Strain theory

According to Strain Theory, the gap between goals and the means of achieving them becomes so wide that individuals are compelled to use illegal means to attain those goals. In Merton’s view, human beings are essentially good by nature, but social conditions, the structure of society, and upbringing create such social pressure that, in order to reduce it, people adopt illegal means and become criminals. Resources in society are distributed unequally, and the inevitable result is a connection between lower-resource social classes and crime. Therefore, crime can be controlled through an equal and fair distribution of resources and opportunities for advancement. According to Merton, excessive emphasis on goals, combined with the restriction of means to a particular class, produces social pressure and a breakdown of norms (anomie).

Merton’s theory of social strain and pressure has also been widely criticized. The major points of criticism are as follows:

• This theory cannot be tested in a practical manner.
• It is too general, vague, and ambiguous.
• It does not explain the criminal behavior of those who are born and raised in affluent classes. In this regard, the concept of white-collar crime should be kept in mind.
• This theory does not explain significant individual differences in behavior.
• It does not explain why the majority of the working class obeys the law rather than breaking it.

Later criminologists took these very objections as the starting point for revising and extending Merton’s original idea, rather than abandoning it. Albert Cohen, writing in 1955, narrowed the focus to working-class boys placed in schools run on middle-class standards of behavior and achievement. When these boys could not meet those standards, the result was not simply frustrated ambition but what Cohen called status frustration – a sharper, more personal humiliation that pushed them toward each other and toward delinquent subcultures built on values that inverted respectable society’s own: vandalism, theft, and defiance prized precisely because they were non-utilitarian and openly rejected middle-class norms. This gave Merton’s rather abstract “breakdown of norms” a concrete social mechanism, and it answered part of the vagueness criticism by describing exactly how blocked goals turn into a shared, group-level identity rather than isolated frustration.

Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin pushed the revision further in 1960 with differential opportunity theory, arguing that blocked legitimate opportunity is only half the picture – access to illegitimate opportunity varies just as unevenly across neighborhoods, and it is this second, usually ignored variable that decides what kind of criminal response actually emerges. Where organized illegitimate networks were available, the result tended to be criminal gangs built around theft and racketeering; where neither legitimate nor illegitimate opportunity was well organized, the result was more often conflict gangs oriented around violence and status; and where young people failed at both legitimate and illegitimate routes, Cloward and Ohlin pointed to retreatist patterns built around drug use rather than acquisitive or violent crime at all. This typology directly answered the criticism that strain theory could not explain individual and group differences in behavior, since it showed that identical strain could produce very different outcomes depending on what was locally available.

The most influential revision came from Robert Agnew, whose General Strain Theory in 1992 argued that Merton, Cohen, and Cloward and Ohlin had all defined strain too narrowly by treating it as nothing more than the blocking of monetary or status goals. Agnew broadened the concept to include the presentation of negative or painful stimuli – such as abuse, harassment, or chronic conflict at home or school – and the actual or threatened loss of positive stimuli, such as the death of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, alongside the original failure to achieve valued goals. Just as importantly, Agnew placed the emphasis on the negative emotions strain produces, particularly anger, and on the fact that individuals cope with those emotions very differently: some turn to crime, but many others manage the same pressure through legal coping mechanisms, support networks, or simple resignation. That single move answered two of the oldest objections to strain theory at once – why people under very similar strain behave so differently from one another, and why most people who experience real hardship never break the law at all.

A further limitation persisted even after Agnew’s revision: strain theory in every version so far had been built largely around economic motivation, which explained property crime reasonably well but left violent crime much less accounted for, and the whole framework had been developed inside the specific context of American culture and its particular emphasis on the American Dream, making it difficult to explain why nations with broadly similar structural inequality produce very different crime rates. Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld addressed both gaps with institutional anomie theory, arguing that the deeper problem is not simply that American culture sets goals unevenly reachable, but that the economy itself has grown so dominant relative to other social institutions – family, education, religion, the political system – that those institutions can no longer discipline or restrain economic behavior the way they once did. Wherever the economy overpowers and reshapes non-economic institutions in this way, Messner and Rosenfeld argued, an unusually criminogenic form of anomie results, and cross-national variation in crime rates can be read as variation in exactly this institutional balance of power rather than in the strength of any one country’s cultural ideology alone. That reframing let strain theory step outside the single American case it had originally been built around, without abandoning Merton’s basic insight that legitimate goals promoted more strongly than legitimate means will always generate pressure toward crime somewhere in the system.