Navigating Deviance, Crime, and Punishment

DEVIANCE

Behaviour that fails to conform to societal norms and thereby poses a threat to social order

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Any enduring, predictable pattern of social relations among people in society

SOCIAL CONTROL

The institutions and other mechanisms that promote conformity

Deviant behaviour includes...

Unintentional or intentional violations of prevailing social expectations (norms)

  • Appearance deviance—the violation of appearance norms, including ways of dressing, tattooing and piercing, and obesity and anorexia
  • Mental illness—unintentional deviance where people who suffer from mental illness break rules or violate people’s expectations without meaning to
  • Sexual deviance—includes violations of the sexual double standard by women, of sexual fidelity by married people, and of assumptions that people are or should be heterosexual
  • Substance abuse—close connections exist between drug use, crime, and delinquency

Deviant behaviour may lead to...

Informal penalties like stigmatization, ridicule, or exclusion (negative sanctions)

Norms

Rules or expectations that serve as guidelines for behaviour in everyday life

Folkways

Norms based on popular habits and traditions

Mores

Norms that carry moral significance, and contribute to the general welfare of a group

Taboos

Powerful social beliefs about the wrongness or repulsiveness of certain behaviours

Norms, folkways, mores, and taboos are upheld by sanctions, social gestures that may be either positive (rewarding behaviour) or negative (punishing behaviour).

Moral Panic

Social concern, bordering on overreaction, about certain deviant behaviours that are fairly trivial in nature or frequency (Cohen)

  • May be stoked by a moral entrepreneur, someone who has an interest in arousing concern about the behaviour

NAMES WORTH KNOWING

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) proposed that crime is universal and unavoidable, regardless of the society or its laws.

Edwin Sutherland (1883–1950) was one of the first sociologists to apply a symbolic interactionist framework to the study of deviant subcultures, proposing that deviance and crime were learned through socialization.

Robert Merton (1910–2003) developed strain theory, stating that criminal behaviour results from the desire for material success combined with a lack of legitimate opportunities.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) explored the relationship between power and knowledge, in part by analyzing institutions such as prisons and schools as instruments of social control.

Howard Becker (b. 1928) authored Outsiders (1963), a book whose examination of how deviance is socially constructed laid the groundwork for the development of labelling theory.

Travis Hirschi (b. 1935) argued that children’s relationships with their parents are the most important factor in determining their involvement in delinquent activities.

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CRIME

Any deviant behaviour that breaks the criminal laws of a given society

IDEAS OF CRIME

  • Are socially constructed
  • Vary across cultures
  • Change over time

TYPES OF CRIME

"Crimes without Victims"

Consensual acts by adults that break legal rules but do not involve or harm a third party

Violent Crime

Results from an interaction between economic disadvantage (and related stress), cultural attitudes that encourage conflict, and an absence of neighbourhood or community cohesion

Reflects the absence of order and the failure of stable mechanisms for resolving disputes

Non-Violent Crime

Involves attempts to gain money or property

Organized crime

Calculated, planned ways of making a living that involve committing offences for material benefit

Business crime

Committed by corporations or by individual business people in their own interests, often at the expense of the larger corporate body

Street crime

Often carried out in public places by amateur criminals, including acts of shoplifting, vandalism, break and enter, and car theft

Victimization

The experience of being made a victim of a crime or unjust treatment

Routine activity theory

Individual lifestyle and social affiliations, including how and where people spend their time, largely influences risks of victimization

Lifestyle theory

People with high-risk lifestyles are more likely to be victimized than people with lowrisk lifestyles

Victim precipitation theory

People create their own risks of being victimized, through verbal provocation, body language, wearing certain types of clothes, etc.

Youth and Crime

Influential factors

Parental neglect or abuse, family unemployment, socioeconomic marginalization, and inadequate education

Criminal ital

Includes criminal knowledge and skill, but also describes social embeddedness in a community of young people for whom crime is a necessary way of life

Gangs

Young people who become involved in gangs and other deviant subcultures often become trapped in lifestyles that are hard to ese

PUNISHMENT

Different approaches to punishment reflect different objectives

Retribution

"Eye for an eye"

Deterrence

Discourage crime by imposing significant costs on those who offend

Rehabilitation

Reform criminals to help them become law-abiding citizens

Restorative Justice

Ensure that offenders take responsibility for harm caused to the victim and community

Inacitation

Imprison those believed to pose a threat to society

PRISONS

Prisonization

Theory that prisons degrade and debilitate inmates, making them unable to function effectively outside the prison environment (Clemmer)

Recidivism

The “revolving door” of crime: released offenders, having been immersed in the prison subculture, re-offend and return to prison

Overrepresentation

Some racial minorities are more likely to be imprisoned than others

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