Deviance, Law, and Crime

Question 1

Cesare Lombroso

Answer 1

Believed you could identify criminals by physical characteristics

• Low foreheads, prominent jaws, protruding ears (criminality is born out of a person’s biology)

Question 2

Sociologist vs. Criminologist view of crime

Answer 2

Sociologist: tend to be more critical, and look more toward “the social” and law to explain crime, rather than looking at the crime itself

Criminologist: tend to be more conservative and open to psychological, biological, and functionalist explanations of crime

Question 3

Social construction of deviance and crime

Answer 3

Most sociologists accept that our ideas about what is deviant are socially constructed

• we must pay attention to the changing definitions of deviance and crime instead of who commits them

Question 4

Deviance

Answer 4

When someone departs from a norm and evokes a negative reaction from others.

Question 5

Crime

Answer 5

Deviance that breaks the law

Question 6

A law

Answer 6

A norm stipulated and enforced by government bodies

Question 7

3 factors to deviance

Answer 7

1. It’s culturally-dependant
2. Time - what was considered deviant 100 years ago is different from now
3. It is dependant on geography, culture, context, politics

Question 8

Moral entrepreneurs

Answer 8

An individual, group, or formal organization that seeks to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm.

Question 9

Stigmatization

Answer 9

The act of describing or regarding someone or something as worthy of disgrace or great disapproval.

Question 10

Social control

Answer 10

The ways in which a social system or specific institutions attempts to regulate people’s thoughts, feelings, appearance, and behaviour.

Question 11

Michael Foucault and Social Control

Answer 11

Interested in how power exercises itself over bodies, populations, and forms of knowledge.

Question 12

Panopticon

Answer 12

A prison design that allows inmates to be constantly observed without their knowledge.

• metaphor for the growth of modern surveillance, social control, and associated discipline
• it’s about indirect forms of control more than direct

Question 13

Network of gazes

Answer 13

The multiplication of supervision - people are supervised by authorities, by others, and by themselves

Question 14

Symbolic interactionalism approach to understanding deviance

Answer 14

People may learn deviant and criminal behaviour when they interact with others.

• identifying the social circumstances that promote the learning of deviant and criminal roles is a traditional focus of symbolic interactionalists

Question 15

Critical race theory perspective on law

Answer 15

They suggest that the alleged colourblindness of the law - as a neutral tool of justice is fantasy.

Instead, law is built by the imperatives of those with power

Question 16

Indigenous/settler colonialism theory view on law

Answer 16

Indigenous legal theorists have shown how colonial domination is entrenched through law. Also believe law is socially constructed to regulate behaviour and codify the norms of the powerful.

Question 17

Point of this chapter

Answer 17

LAW IS ABOUT POWER

The power not only to subjugate but to encode specific values as important and value judgements as intrinsic and necessary.

In colonial contexts, law is built to facilitate settlement on Indignius lands; settler law exists to protect settler states from indigenous nations.

Question 18

Reading: Becker, becoming a marihuana user

Answer 18

He found that one had to pass through a three-stage learning process before becoming a regular marijuana user.

1. Learns to smoke it in a way that will produce real effects
2. Learns to recognize the effects and connect them with drug use
3. Learns to enjoy the sensations he perceives

• “the presence of a given kind of behaviour is the result of a sequence of social experiences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of behaviour, the perceptions, and judgements of objects and situations.