AQA A-Level Sociology: Crime and Deviance
6 exam-style questions with full mark schemes and model answers. Write your own answer and the AI examiner marks it against the mark scheme.
Read Item A below and answer the question that follows.
Item A — written for this exercise
Sociologists have long disagreed about where to look for the causes of crime. One tradition directs attention to the structure of society itself. From this angle, crime is generated by the way society is organised: by the gap between the cultural goals people are taught to pursue and the unequal opportunities they have to reach them, by the position of groups within an unequal economic system, and by the deprivation and marginalisation experienced in particular neighbourhoods. On this view, to explain crime we must examine social forces that operate above the level of the individual, shaping who offends and why.
A different tradition is sceptical of beginning with social structure at all. It argues that no act is criminal or deviant in itself; an act becomes deviant only when others react to it and attach a label. A recent (invented) review of how a single inner-city area was policed found that two neighbourhoods with very similar levels of reported anti-social behaviour were treated quite differently: in one, officers logged incidents formally and pursued prosecutions, while in the other comparable behaviour was dealt with informally and rarely recorded. For these researchers, the lesson is that the official map of "where crime happens" partly reflects the reactions of agents of social control rather than the structure of society, and that much offending stays hidden in the dark figure of unrecorded crime.
Question: Applying material from Item A and your knowledge, evaluate the view that the causes of crime are best understood by examining the structure of society. [30 marks]
Read Item B below and answer the question that follows.
Item B — written for this exercise
The criminal justice system is supposed to treat everyone alike, yet sociologists point to evidence that some social groups are dealt with more severely than others at different stages of the process. A recent (invented) study of one police force area reported the following figures on the use of stop and search:
| Group | Stop and searches per 1,000 people | Share of searches leading to arrest (%) |
|---|---|---|
| White | 8 | 17 |
| Black | 31 | 11 |
| Asian | 14 | 14 |
The same study followed cases through the courts and found that, among those convicted of broadly similar offences with similar records, defendants from some minority groups were somewhat more likely to receive an immediate custodial sentence rather than a community penalty. The researchers suggested that decisions made by officers, prosecutors and magistrates, rather than differences in offending alone, helped to produce these contrasts.
Question: Applying material from Item B, analyse two ways in which the criminal justice system may treat some social groups more harshly than others. [10 marks]
Outline and explain two ways in which a person's social class position may affect their chances of committing or being convicted of crime. [10 marks]
Outline three functions that crime or deviance may perform for society, according to functionalists. [6 marks]
Outline two reasons why official crime statistics may not give an accurate picture of crime. [4 marks]
Outline two reasons why women may be less likely than men to commit crime. [4 marks]