Chapter 7. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Psychopathy and sociopathy - both refer to personality disorders that involve anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions

Psychopathy - often used to emphasize that the source of the disorder is internal, based on psychological, biological, or genetic factors

Sociopathy - used to emphasize predominant social factors - familial sources of its development and the inability to be social or abide by societal rules

Contemporary approaches to psychopathy and sociopathy - focused on biological and genetic causes

Cesare Lombroso - Italian professor of legal psychiatry - isolated specific physiological characteristics of “degeneracy” that could distinguish “born criminals” from normal individuals

James Fallon

• His research involved analyzing brain scans of serial killers

• found that areas of the frontal and temporal lobes associated with empathy, morality - self-control are “shut off” in serial killers

• Claims these are genetic markers to suggest that psychopathy or sociopathy was passed down genetically

• While studying Alzheimer’s - discovered a brain scan from a control subject that indicated the symptoms of psychopathy - same as seen in brain scans of serial killers

• He was related to a serial killer - acknowledged environment played a significant role in the expression of genetic tendencies

Deviance - a violation of established contextual, cultural, or social norms, whether folkways, mores, or codified law

Folkways - norms based on everyday cultural customs concerning practical matters

Mores - more serious moral injunctions or taboos that are broadly recognized in a society

Laws - norms that are specified in explicit codes and enforced by government bodies

Consensus crimes - most serious acts - about which there is near-unanimous public agreement

Conflict crimes - may be illegal but about which there is considerable public disagreement concerning their seriousness

Social deviations - not illegal in themselves but are widely regarded as serious or harmful

Social diversions - violate norms in a provocative way but are generally regarded as distasteful, or for some cool, but harmless

Whether an act is deviant - depends on society’s definition of that act

Howard Becker - defined moral entrepreneurs as individuals or groups who publicize and problematize “wrongdoing” - have power to create and enforce rules to penalize wrongdoing

A moral panic occurs when media-fuelled public fear and overreaction lead authorities to label and repress deviants

“Looping effect” - once a category of deviance has been established and applied to a person they identify in the category and behave accordingly

Interactionist labelling theory - individuals become criminalized through contact with the criminal justice system

Social control - defined broadly as an organized action intended to change people’s behaviour

Social order - arrangement of practices and behaviours on which society’s members base their daily lives

Sanctions - Sanctions can be positive as well as negative - play a role in social control

Positive sanctions - are rewards given for conforming to norms

Negative sanctions - are punishments for violating norms

Informal sanctions - emerge in face-to-face social interactions

Formal sanctions - are ways to officially recognize and enforce norm violations

Donald Black - identified four key styles of social control

• Penal social control - prohibiting certain social behaviours and responding to violations with punishment

• Compensatory social control - obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a harm committed

• Therapeutic social control - involves the use of therapy to return individuals to a normal state

• Conciliatory social control - aims to reconcile the parties of a dispute and mutually restore harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged

Government - refers to the strategies by which one seeks to direct or guide the conduct of another or others

19th century - invention of modern institutions like the prison, public school, modern army, asylum, hospital, and factory - means for extending government and social control etc

Foucault describes these modern forms of government - disciplinary social control because they each rely on the detailed continuous training, control, and observation of individuals to improve their capabilities

Surveillance - refers to the various means used to make the lives and activities of individuals visible to authorities

Jeremy Bentham

• Published a book on the ideal prison - the panopticon or “seeing machine”

• Prisoners’ cells would be arranged in a circle around a central observation tower where they could be both separated from each other and continually exposed to the view of prison guards

Normalization - refers to the way in which norms are first established and then used to assess, differentiate, and rank individuals according to their abilities

Foucault describes disciplinary social control - key mechanism in creating a normalizing society

Society - controlled through normalization and disciplinary procedures

Social control - adopted a model of risk management in a variety of areas of problematic behaviour

Risk management - refers to interventions designed to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events occurring based on an assessment of probabilities of risk

New penology strategies of social control - concerned with techniques to identify, classify, and manage groupings of offenders sorted by the degree of dangerousness they represent to the general public

Situational crime control redesigns spaces where crimes or deviance could occur to minimize the risk of crimes occurring there

Three functionalist perspectives on deviance in society - Social disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory

Émile Durkheim - believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society

Social disorganization theory - crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control - opposite of Durkheim’s thesis

