Deviance and Social Control
Chapter I
• What is deviance? A collections of persons
or conditions that are devalued.
• What does devalued mean? Who has the
power and the means to devalue whom?
Deviance defined from four
methods
• 1. Statistical definition – a variation or departure from the
average.
• 2. Absolutist – values represent how people should act, but
leaves room for variations. Violations of agreed upon
acceptable behavior represents deviance. Psychologist
operate from this definition.
• 3. Reactivist – reaction against a behavior leads to labeling
of that behavior as deviant. Once the act is labeled deviant
so is the actor who engages in the behavior.
• 4. Normative – deviance is a violation of a norm which
draws reactions or sanctions. Sanctions force conformity.
Deviance and society
• Deviance refers to something different, not
like us.
• Deviance also implies something that is
seen as negative or devalued.
• Norms – are expectations of conduct in
particular situation. Norms are transmitted
from generation to generation. Norms are
different in different social setting.
Norms continued
• Norms are provided to help maintain order in
society and give us boundaries for how to act or
not act in certain situations. Norms vary across
social classes, religious, and ethnic boundaries.
• Simple things like child rearing, religious rituals,
and clothing vary from group to group.
• Norms and roles – certain behaviors are expected
from people who fill certain roles in our society.
Certain behaviors get you granted membership
into certain groups.
Three ways to study norms in a
society
• 1. Inferential – finding out what norms are by
trying to force social control efforts or sanctions
for changing that behavior. Norms are discovered
only after a group member violates a group norm
and is sanctioned for it.
• 2. Qualitative – norms are deeply imbedded in our
social activities and can’t be studied without
without studying the social surroundings.
• 3. Cognitive – infer about norms through asking
questions about normative behaviors from group
members.
Differentiation and Deviance
• People differ in age, sex, race, education,
occupation. Differentiation refers to those
differences.
• According to Durkheim deviance is both
necessary and helps creates social cohesiveness.
Deviance changes over time to fit the societal
needs.
• social differentiation promotes deviance.
Comparing people creates individual distinctions,
or ranks some people and characteristics as more
valued than others. Modern societies rank people
by occupation, race, attitudes, social class, urban
v. rural.
Power and conduct disapproval
• Stratification leads to one group having the power
to enforce their conduct laws onto other people, or
to set standards by which all others should strive
to achieve.
• Power can be defined as the ability to make
choices by virtue of control over political,
economic, and social resources. People who have
money, attained high levels of education, and have
social influence generally yield more power than
those who are lacking those resources.
Subcultures
• Subcultures are created based on differences.
Therefore people are not deviant within their
subculture, but can be considered deviant by
outsiders. Sometimes members of these
subcultures share a set of values and meanings not
shared by the society of which they are a part.
However, a subculture need not act in opposition
to larger society; if it does, the term counterculture
is more appropriate.
• For Cohen, subcultures may represent collective
solutions to frustration felt by those who are
trying to measure up to the middle-class
measuring rod.
The Relativity of deviance
• Debates over prostitution, gambling, nudism,
cheating, and marijuana use arise from conflicts
between norms about such acts.
• Social types perceived by some as deviant include
reckless drivers, pacifist, racist, the very poor, the
very conservative, older people, drinkers, nondrinkers, motorcycle gang members. Etc.
• Sociologist claim that deviance requires a
judgment of norms and than a reaction to
violations of those norms.
Chapter 2
Deviant events and social control
• Deviant events- refers to some behavior, but also
the context in which the behavior occurred.
• Deviant role – everyone performs roles in
everyday life like mother, daughter, student,
friend, and even deviant. But no one is deviant all
the time. Some people act out deviant roles more
than others.
• Deviant locations – places that have more
deviance than others. Shaw and McKay studied
Chicago in the 1920s and found that the Zone of
transition had more deviant people than others
areas of the city.
Deviant acts over time
• Analyst cannot effectively study deviant acts in
isolation from their social context. The history of
the deviant act suggests the possibility of
transitory events. For example, smoking is
considered deviant today, while in recent decades
it was considered normal.
• Deviance can be victimless as well as have
victims. Also, some can be victims of deviant
labels and social control efforts. Social control is
a deliberate attempt to control the behavior of
people so they will conform.
Social Control
• Informal social controls – ridicule, reprimand,
criticism, praise, gesture cues, glances, verbal
disapproval, denial of affection, and expressions
of opinion.
• Formal social controls – organized systems of
reactions from specialized agencies like churches,
businesses, educational institution, and even the
nation state through criminal justice and military.
• Consensus v. conflict perspective
John Stewart Mills
• In the 18th century, John Stewart Mills said that
can legitimately be used to exercise power over
citizens in a free society only to prevent harm to
others. Criminal law should restrict the social,
psychological, and fiscal cost of crime to other
members of society.
• Laws should highlight behavior that violates the
moral belief of a large number of people.
