Last Updated on September 11, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Functionalists argue that crime is normal, inevitable and — in the right quantity — useful to society. There are four positive functions of crime:
- Boundary maintenance
- Social integration
- Social regulation and adaptation
- Allowing for social change
The Functionalist perspective is usually the first theory taught in the crime and deviance module, and it is the theory every other perspective on the course is set against.
Durkheim: crime is normal and inevitable
Emile Durkheim argued that crime is found in every society that has ever existed, which means it cannot be an illness or a failure of socialisation. It is a normal feature of social life. He noted that crime rates were in fact higher in advanced industrial societies, not lower — the opposite of what a pathology model would predict.
His explanation is that not everyone can be equally committed to the collective sentiments, the shared moral beliefs of a society. People are exposed to different influences and circumstances, so it is impossible for them all to be alike, and some will inevitably break the rules.
The society of saints
Durkheim made the point with a thought experiment. Imagine a monastery where nobody steals, fights or lies — a society of perfect individuals. Crime as we understand it has vanished.
But the community will not simply stop disapproving of things. It will start disapproving of smaller ones. The general standard of behaviour would be so high that the slightest slip would be treated as a serious offence, and a person who was merely impolite or showed bad taste would attract strong disapproval.
The behaviour that gets punished changes; the fact of punishment does not.
Lawns, and how to go to jail for one
This sounds abstract until you look at American lawn ordinances.
Many US towns set a maximum legal grass height, typically eight inches. Let your lawn grow past it and the local council can fine you. Keep refusing and you can end up in court — and people have been fined thousands of dollars for letting their lawns grow too long, with a handful serving jail time.
These are prosperous, orderly, low-crime neighbourhoods. There is no burglary problem to police. So the standard of acceptable behaviour rises to meet the available disapproval, and the community finds itself criminalising the length of grass.
That is the society of saints, running live, in the suburbs of Ohio.
Society of Saints: in some towns in America you can be fined if you let your grass grow too long!
Durkheim’s conclusion is that a society without deviance is not possible, because deviance is defined in relation to whatever the current norms happen to be. Raise the standard and you create new deviants at the new margin.
Crime performs positive functions
Durkheim went further than saying crime is inevitable. He argued that a certain amount of it is functional — it does useful work for society. Too much, and social order breaks down into what Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness. Too little, and society becomes rigid and unable to change.
Boundary maintenance, or social regulation
You will see this function under both names. They describe the same thing: Durkheim’s own term is social regulation, and most textbooks and exam questions call it boundary maintenance. Use whichever you like, but know that they are one function, not two.
Crime produces a reaction, and the reaction is the point.
When an offence is publicly punished, the rest of society is reminded where the line sits. A court case reported in the news, a sentence handed down, a public apology extracted — each of these is a small ceremony in which the community restates what it will not tolerate. The courts and the media are in effect broadcasting the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
This is why the publicity of punishment matters as much as the punishment. A crime dealt with in secret does no boundary work at all.
Social integration
The reaction to a serious crime pulls people together.
When a community is confronted by an act it finds shocking, the shared outrage strengthens the bonds between its members. People who otherwise have little in common discover that they agree about something. Vigils, memorials, minute silences and public fundraising after a serious offence are all the visible form of the same process: collective condemnation producing collective feeling.
The effect is temporary but real, and it is a genuinely counter-intuitive claim — that the worst events in a community’s life can also be the ones that most strongly confirm it is a community.
Adaptation and warning
Crime also functions as a warning device. A sudden rise in a particular offence tells society that something is not working, and prompts adaptation.
Kingsley Davis extended this with the idea of a safety valve — the argument that some deviance releases pressure that would otherwise damage more important institutions. Albert Cohen added the warning-device version: rising truancy rates, for example, signal that something is wrong in the education system rather than simply that individual children are badly behaved.
This is the function students find easiest to evaluate, because the reasoning runs backwards. The theory identifies the function after the fact, which makes it hard to test.
Allowing for social change
For a society to change its values, someone has to break the existing ones first.
Criminals provide a constant test of the boundaries of permitted action. Where the law is clearly out of step with what most people actually think, law-breaking is what exposes the gap — and legal reform follows. Durkheim’s formulation is that all social change begins with some form of deviance: yesterday’s deviance becomes today’s norm.
