2.1. Explain forms of social control. Flashcards
What is social control?
- For society to function smoothly, people need to behave more or less as others expect them to.
- Social control involves persuading or compelling people to conform to society’s norms, laws and expectations. Society has various means of achieving control over its members’ behaviour, grouped into internal and external forms of social control.
What are internal forms of social control?
Are controls over our behaviour that come from within ourselves - from our personalities or our values. As such, they’re therefore also forms of social control. They lead us to conform to the rules of society and the groups that we belong to because we feel inwardly it is the right thing to do.
(internal form of social control) Moral conscience or superego.
- Freud’s theory = we conform to society’s expectations and obey its rules as our superego tells us to do. Along with id and ego, the superego forms part of our personality. Our superego tells us what’s right and wrong and inflicts guilt feelings on us if we fail to do as it urges.
- Superego develops through early socialisation within the family, telling us how we ought to behave. Its function is to restrain the selfish, ‘animal’ urges of the id.
- If we acted on these urges, they would often lead us into anti-social and criminal behaviour. The superego allows us to exercise self-control and behave in socially acceptable ways.
(internal forms of social control) Tradition and culture.
- The culture where we belong to also become part of us through socialisation.
- We come to accept its values, norms and traditions as part of our identity.
- e.g. believers follows the religious traditions that they have been raised in.
- Conforming to such traditions is an important way of affirming one’s identity and being accepted as a member of a particular community.
(internal forms of social control) Internalisation of social rules and morality.
- Both superego and traditions we follow become part of our inner self/personality. But they both start as things outside of us.
- Socialisation - in both cases, we internalise these rules through process of socialisation - whether from parents/wider social groups and institutions e.g. religion. In this way, society’s rules and moral code become our own personal rules and moral code. As result, we conform willingly to social norms.
- ‘Rational ideology’ - describes the fact we internalise social rules and use them to tell us what is right and wrong. This enables us to keep within the law.
What are external forms of social control?
Aim to ensure we conform to society’s expectations and keep to its rules. Society does this through agencies of social control.
(external forms of social control) Agencies of social control.
- Are organisations/institutions that impose rules on us in effort to make us behave in certain ways.
- Includes family, peer group and education system e.g. teachers may give disruptive student a detention.
- All these are negative sanctions (punishments), but agencies of social control can give positive sanctions (rewards) to those who conform.
- Both positive and negative sanctions help to impose social control. Links to Skinner’s operant learning theory of behaviour reinforcement - punishments deter undesired behaviour and rewards encourage acceptable behaviour.
(external forms of social control) The Criminal Justice System.
CJS contains several agencies of social control, each with the power to use formal legal sanctions against individuals in attempt to make them conform to society’s laws:
- Police = have power to stop, search, arrest, detain, question suspects.
- The CPS = can charge a suspect and prosecute them in court.
- Judges and magistrates = have power to bail the accused/remand them custody, to sentence the guilty to a variety of punishments.
- The prison service = can detain prisoners against their will for the duration of their sentence, and punish prisoners’ misbehaviour.
All are negative sanctions, but CJS also has positive sanctions (rewards) that it can use to control behaviour.
(external forms of social control) Coercion.
- Involves the use/threat of force in order to make someone do/stop doing something.
- Force many involve physical/psychological violence, or other forms of pressure.
- Negative sanctions of the CJS are examples of coercion - sending someone to prison for stealing is a form of coercion aimed at preventing further offending.
(external forms of social control) Fear of punishment.
- Fear of punishment = one way of trying to achieve social control and make people conform to the laws.
- In effect, fear of punishment is form of coercion as it involves the threat that force will be used against you if they don’t obey the law.
- Deterrence - some theorists (right realists) argue the fear of being caught and punished is what ensures that many would-be criminals continue to obey the law. Fear acts as a deterrent.
What is control theory?
Ask why people obey the law? The answer given by control theorists is that people conform as they are controlled by their bonds to society, which keep them from deviating. Hirschi argues that ‘delinquent acts occur when an individual’s bond to society is weak or broken’.
Hirschi - 4 elements to the individual’s bond to society.
- Attachment - more attached we are to others, the more we care about their opinion of us, the more we will respect their norms and the less likely we will be to break them.
- Commitment - the more we are committed to a conventional lifestyle, the more we risk losing by getting involved in crime, so the more likely we are to conform.
- Involvement - the more involved we are in conventional, law-abiding activities, the less time and energy we will have for getting involved in criminal ones. This is part of justification for youth clubs: they keep young people off the streets and busy with legal activities.
- Beliefs - if we have been socialised to believe it is right to obey the law, we are less likely to break it.
Control theory - Parenting.
- Many control theorists emphasise the role of parenting in creating bonds that prevent young people from offending.
- e.g. Gottfredson and Hirschi argued low self-control is a major cause of delinquency, and that this results from poor socialisation and inconsistent or absent parental discipline.
- Other control theorists put forward similar ideas. Riley and Shaw found that lack of parental supervision was an important factor in delinquency. Argue parents should: involve themselves in their teenagers’ lives and spend time with them, take an interest in what they do at school and how they spend time with their friends, show strong disapproval of criminal behaviour and explain the consequences of offending.
Control theory - Walter reckless.
- Points to importance of parenting and socialisation. We have psychological tendencies that can lead to criminality, but effective socialisation can provide ‘internal containment’ by building the self-control to resist the temptation to offend.
- He also argues that external controls such as parental discipline can provide ‘external containment’.
Control theory - Feminists.
- Used control theory to explain women’s low rate of offending.
- Heidensohn argues that patriarchal society controls females more closely, making it harder for them to offend. e.g. women spend more time on domestic duties, leaving them less opportunity to engage in criminality outside the home.
- Carlen found that females who do not offend had often failed to form an attachment to parents as they had suffered abuse in the family or been brought up in care.
