people are drawn to the cities and to employment by large corporations. In such a setting, the neighborhood no longer forms a stable unit.
As the writer sees the observation above, the highest rates of crime are generally found in slum neighborhoods near the center of large cities, decreasing as people move outward toward the
suburbs. This fact remains fairly constant despite changes over the years in ethnic composition. Why does this pattern persist? From the functionalist perspective, the underlying cause of crime in
poor urban communities is social disorganization. For most significantly, functionalist cite high rates of substandard housing, mental
disorders, population changes, disease, and poverty as evidence of social disorganization- conditions of human wretchedness that seem to go hand in hand with crime Shaw and
McKay, 1942; 1929.
33
3. The Conflict Approach
Some conflict theorists, in direct contrast to Durkheim, believe that when crime rates go up, it is a sign that the powerful are becoming more repressive. They argue that the behavior that is
labeled as criminal is nothing more than conducts those conflicts with the values or interests of the most powerful, dominant groups in society.
34
As evidence of this, they point out that most middle-and upper-class crimes are generally not included in crime reports. Crime rates, rather than measuring the amount of criminality in a
society, measure the degree of conflict between social groups. Violations of the law are not due to normlessmess, as Merton suggests, but to an adherence to an alternate set of norms. Thus, although
33Ibid, p. 393 34Ibid
18
conflict theorists tend to discount anomie as a cause of crime, we can see that there are marked similarities between this perspective and the labeling approach.
35
From the conflict perspective and other resource relate to this approach such Quinneys concept on Criminology, the writer consider crime is seen as the result of the unequal distribution of
wealth and power in a capitalist society. Competing groups try to impose their will on each other, and the social order is established not through consensus but through coercion. The rulers and the
ruled form a bureaucratic hierarchy, with those on top controlling the state and legitimizing their own values at the expense of those on the bottom. It is the powerful who define what is right and
what is wrong, and they impose the stigma of criminality on the less powerful. In this paper, the writer uses “The Conflict Approach” to analyze the phenomenon of crime
inside of this film. Conflict approach sees the phenomenon of crime as the result of the unequal distribution of wealth and power in a capitalist society. It says that usually the dominant people has
the more power in capitalist society.
35Ibid 19
CHAPTER III RESEARCH FINDINGS
In this chapter, the writer describes two main discussions, they are; data description and data analysis.
A. Data Description
In this description of data, the writer discusses the phenomenon of crime in American Gangster movie. Here the writer tries to tabulate the collected data through the following table:
b. The types of crime
c. The indicators of each type
d. The corpus as the evidence of analysis
In this section, the writer limits the discussion about the phenomenon of crime that were performed in American Gangster the movie based on Montero and McDowell’s approach,
they are Juvenile delinquency, victimless crime, white-collar crime, organized crime and violent crime. But in this study, the writer only focuses on the kinds of crime that most often appeared in
this movie; victimless crime, white-collar crime, organized crime and violent crime. The tabulated data are described as follows:
20
