CRIM 2004: Order, Disorder, Crime, and Deviance - Lecture Notes

Lecture 1: Order and Deviance

Thoughts on Order

  • Peace

  • Safety

  • Predictability

  • Structures and Systems of Social Cohesion

  • Norms

  • Can be Rigid.

Main Concepts

  • Order and Disorder

  • Chaos

  • Power

What is Order?

  • Something that is working.

  • Arrangements and Interrelations.

  • Political System.

Social Order

  • Arrangements to which people conform, rebel, or disobey.

  • Expectations between individuals.

  • Human Relations and relations between different parts of society.

  • Functionality for Safety and Predictability.

  • Rules and Norms like a skeleton of society.

Is Order Needed?

  • Order is an antithesis to chaos and disintegration.

  • Prevents Violence.

Components of Order

  • Predictability and Durability must be Reccurrent.

  • Absence of the imminent threat of the chaotic breakdown of social relations.

  • State of Tranquility.

  • Regulation is a skeleton of society of constraints and direction.

Legitimacy of Order

  • Not all Orders are Created Equal, some consider things orders for others it may be utter disorder.

  • Conforming to values and expectations rather than just superficial peace and predictability, but values can differ.

  • Regular durable recurrent predictable patterns of daily lives must be acceptable to most individuals. It is impossible to get universal acceptance.

  • Any power deployment is expensive.

  • Aim to meet expectations and to conform to shared values.

  • Justifiability of Power Relations and conforming to shared values.

Keys for legitimacy

  • Legality. Procedural and Distributive Fairness.

  • Effectiveness of Delivering goals by the Public Good.

Power Systems

  • Habit.

  • Coercion.

  • Self Interest.

  • Helpless Resignation.

Prison Order

  • Order means Dynamic; Always Under Threat, Negotiated, Regenerated.

  • Social Control through conformity to shared or imposed norms.

Influences of Society Members

  • Different Ways both Subtle and Direct.

  • Laws and Discourses.

  • Moral Panic.

  • Social Control practiced in all Societies formally or informally.

Conformity to Shared or imposed Norms

  • Because we believe it's the Right Thing.

  • Aligns with our own Values.

  • Threat of the Negative Consequences and Repercussions.

Deviance

  • Defined by Society is not a Natural Thing.

  • Behavior that violates social norms or expectations.

  • But context matters greatly. If There are no rules, there is no deviancy.

Actions and Beliefs

  • Traits that deviate from the Important Social Norms and expectations and entails the Strong Disapproval social isolation punishment.

  • Being Fear as a Threat, Immigrants, or Youth can be deemed as Threats.

Key Questions

  • There should be a rule norm or expectation from which we or something deviates.

  • Someone who contravenes this rule or expectation.

  • There Needs to be an Audience, and there needs to be some Negative Reaction from punishment by that audience.

What is Situational?

Social deviance is high consensus among a large portion of society whereas some circumstances and actions might be appropriate whereas in other events might be deemed inappropriate. People are situational to the circumstance.

Hegemony and Epistemic Injustice.

Settler colonial power holders can impose control of the social production of wealth through Military Conquest. The Most Important Area of Domination comes through controlling our own perceptions of ourselves and our relationships to the world. Black Man White Brain, Socialized to accept the way of thinking of imposing Powers to be ashamed of their ways of thinking doing or living and things like that. So to summarize we should not see this as Binary terms. We also need to consider Social Inequality Power Relationships to Conflicting Interests.