Title: Durkheim's Anomie Theory | Criminology Wiki | Fandom
Headings: Durkheim's Anomie Theory
Durkheim's Anomie Theory
Crime is Necessary

Content: Drawing on statistics, he drew a correlation between suicide rates and social variables. What he deemed egoistic or anomic suicide were those that described “weak social integration and failed moral regulation” as seen through the conclusion that protestants, intellectuals, and single people had higher suicide rates than religious folk, specifically Catholics and Jews. In other words, the individual and isolated people had a higher tendency for suicide than the collective and densely networked community because of their lack of cohesion and relationship with the collective conscience of society (Smith, 2008). More rare cases of altruistic and fatalistic suicide were common when an individual was too closely bound to the group. Ultimately, this study concluded that social cohesion, or group solidarity, and the values held to be true by the collective conscience could both prevent and generate deviant activity. Of the two types of solidarity, mechanical and organic, Durkheim concluded that organic solidarity, the more complex of the two, which emphasizes a community’s interdependence upon each other, is far stronger than mechanical solidarity in which there are common beliefs within society solely because the individuals are alike. This “solidarity based on the functional interdependence necessitated by and productive of the industrial revolution” would replace the dependence on the conscience collective (Krohn, 1980). Although there have been a small handful of direct examinations of Durkheim and his theories, there are a few studies that have analyzed more specific aspects of social disorganization and its effects. Theorists Gibbs and Martin, and later Miley and Micklin, focused on suicide and how the social integration enabled or inhibited such behavior. When Miley and Micklin developed the research, they theorized that “population and technological development will be directly related to the division of labor…and the division of labor will produce a decrease in status integration which, in turn, will increase suicide rates,” furthermore, supporting Durkheimian theory (Krohn, 1980).