Crime - Durkheim What Does Emile Durkheim

Crime - Durkheim

What does Emile Durkheim mean when he says crime is "normal"? In Durkheim's book, Division of Labor, according to author Stephen P. Turner, Durkheim said crime is inevitable and it is normal. What was the justification for those statements? How did he come to make what today would seem an outrage?

In the larger context, Durkheim emphasized that law and morality are linked, and that what is considered "illegal" is generally believed to also be "immoral" in the opinion of the general public (Turner, 1993, pp. 71-72). He believed that if religion and morality had sufficient power and authority in society, if "socialization to society's values were perfect," and if existing religious and moral values were "perfectly known," all citizens would be behaving according to those values. Behaving properly would be what everyone did in that instance, and there would be "no challenge to the society's dominant values" -- hence, law would be pointless because no one would be out of line (Turner, 72).

However he was perceptive enough to realize that "…such a universal and absolute uniformity is utterly impossible" and hence, crime does exist and will continue to exist (Turner, 72). And moreover, though it will vary in degree from one society to the next, it is "impossible for any society to be free of crime" and since the nature of social life that people will "diverge to some extent from the collective type" it's also inevitable that "among these deviations" some will be played out in a law-breaking, criminal "character" (Turner, quoting Durkheim, 72).

So, not only is crime inevitable, Durkheim "shocked his contemporaries" and future generations of students and scholars when he asserted that "crime is normal… [and] it is a factor in public health, an integrative element in any healthy society" (Turner, 72, quoting Durkheim's remarks made in 1895). Durkheim insisted that crime is useful for a healthy society, but how can that statement be explained? First of all, crime is normal, he said, because it is inevitable; and expecting a crime-free world is absurd. But he went on to explain that if there was such a powerful government-promoted degree of social control to prevent crime that would "…constitute an intolerable repressive society, one that would be destructive of all individuality" (Turner, 73). If a society were "pathologically repressive," it could probably bring the crime rate way down, but that would not be healthy. That was his explanation of the indirect way in which crime is a healthy thing.

Furthermore, in the second major point, Durkheim believed that in certain cases where crime exists, "collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form," and sometimes crime aids in the determination of the particular form those sentiments will take (Parsons, et al., 1965). Socrates' crime paved the way for "a new morality and faith which the Athenians needed, since the traditions by which they had lived until then were no longer in harmony with the current conditions" in Ancient Greece at that time (Parsons, 1965).

Conclusion