Week 3 : Deviance Crime and Law

Deviance

Any minor or serious act that breaks an accepted social standard.

1. Severity of public response (disapproval to severe jail time)

2. Perceived harmfulness (harm created)

3. Degree of public agreement

How does deviance vary? [3]

Minor deviances

Deviances that are not criminal and generally not harmful to society

Lesser crimes

Criminal acts but are not serious violations of social norms

Consensus crime

Crimes that are illegal and thought of as extremely harmful to society. Produces high levels of public agreement regarding their seriousness, comes with serious punishments

White-collar crimes

Crimes that have high social costs and have a negative impact on society. Often occurs in a work setting and is motivated by greed/monetary gain. Involves intentional acts of violence and are small or large in scale, depending on the amount of money stolen

Berger and Luckmann

Who developed social construction?

Social construction

Based on symbolic interactionist theory. Argue that humans internalize definitions of he world and interact with each other based on these definitions. We learn about the world, then, through the process of socialization and interaction with socialization agents.

1. People categorze experiences and act on these categoies

2. they simultaneously forget how these categories ultimately have social origins and are not natural and permanent

Two step process of social construction:

Means the norms we define as importnt are always changing and look different in different societies and cultures. What we label as deviant changes when norms and vlaues change

What does it mean to say our ideas about deviance are socially constructed?

They affirm cultural values and norms

Durkeim believed deviance served a function for human societies how?

Because it is important and functional for human societies

Why did Durkheim believe that crime and deviance will never go away in society?

1. It affirms cultural values and norms.
2. Society’s response to deviance and crime teach individuals what is
right and wrong.
3. Responding to deviance and crime unites societies.
4. Deviance and crime spur social change.

According to Durkheim, crime serves four main functions in human societies:

Social explanations come from theories that seek to
understand criminal and deviant behaviour as a product of the
influence of an individual’s environment

Social explanations of deviance and crime come from where?

Strain theory

When an individual’s goals and opportunities for success do not
match, they turn to deviant or criminal behaviour.

Subcultural theory

Focuses on the role of culture in explaining criminal and deviant behaviour in human societies

Learning theory

Different environments provide opportunities to learn how to engage in deviance and crime. If people interact with and are exposed to criminals, they learn to engage in criminal behaviour

Edwin Sutherland

Who developed learning theory?

Control Theory

Explains how weak social control in society may lead individuals to commit criminal or deviant acts. Individuals might have weak beliefs in traditional values or lack employment or educational activities

1. distant relationship with family, teachers, or peer ground

2. might not have strong institutional involvement if not active in organizations

Weak social control might be the result of multiple factors, including: [2]

Travis Hirschi

Who developed control theory

Labelling Theory

Explains criminal and deviant behaviour as a process by which labelling someone as a criminal produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people are viewed this way they become stigmatized and turn to crime as a result

Howard Becker

Who developed the labelling theory?

1. primary diviance

2. secondary deviance

Labelling theorists differentiate between two types of deviant acts

Primary deviance

Deviant act, refers to early, random acts of deviance that are common

Secondary deviance

More serious deviant acts that may cause an individual to organize their life and identity around being a deviant

The Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act recognizes the importance of
labelling. Youth are not published in order to prevent a primary act from becoming a secondary one. Prevents youth from being labelled a deviant and getting irrevocably stigmatized as a criminal

Why is it illegal in canada to publish the identity of a young offender?

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment

Tested the length to which individuals accepted roles and followed others

How blindly individuals would follow orders from an authority figure

Milgram investigated criminal and deviant behaviour by testing what?

The Uniforme Crime Reporting Survey

Keeps track of all criminal incidents reported to and substantiated by Canadian police services

Crime Severity index

Measures the severity of crime committed in Canada as it assigns a different weight depending on the severity of the sentences handed down by courts

Young people are more likely to commit over older

People over 60 are less likely to commit

Crime related to age:

25% but it is on the rise in the past 20 years

What percentage of crimes are committed by women in Canada?

Not because of their ancestry, but because of their lower socio-economic status

Why are indigenous and african-canadian individuals incarcerated in numbers that are higher than canadian population numbers?

Punishment

Penalty inflicted on someone for committing a transgression of a criminal nature. Usually entails a denial of certain abilities, priviledges, rights

Retribution

Punishment should be comparable to the suffering caused by the crime

Deterrence

The process of convincing individuals to not commit crimes again or commit them in the first place

Rehabillitation

Trying to heal or reform a criminal as opposed to solely punishing them

Parole

Early release of a prisoner for things such as good behaviour

Probation

Releasing a prisoner into the community under certain conditions

1. retribution

2. Deterrence

3. rehabillitation

4. Parole

5. Probation

6. boundary setting

7. restoration

functions of punishment in human societies [5]