – that controls the primal impulse to deviate.

So for many Durkheimian criminologists, the fundamental question to be asked is not why individuals deviate and commit criminal acts. The key issue to address is what helps keep us in line and functioning along this normative framework.

Apart from the importance of effective socialisation and moral development, various sociologists lay emphasis on the importance of strong communities for crime prevention.

For example, the seminal post-war American sociologist Travis Hirschi focuses on the centrality of effective social bonds to combat the rise of anonymous communities.

These act as fertile ground for societal de-regulation and the unshackling of the deviant impulse. Without the requisite community identity, attachment, participation and involvement, communities risk atomisation and the erosion of the informal social sanctioning power that more cemented communities possess.

The ramifications for understanding why crime tends to proliferate among weakened communities and neighbourhoods are enormous. Moreover, social control theory provides a strong case for the community-oriented scaffolding that national crime prevention strategies should ensure. What are we doing, as a nation, to ensure that our communities do not spiral into a fragmented aggregate of people, versus spaces where there is meaningful interaction that cultivates a sense of belonging and fulfilment, and thus act as strong buffers against the deviant or criminal impulse?

Quite often, this important debate is lost amidst the cacophony – often short-lived – following the perpetration of serious criminal offences.

Safer and stronger communities will not rid and eradicate crime. But they will go a long way to ensure community and societal integration.

And the latter, along with effective rule of law, community policing, a strong safety net that identifies those most at risk of criminal careers and victimisation, are tantamount to a holistic and effective national crime prevention strategy.