Chapter 6 Flashcards
The violation of norms (or rules or expectations)
Deviance
The violation of norms written into law.
Crime
Blemishes that discredit a person’s claim to a normal identity.
Stigma
A group’s usual and customary social arrangements, on which its members depend and on which they base their lives.
Social Order
A group’s formal and informal means of enforcing its norms.
Social control
An expression of disapproval for breaking a norm, ranging from a mild, informal reaction such as a frown to a formal reaction such as a fine or a prison sentence.
Negative sanction
An expression of approval for following a norm, ranging from a smile or a good grade in a class to a material reward such as a prize.
Positive sanction.
Inborn tendencies (for example a tendency to commit deviant acts)
Genetic predisposition
Crimes such as mugging, rape and burglary.
Street crime.
The view that a personality disturbance of some sort causes an individual to violate social norms.
Personality disorders.
Edwin Sutherland’s term to indicate that people who associate with some groups learn an excess of definitions of deviance increasing the likelihood that they will become deviant.
Differential association
The idea that two control systems-inner controls and outer controls- work against our tendencies to deviate.
Control theory.
The view that the labels people are given affect their own and others’ perceptions of them, thus channeling their behavior into either deviance or conformity.
Labeling theory
Ways of thinking or rationalizing that help people deflect (or neutralize) society’s norms.
Techniques of neutralization
A term coined by Harold Garfinkel to refer to a a ritual whose goal is to remake someone’s self by stripping away that individual’s self identity and stamping a new identity in its place.
Degradation ceremony
The objective held out as legitimate or desirable for the members of a society to achieve.
Cultural goals
Approved ways of reaching cultural goals.
Institutionalize means.
Robert Merton’s term for the strain engendered when a society socializes large numbers of people to desire a cultural goal (such as success), but withholds from some the approved means of reaching that goal; one adaptation to the strain is crime, the choice of an innovative means (one outside the approved system) to attain the cultural goal.
Strain theory
Opportunities for crimes that are woven into the texture of life.
illegitimate opportunity structure.
Edwin Suherland’s term for crimes committed by people of respectable and high social status in the course of their occupations; for example, bribery of public officials, securities violations, embezzlement, faces advertising, and price fixing.
White collar crime
Crimes committed by executives in order to benefit their corporations.
Corporate crime
The system of police, courts, and prisons set up to deal with people who are accused of having committed a crime.
Criminal justice system
The death penalty
Capital punishment.
The killing of several victims in three or more separate events.
Serial murder.
The practice of the police, in the normal course of their duties, to either arrest or ticket someone for an offense or to overlook the matter.
Police discretion.
To make deviance a medical matter, a symptom of some underlying illness that needs to be treated by physicians.
Medicalization of deviance
The transformation of a human condition into a medical matter to be treated by physicians.
Medicalization