The suffragettes are the clearest case. Between 1903 and 1914 members of the WSPU committed arson, broke windows, chained themselves to railings and were imprisoned and force-fed. They were criminals by the standards of the law as it stood. Within a decade of the campaign ending, the position they had been arrested for holding was the law of the land.
Too much crime is dysfunctional
Durkheim was clear that crime is only functional in moderate quantities. Too much and social order breaks down; too little and there is not enough capacity for positive social change.
The obvious problem is that he never specified how much crime a society needs, or which types. That vagueness is a serious weakness and it is dealt with in the criticisms below.
Durkheim’s view of punishment
Durkheim argued that the function of punishment is not to remove crime from society, because society needs crime. The point of punishment is to control the amount of it and to maintain the collective sentiments — in his own words, punishment serves to heal the wounds done to the collective sentiments.
A healthy society, on this account, requires both crime and punishment, in balance, and able to change.
Positive evaluations of the Functionalist perspective on crime
Durkheim’s central claim has survived. No society has ever been found without crime, and the search for one has been abandoned. That is a strong result for a nineteenth-century theory.
The insight that deviance is defined relative to current norms was decades ahead of its time and is the direct ancestor of labelling theory. Once you accept that the same act can be deviant in one context and not another, you are most of the way to the interactionist position.
Boundary maintenance holds up well against evidence. Public reaction to high-profile offences does follow the pattern Durkheim described, and the reaction is strongest where the offence is felt to threaten a shared value rather than simply to have harmed an individual.
The theory is genuinely macro-sociological. It explains why crime exists as a feature of societies rather than of individuals, which is a different and larger question than the psychological one.
Criticisms of the Functionalist view of crime
It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using the others, and functionalism has more standalone criticisms available than almost any other theory on this course.
Functional for whom? Durkheim never asks who benefits. Marxists argue that what looks like a shared boundary being maintained is usually the ruling class’s boundary being maintained, and that the crimes causing the most harm — corporate fraud, workplace negligence, environmental damage — attract almost none of the collective outrage Durkheim describes.
It ignores the victim. Left realists point out that telling the victim of a burglary that the offence performed a boundary-maintenance function is, at best, cold comfort. The theory operates at a level of abstraction where individual suffering disappears.
It treats crime as one thing. Durkheim theorises about crime in general and never distinguishes between types. Some crimes may be so harmful that they are always dysfunctional, whatever boundary work they do.
It cannot explain hidden crime. Boundary maintenance and social integration both require the crime to be known about. Domestic abuse, which affected around 7.8% of people aged 16 and over in the year to March 2025, performs no integrative function precisely because it stays private. The theory has nothing to say about the large volume of crime that is never reacted to at all.
It is teleological. The theory identifies a function and reasons backwards to explain why the thing exists. In reality, crime is caused by a dysfunctional system; in functionalist theory, crime becomes the necessary cause that makes the system functional. It also never specifies how much crime is the right amount, which makes the claim unfalsifiable.
Postmodernists argue that functionalism assumes universal norms reinforced by public punishment, when society is now so diverse that there is no such thing as “normal”.
Interactionists argue that whether a crime is functional cannot be settled objectively — it depends entirely on your relationship to it — and that functionalism treats crime statistics as a record of behaviour when they are better understood as a record of what the police and courts choose to process.
Contemporary evidence to evaluate Functionalism (2026 update)
Below I consider four pieces of current evidence and what each suggests about the functionalist account.
The crime drop is the hardest fact for this theory
According to the ONS’s Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026, released in July 2026, the traditional crimes have collapsed since the mid-1990s:
- Violence with or without injury: 989,000 incidents, 78% below the 1995 peak
- Theft: 2.6 million incidents, 77% below the 1995 peak
- Criminal damage: 646,000 incidents, 81% below the 1995 peak
- Homicide: 499 offences, the lowest since current recording began in 2003
- Knife-enabled and firearms offences: both down 8% on the previous year
Durkheim’s theory predicts that crime is normal and inevitable, and it is — nobody claims crime has disappeared. But the theory offers no account of why the volume should fall by three quarters in thirty years. A theory that explains why crime exists cannot explain why there is so much less of it than there used to be.