• And legal prohibitions should only be placed on
behaviors the the state can enforce laws upon.
• Legal sanctions have led to increased incarceration
rates in the U.S. – 2.4 million
The Irony of social control
• Social control efforts may actually increase
interactions of deviants with others labeled
deviant creating a culture of deviance and
unintentionally leading to more deviance.
• Lemert - Primary and Secondary deviance
Becoming Deviant – Chapter 3
• Socialization and social roles:
– Role strain – arise when roles conflict with each other
in a single persons life.
– Role – social position or status that has expectations for
certain behaviors.
– Prescribed roles – habits, beliefs, attitudes, and conduct
required of a certain status position.
– Role playing – orientation to a set of expectations
attached to a role.
– Role taking – the decision to adopt a particular social
role.
– Role set – set of expectations for a person depending on
the combinations of role associated with his/her identity
(mother-wife, student-daughter, father-student, etc.)
– Master role – the role the individual organizes all other
parts of themselves around.
Deviant role taking
• The role must include the acceptance of the
deviant label and the acting out of the behavior. A
role doesn’t become a part of your identity until
you define yourself as such. For example, a
person is not necessarily a homosexual just
because they explore their sexuality with the same
sex. Or a person is not an alcoholic just because
they drink occasionally. The deviant needs to
develop a deviant self-conception and that selfconception may even become their master status
Stigma of the Deviant Label
• The stigma of the label may throw a person
into the category of outsider. Social
rejection and exploitation is the norm
experienced by outsiders.
• Once the label is applied by significant
others or by a formal organization a selffulfilling prophecy may occur.
Understanding the Deviant
• Deviance can be understood by in-depth
interviewing.
• Participant observation – however,
according to Douglas, this only allows for
fictitious membership.
• However, getting on the inside does help
provide a better understanding.
Managing deviance
• Secrecy – keeping deviance hidden by the
actor and actors family and friends.
• Rationalization – Skyes and Matza’s
techniques of neutralization
• Change to conformity
• Join a deviant subculture
Demonic Perspective
• Temptation or Possession caused deviance
• How is guilt determined – trial by ordeal
• Punishment and social control under the
demonic perspective
• How is this perspective related to the Salem
Witch Trials in 1692?
• Does this perspective still exist today?
Biological theoretical
explanations
• Deviance is traced to physical abnormalities or
inherited traits. For example alcoholism, drug
addiction, mental illness, and sexual deviance
have all been genetically traced.
– Biology and crime
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Jacobs – XYY Chromosome
Twin studies
Lombrosos’s criminaloid
Adoption studies
IQ studies
Evaluating biological approaches
• Biology contributes little to explanations of social
and symbolic behavior of human beings behavior,
deviant or nondeviant.
• There are no physical functions or structures, no
combination of genes, and no glandular secretions
that contain the power to direct, guide, or
determine the type, form, and course of human
behavior.
• Humans do not inherit the knowledge of social
norms, they are taught.
Psychiatric model of deviance
• According to psychologist personality traits that
are deviant are said to include emotional
insecurity, immaturity, feelings of inadequacy,
inability to display affection, and aggressiveness.
• Childhood experiences produce deviant behavior.
• Freud, in the early 1900s, wrote about the id, ego,
and superego. He also talked about normal drives
that must be controlled like the sex drive, and
aggressive drive. Children had to go untainted
through all three stages of development to be
normal (oral, anal, phallic).
Evaluating the Psychiatric model
• Deviance infers some illness causes problems.
This takes away from personal responsibility for
actions.
• Psychologist don’t agree on what is normal
behavior. There is too much diversity.
• The deviant act is evidence of mental illness. But
if everyone commits a deviant act, are we all
mentally ill?
• The psychiatric profession and the pharmacology
that goes along with the diagnosis is a multi
billion dollar industry. Of course it is in their
interest to find us crazy and prescribe drugs to
cure us.
• Deviance is arbitrary and cultural.
Rational choice model
• Beccaria and Bentham saw deviance as a
personal decision after people weighed the
penalty for deviance with the price they
would have to pay for the violation of the
norm (late 1700s).
• D o all deviants choose their behavior?
Chapter 4
The social context of deviance
• Deviance and suburbanization
– 1970s saw rapid growth to suburbs.
– Urban areas suffered job loss, lack of affordable
housing, and funding for basic resources like hospitals,
job placement centers, after school programs, AFDC,
etc.
– Transportation was limited and most suburban people
had private transportation. Blue collar factory jobs in
urban areas were replaced with minimum wage service
work.
– Government jobs were cut which hurt
AfricanAmericans the most because of placement in
government jobs after the Civil Right legislation was
passed.
– By the late 1960s ¼ of blacks in urban areas were
unemployed. By the late 1980s that number was 40%.
City life become synonymous
with crime
• City crime, drug use, drinking,
homosexuality, mental disorders, suicides,
homicides increased in urban centers all
over the globe.