Zones of transition - between established working class neighbourhoods and the manufacturing district

Control theory - According to Hirschi, social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds

Hirschi identified four types of social bonds that connect people to society

• Attachment - measures our connections to others

• Commitment - refers to the investments we make in conforming to conventional behaviour

• Involvement - in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance

• Belief - an agreement on common values in society

Robert Merton - agreed that deviance is a normal behaviour in a functioning society - expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory

Strain Theory - access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates

Merton defined five ways that people adapt to this gap between having a socially accepted goal but no socially accepted way to pursue it

• Conformity - The majority of people in society choose to conform and not to deviate

• Innovation - Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means

• Ritualism - People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways

• Retreatism - Others retreat from the role strain and reject both society’s goals and accepted means

• Rebellion - A handful of people rebel, replacing a society’s goals and means with their own

Critical sociology - Social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance

Many crimes - understood as crimes of accommodation or ways in which individuals cope with conditions of oppression - due to inequality

Personal crimes - murder, assault, and sexual assault - products of the stresses and strains of living under stressful conditions of scarcity and deprivation

Defensive crimes - economic sabotage, illegal strikes, civil disobedience, and ecoterrorism - direct challenges to social injustice

C. Wright Mills - named the power elite - a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources

Underprivileged and serious street crimes like armed robbery or assault - not the majority or most serious crimes

White-collar or corporate crime - refers to crimes committed by corporate employees or owners in the pursuit of profit or other organization goals

Feminist Contributions

• Women who are regarded as criminally deviant are often seen as being doubly deviant

• Feminist analysis - focuses on the way gender inequality influences the opportunities to commit crime and the definition, detection, and prosecution of crime

• 1970s - women worked to change the criminal justice system - establish rape crisis centres, battered women’s shelters, bringing attention to domestic violence

Feminists challenged the twin myths of rape - often the subtext of criminal justice proceedings presided over largely by men

• First myth - women are untrustworthy and tend to lie about assault out of malice toward me - as a way of getting back at them for personal grievances

• Second myth - women will say no to sexual relations when they really mean yes

Symbolic interactionism - theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviours as deviant or conventional

Edwin Sutherland

• Sought to understand how deviant behaviour developed among people

• He found that individuals learn deviant behaviour from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance - deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes

Labelling theory - labelling a deviant behaviour to another person by members of society

Edwin Lemert - expanded on the concepts of labelling theory - two types of deviance - primary and secondary

Primary deviance - a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others

Secondary deviance - occurs when a person’s self-concept and behaviour change after their actions are labelled as deviant by members of society - can give a master status

Master status - a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual

The sociological study of crime, deviance, and social control - important with respect to public policy debates

Government policy - represented a shift toward a punitive approach to crime control and away from preventive strategies such as drug rehabilitation, prison diversion, and social reintegration programs

Deviance - violation of social norms - not always punishable and not necessarily bad

Crime - a behaviour that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanction

Violent crimes - based on the use of force or the threat of force - Ex. rape, murder, and armed robbery

Nonviolent crimes - destruction or theft of property, but do not use force or the threat of force - also called “property crimes”

Victimless crime - perpetrator is not explicitly harming another person - debated type of crime

A self-report study - collection of data acquired using voluntary response methods - able to collect crime stats based on this

The corrections system - or the prison system, is tasked with supervising individuals who have been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for a criminal offence

Hartnagel summarised the literature - why Aboriginal people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system

• Aboriginal people are disproportionately poor and poverty is associated with higher arrest and incarceration rates.

• Aboriginal lawbreakers tend to commit more detectable street crimes than the less detectable white collar crimes

• Criminal justice system disproportionately profiles and discriminates against Aboriginal people

• The legacy of colonization has disrupted and weakened traditional sources of social control in Aboriginal communities

Aboriginal sentencing circles - involve victims, Aboriginal community, Aboriginal elders - determine the best way to find healing for the harm done to victims and communities together

Racial profiling - occurs when police single out a particular racial group for extra policing, including a disproportionate use of stop-and-search practices - affects everyone who isn’t white

Serving prison time - does not reduce the propensity to re-offend after the sentence has been completed - may make it more likely to re-offend

Penal-welfare complex - creation of inter-generational criminalized populations excluded from participating in society or holding regular jobs on a semi-permanent basis

Community-based sentencing - offenders serve a conditional sentence in the community, usually by performing some sort of community service