HOWEVER, there is a functionalist reply and it is worth knowing. If crime were falling toward zero the theory would be in serious trouble. It isn’t. What has happened is that the definition of what counts has shifted — which is exactly what the society of saints predicts, and exactly what the lawn ordinances illustrate.
Fraud is the crime that has taken its place
The same release shows fraud at 4.5 million incidents, up around 32% since 2017, and now close to half of all crime the survey measures. Meanwhile computer misuse has fallen by roughly 55% over the same period.
Functionalists would read the rise in fraud as evidence that a new set of opportunities has produced a new pattern of deviance, and that society is now adapting to it — the regulation function working in real time. Critics would read it as evidence that the theory can accommodate any pattern of crime after the event, which is precisely its problem.
Anti-social behaviour and the moving boundary
The 2026 survey found 40.9% of people had experienced or witnessed anti-social behaviour, up from 35.5% the previous year, though the ONS notes that some of the rise reflects a change in how the question was asked from April 2025. Reported harassment rose from 8.3% to 10.0%.
This is a society raising its standard and finding new deviants at the new margin. Behaviour that would once have passed as unremarkable rudeness is now recorded, counted and in some cases criminalised.
Nitrous oxide: boundary maintenance without a change in behaviour
Nitrous oxide became a Class C drug on 8 November 2023. What makes the case interesting is that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs — the government’s own statutory expert body — reviewed the harms in March 2023 and recommended against reclassification. The government proceeded anyway, citing the drug’s visibility among young people.
Nothing about the substance changed. Nothing about the behaviour changed. The boundary moved, and a large number of people became criminals overnight. Reported use among 16–24 year olds then fell from 3.3% to 1.3%.
A functionalist would call this boundary maintenance working exactly as described. An interactionist would call it moral entrepreneurship with the paperwork attached. Both readings fit, which is a useful thing for a student to be able to say.
Applying the Functionalist perspective: exam essay example (30 marks)
An A-level sociology essay written for the AQA’s 7192 (3) specification, exam paper 3, using the PEAC system (Point – Explain – Analyse – Criticise).
Question: Evaluate the contribution of consensus theory to our understanding of crime and deviance (30 marks)
Introduction
Consensus theories of crime — principally Durkheim’s functionalism, Merton’s strain theory and Hirschi’s social bond theory — begin from the assumption that societies rest on shared values, and analyse crime as a phenomenon produced by, and reacting back on, that shared framework. Below I assess the contribution of each in turn, arguing that consensus theory made two lasting contributions to criminology but is limited by its silence on power, and cannot account for the scale of the fall in crime over the last thirty years.
Point 1: Durkheim established that crime is normal
POINT: Durkheim’s foundational contribution was to establish that crime is a normal feature of all societies rather than a pathology.
EXPLAIN: Using the society of saints, Durkheim showed that deviance is defined relative to prevailing norms, so eliminating one category of offence simply produces disapproval of a smaller one. He identified positive functions crime performs — boundary maintenance, social integration, adaptation and social change.
ANALYSE: This reframed the central question of criminology. Before Durkheim the question was what is wrong with criminals; after him it was also what crime does for societies. The relativity of deviance is the direct ancestor of labelling theory, which means interactionism is in part a development of functionalism rather than only an alternative to it. American lawn ordinances, where prosperous low-crime towns end up fining people over grass height, show the mechanism operating in reality rather than only in thought experiment.
CRITICISE: Durkheim never asks functional for whom. Marxists argue the boundaries being maintained belong to the powerful, and that the most harmful acts — corporate and state crime — generate almost no collective reaction. The theory is teleological and does not specify how much crime is functional, which makes it difficult to falsify.
Point 2: Merton connected crime to social structure
POINT: Merton’s strain theory located the cause of crime in the gap between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means available to reach them.
EXPLAIN: Where a society tells everyone to pursue material success but distributes opportunity unequally, those denied legitimate means experience strain and adapt to it. Four of Merton’s five adaptations — innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion — are deviant; only conformity is not.
ANALYSE: This was the first systematic account of why crime is class-patterned that did not rely on the moral failings of individuals. It also explains the current fraud figures unusually well: fraud is textbook innovation, an illegitimate means to a legitimate goal.