• Urbanism as a way of life – urbanism
results in clashes of social norms and roles
– there is a break down in formal and
informal mechanisms of social control
Six reasons cities are conducive
to crime
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1. Norm conflicts
2. Rapid cultural changes
3. Mobility of residents
4. Materialism
5. Individualism
Increased use of formal social control
efforts.
Sources of deviant attitudes
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1. Associates
2. Neighborhoods
3. Family members
4. Mass media
5. Occupation
6. Cultural conflicts between new
immigrant groups and already established
groups.
Chapter 5
Anomie and Conflict
• Social pathology - developed in the late
1800s and continued to be popular until the
1930s. Social Pathology linked deviance to
pathological conditions of the cities and
Larger societies. The theory labeled
conditions such as crime,, suicide,
drunkeness, poverty, mental illness,
prostitution and so forth as deviance.
Evaluation of Social Pathology
• Deviance and Illness - rather than the
individual or social illness, deviance
represents a departure away from norms.
Social pathology can not effectively deide
individuals into categories of normal and
pathological.
• Universality of Norms - Social
pathologists failed to recognize variations in
standards for deviance over time and from
group to group, determined by changes in
norms.
Social Disorganization
• Crime and deviance was a result of
pronounces social changes following W.W.I
and the Great Depression, along with
extensive immigration, urbanization, and
industrialization in the United States.
• Social disorganization was a concept
elaborated on originally by Y\Thomas
Znaniecki (1918) and George Cooley
(1918). Latter Shaw and McKay
popularized it at the University of Chicago
and their concentric zone model.
Evaluation of Social disorganization
• Confusing cause and effect - the social
disorganization perspective meaningfully
describes community characteristics that may bear
relationships to deviance, but it sometimes fails to
distinguish the consequences of social
disorganization from the tendency to equate social
disorganization with the phenomenon it was
intended to explain, deviance.
• Subjectivity - labels and behaviors are
subjectively chosen as deviant.
• Deviance as a lower class phenomenon
• What is the criteria for disorganization? Are
these communities really disorganized?
Anomie Theory
• The anomie perspective explains deviance
in a way related to the principals of social
disorganization. Anomie advances the core
idea that elements in society promote
deviance by making deviant behavior a
viable adaptation to living in society.
• Modern industrial societies create strain by
emphasizing status goals like material
success while simultaneously limiting
institutional access to certain segments of
society.
Adapting to Strain
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Robert K. Merton’s model (1938)
Goals (values) Means (norms)
Conformity
+
+
Innovation
+
-Ritualism
-+
Retreatism
--Rebellion
-/+
-/+
Extensions of Anomie
• Cloward and Ohlin (1960) - pointed out that
varying access to illegitimate means of
achieving goals existed giving people
different choices for adaptation.
• Simon and Gagnon (1976) anomie results
not just from absolute deprivation, but from
relative deprivation as well. The wealthy
commit crimes to feed their ever growing
greed and desire to have more and more.
Evaluating Anomie
• The assumption of Universality - not
everyone accepts the goals and means and
they change across time and space.
• Class Bias - typically only the poor deviate
because of their lack of success.
• Trouble with retreatism - people become
drug addicted and alcoholic for much mo9re
complex reasons than just dropping out
because of failure to obtain goals.
Conflict Theory
• Conflict models focus on the origins of rules and the
application of sanctions who violate those rules.
• Marxism - Marx himself viewed society as an uneasy
relationship between two groups with incompatible
economic interest.Marx believed that developing
capitalism would force a proliferation of criminal laws that
would act as an important mechanism by which rulers
could maintain order.
• First, laws prohibit certain conduct, particularly conduct
that threatens the interest of the ruling class.
• Second, laws legitimize intervention by society’s
mechanisms of social control including the police, courts,
and correctional institutions. Because the wealthy control
the legislature, criminal law sides with the upper class to
assure they remain their tie to capitalism.
Marx’s inherent contradictions of
Capitalism
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Inevitability of monopolies
replacement of workers with machinery
Lack of centralized planning
Control of the state by the wealthy
Contemporary examples come from the
works of Vold (1958), Quinney (1980),
Turk (1969), Chambliss (1976).
Social threat and Conflict theory
• Liska (1992) claimed that as a group
becomes more threatening to the interest of
the wealthy social control efforts also
increase. Even those who normally
wouldn’t be criminalized become locked
away in prisons and mental institutions.
Evaluation of Conflict models
• Nothing about the process of becoming
deviant is brought out in this model.
• The ruling class may not always benefit
• Law makers don’t make rules without being
pushed by powerful interest groups that are
made up of all different types of people.
• It assumes that laws cause deviant behavior.
Pfohl’s components of critical
theorizing (1970s)
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Power
knowledge
historical materialism
symbolic rituals of social control
common sense