A-Level Sociology: crime and deviance

Crime and deviance is the topic where revision notes look least like the exam. The notes are a list of names with a theory attached to each; the paper hands you a situation and asks what follows from it. So the questions here are cases, and the theory is the thing you have to supply.

Two sixteen-year-olds shoplift on the same afternoon. One is never caught and never does it again. The other is caught, charged, excluded from school, and within two years spends her time with friends who all have convictions. The acts were identical and the lives were not, which is the difference between an isolated act and a deviant career put as something that happened to somebody rather than as a pair of definitions.

A warehouse worker has been taught what success looks like and given work that will never pay for it, and starts selling stolen goods. Naming that adaptation — he kept the goal and changed the route — is worth more than reciting the list of five, and the wrong options here are the other four, described accurately enough that you have to think about which one the case actually is.

Two councillors argue about burglary on an estate. One talks about what people there have compared with everyone else and about policing they might trust; the other about what a burglar weighs before going in. Both take the burglary seriously as a problem for the people living with it, which is what makes them both realists; they part company over why it happens, which is what separates them.

A moral panic is set out as a sequence rather than a definition, and it ends on the step that matters: the arrests produced by the reaction are then offered as proof that the reaction was needed. The loop is deliberately left standing as one of the wrong answers.

Three questions are about what a figure cannot settle. Women's conviction rates are consistent with women offending less, with their offences being handled informally rather than prosecuted, and with courts treating them differently — and the same number fits all three. A stop-and-search disparity shows a difference in police interaction and not its cause. The gap between victim surveys and police records is the dark figure, not evidence that either source is worthless.

The rest cover Durkheim on what punishment does for those who are not punished, a school subculture as a second ladder of status built by inverting the first, the Marxist point about who decides which harms count as serious crime, labelling and master status, and situational prevention weighed against addressing causes, with displacement as the question the first has to answer.

Every person and every case described here is invented; real sociologists are named only for claims genuinely theirs, and no study, date or statistic is attributed to anyone. Nothing is reproduced from any exam board specification, past paper or mark scheme.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Separate an act from the reaction to it, and say where a deviant career comes from
• Recognise a strain adaptation from a case rather than from its name
• Tell left realism from right realism by the cause each identifies, not by the policy each proposes
• Name the circular step in a moral panic: the reaction producing the evidence for itself
• Say what conviction rates, stop-and-search disparities and victim surveys can and cannot establish on their own
• State the functionalist and Marxist accounts of crime as arguments belonging to someone, not as facts
• Weigh situational prevention against addressing causes, including displacement

Twelve invented cases and the sociology each one calls for: two shoplifters whose lives diverge because of what was done to them, a group of boys who build a ladder of status out of everything the school punishes, a warehouse worker who keeps the goal and changes the route, two councillors disagreeing about an estate, a panic whose arrest figures become its own proof, and three sets of numbers that settle less than they appear to. Fourteen flashcards carry the vocabulary — collective conscience, primary and secondary deviance, master status, relative deprivation, the dark figure, displacement.