CRITICISE: Merton assumes a value consensus around material success that may never have existed and certainly does not now. He cannot explain non-utilitarian crime — vandalism and joyriding achieve no goal — which is the gap subcultural theory was built to fill. And because he works from official statistics he inherits their class bias, so elite crime is invisible to him.
Point 3: Hirschi inverted the question
POINT: Hirschi argued the interesting question is not why people offend but why most people do not.
EXPLAIN: His answer is that four elements of the social bond — attachment, commitment, involvement and belief — hold individuals to conventional society, and offending becomes likely as those bonds weaken.
ANALYSE: This is the consensus theory with the strongest empirical support and the most direct policy application. Programmes aimed at school engagement and youth employment are social bond theory in practice.
CRITICISE: Social bond theory explains minor delinquency far better than serious or organised crime, and it has nothing to say about elite offenders, who are typically the most strongly bonded people in society — employed, married, respectable and embedded in institutions. Being attached to conventional society did not prevent the frauds that now make up half the crime survey.
Conclusion
Consensus theory’s contribution is real and is mostly Durkheim’s: the recognition that crime is universal, that deviance is defined relative to norms, and that society’s reaction to crime is itself a sociological object. That insight is now assumed by every other perspective on this specification, and the suffragettes remain the clearest demonstration of its most striking claim — that yesterday’s deviance becomes today’s norm.
Its limitation is that it cannot see power. It has no adequate account of who defines the boundaries, whose harms go unpunished, or why the crimes causing the greatest financial damage generate the least reaction. On the evidence of the last thirty years it also faces a problem it was never designed for: traditional crime has fallen by roughly three quarters since 1995, and consensus theory offers no mechanism that would predict or explain a fall of that size. It remains the essential starting point for the study of crime, and an insufficient finishing point.
Short version of this essay
- (P1) Durkheim — crime is normal and functional. Society of saints · American lawn ordinances · boundary maintenance · integration · adaptation · change · suffragettes. Functional for whom? Teleological. Ignores victims and hidden crime.
- (P2) Merton — strain between goals and means. Five adaptations, four deviant. Fraud as innovation. Assumes consensus. Can’t explain non-utilitarian crime. Inherits statistical bias.
- (P3) Hirschi — why don’t we offend? Four elements of the social bond. Strong evidence base, clear policy use. Weak on serious and elite crime.
- Evaluate using: Marxism (whose boundaries?), interactionism (statistics are socially constructed), left realism (the victim), feminism (domestic and sexual violence are largely hidden), postmodernism (no universal norms left).
- Conclusion: essential starting point, insufficient finishing point. The crime drop is the fact it cannot explain.
Functionalism and Crime: FAQs
What was Durkheim’s theory about crime?
Durkheim argued that crime was inevitable because societies could never fully constrain individual freedom. This freedom meant some individuals were always going to be criminal. Durkheim argued crime performed three positive functions: it allowed social change to occur, and it resulted in social regulation and social integration.
What is the Functionalist theory of crime?
There are three main Functionalists who theorise about Crime. Durkheim (1890s) argued that crime was inevitable and performed three positive functions (social integration, regulation and chance). Merton (writing in the 1940s) developed the theory of Anomie: crime happens when there is a strain between society’s goals and the ability of people to achieve those goals legitimately. Hirshi (1960s) argued that crime increases when individuals are less attached to society.
What does Durkheim mean by the “positive functions of crime”?
Crime can reaffirm social boundaries, unite communities against wrongdoing, and encourage adaptation by highlighting laws or norms that need reform.
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ignposting / Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, examined on Paper 3.
Durkheim’s Functionalist theory is taught as part of consensus theory. The other two consensus theories each have their own post: Merton’s Strain Theory of Crime and Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory.
After functionalism students usually study Subcultural Theories of Crime, which accept Merton’s account of strain but argue that the response to it is collective rather than individual.
The main criticism of this perspective comes from The Marxist Theory of Crime, which argues that the boundaries functionalism describes are drawn by and for the powerful.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources used to write this post
Durkheim, E. (1895) The Rules of Sociological Method
Liebling, Maruna and McAra (2023) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Haralambos and Holborn, Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 8th edition
ONS, Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026
House of Commons Library (2023), Nitrous oxide: no laughing matter
Why is there so little about Murton?