The fact that the murders are Ku Klux Klan members at night and sheriffs, deputies, and assistant deputies in the daytime was a shocker. Many questions lie but the Mississippi Burning Trial gives an inside view of the mind of the deviant person, in this case, the minds of off-duty law enforcement officers. Three civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – were murdered by them and I will be explaining the conduct of these murderers using a theory of crime.
According to Durkheim's functionalism, deviance has a purpose and function in general society. To establish order, norms are important. Strain theory, largely informed by Durkheim and Parsons' functionalism, addressed the social and cultural norms. In Mississippi Burning, one can see that the murders of the youthful Freedom Riders had to occur in order to bring down the attention of the FBI, and that the horrors of the graft and racial hatred within the Southern law enforcement officers had to be flushed out.
The KKK marauders were deviant, at least according to northern white standards, but they were the norm according to fearful Southern thinking of the time. These were white men who were hanging on by a thread, quite afraid of true equality of the races for…show more content… His work evolved into that of Becker in the 1960's, an effort to understand the differences between deviance and criminality. In the minds of the KKKs, they were normal and justified in their behavior. The blacks had to be kept down and the whites who changed that, the upstart, superior-acting intellectuals from the North, had to be suppressed and kept out of the picture. By today's standards, this seems quite backward and provincial, but from the viewpoint of the distorted law enforcement officials of the Deep South, they were simply trying to contain an untenable