chp7 deviance and crime Flashcards
Deviance
is behavior that is recognized as violating expected rules and norms.
Formal deviance
(breaks laws or official rules)
Informal Deviance
(violates customary norms)
Deviance and Crime are different
Deviance: recognized violation of cultural norms
Crime: Violation of a society’s enacted criminal law
Not all deviant behavior is criminal
Four main characteristics of deviant behavior:
- It occurs in a social context and is not just individual behavior.
- It is culturally relative.
- The social rules are created or constructed; not just morally decided upon or enforced.
- The audience decides what is defined as deviant.
Social Movements
Networks of groups that organize to support or resist change
-Campaign against smoking
Social Movements success and failure
Temperance Movement
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 1873
1919 TheNational Prohibition Act (Volstead Act), 18th
Repealed 1933
Social Construction of Deviance
-Deviance is influenced by society and subcultures
Medicalization of deviance
attributes deviant behavior to a “sick” state of mind, where the solution is to “cure” the deviance through therapy or other psychological treatment.
Functionalists theories of deviance
-focus on how the behavior and the audience’s reactions contribute to the stability of society.
-Even dysfunctional behaviors such as prostitution and arson reinforce stability.
-The behavior creates social cohesion, giving people a heightened sense of social order.
-“Imagine a community of saints in an exemplary and perfect monastery. In it crime as such will be unknown, but faults that appeal venial to the ordinary person will arouse the same scandal as does normal crime in ordinary consciences” (Durkheim p.100)
STABILITY AND SOCIAL ORDER
Durkheim criticized the functionalist theory that
those who commit suicide are mentally deranged.
Durkheim identified three types of suicide:
Egoistic suicide occurs when people feel totally detached from society.
Lack of social integration
Anomic suicide is committed by people when the disintegrating forces in the society make individuals feel lost or alone.
Anomie relative normlessness caused by the breakdown of social influences.
Altruistic suicide is when there is excessive regulation of individuals by social forces.
People commit suicide for the good of others
Durkheim
- Deviance affirms cultural values and norms.
- -There can be no good without evil and no justice without crime.
- Responding to deviance clarifies moral boundaries.
- -A boundary between right wrong
Robert Merton, functionalist, (1910–2003) developed the
Strain (Anomie) theory of deviance.
- Merton proposed that people conform to the social expectation when the goals (“American Dream”) and the means of reaching them are in balance.
- He traces the origins of deviance to the tensions caused by the gap between cultural goals and the means people have available to achieve those goals.
Social control theory
(Hirschi) examines the culture’s value systems and people’s attachment—or lack thereof—to those values.
- Most people probably feel some impulse toward deviance at times, but that the attachment to social norms prevents them from actually participating in deviant behavior.
- “Control theories assume that delinquent acts result when an individual’s bond to society is weak or broken. Since these theories embrace two highly complex concepts, the bond of the individual to society, it is not surprising that they have at one time or another formed the basis of explanations of most forms of aberrant or unusual behavior” (Hirschi 1969:16)
- ATTACHMENT TO SOCIAL VALUES/NORMS WEAK OR STRONG DETERMINES DEVIANCE
