7 Markets, Organizations, and Work

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control Chapter 16

Troy Duster and Jeff Manza

THE BIG QUESTIONS

• • • •

What is deviance? How is morality defined and regulated? Who defines deviance? How is social control imposed on society?

QUESTION 1

What is deviance?

Deviance and the Group

Establishing group boundaries • Social group membership Freud • All cultures impose rules on young • First lesson about futility of rebellion

Establishing Group Boundaries: Affirmation Positive • Infinite variety of markings, behaviors, and attributes that signal who is in and who is out • Symbolic boundaries Negative • That which people are not allowed to do if group membership is to be retained • May be explicit or implicit

Establishing Group Boundaries: Laws

• Hammurabi code (~1780 BCE) – Retributive justice

• Beccaria (1764) – How and why justice is meted out

Statistical versus Social Deviance

Stop and think! Take a moment to think of ways in which you have observed statistical and social deviance Why is the distinction between these two concepts important?

Social Norms

Norms • Reveal unstated, unwritten, and non-articulated rules of everyday life • Tell much about nature and character of society – Rules of engagement – Rules of personal space

QUESTION 2

How is morality defined and regulated?

The Problem of Moral Regulation Moral behavior • Types of behaviors considered good and right Immoral behavior • Types of behaviors considered bad and wrong

The Problem of Moral Regulation Interested punishment • Related to strong and direct interest in maintaining wealth and their political domination

Disinterested punishment • Related to control of morals and social behaviors

The Temperance Movement as Moral Crusade Prohibition (1920 -1933) • Prohibition of alcohol was crusade to reestablish upper middle class traditional values • Immigrants became public face of alcohol excess

• Most influential advocates were wives from upper-class families • WCTU provided instructional materials and legislative leadership

Campaign against Opium Opium, morphine, and heroin • No U.S. regulation until 1914 • Webb v. U.S. (1916) ruled prescriptions must be individually prescribed

What Do You Think? Just when the pressure to end Prohibition peaked in the early 1930s, laws would emerge to demonize what had previously been normal opiate use Why did the authors of your text book consider this one of the least appreciated ironies of American history?

Contemporary Moral Crusades Attempt to regulate morality remains very much a part of contemporary American society • War on drugs – Reagan (1985) – Criminalization of drugs since 1980s became way of policing poor neighborhoods and communities • Crusades against homosexuality – Stonewall Inn (1969) – Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) overturned 1985 ruling on antigay laws

QUESTION 3

Who defines deviance?

Deviance, Crime, and Power

Labeling theory of deviance • Process by which behavior is defined is critical to understanding what causes it • Many kinds of behaviors are deviant solely because they are so labeled

Becker (1963) • Deviance is social construction that evolves over time • Understanding deviance involves looking at why and how certain behaviors and people get labeled and at behaviors of labeled people

Deviance, Crime, and Power Sutherland (1949): White-collar crime • Unethical business practices committed by people in course of their work lives

• Often creates damage equal to other kinds of crimes; should be treated same way • Some controversy about treatment

Deviance, Crime, and Power The Enron scandal • Involved creating false profits, manipulating energy prices in California, defrauding stockholders

U.S. banking and financial crisis • Destabilized banking industry • Made subprime loans that resulted in massive mortgage defaults

Who Should Be Punished More Severely? Countrywide Financial Corporation CEO Angelo Mozilo OR low-level drug offender

• Two critical points – What kinds of deviant behavior get punished, and how strong the punishment, is linked in part to who the perpetrator is

– What counts as a punishable crime is in large part shaped by overall distribution of power

Deviance, Crime, and Power State deviance, terrorism, and war crimes • State deviance – Policy and actions carried out by government officials in their official capacities • Terrorism – Use of violence to achieve some political objective – “Theater of war” – Legitimate strategies – Guerilla warfare

Emergence of Terrorism in Contemporary World Progression • From battlefield • To strategic ploys of generals to avoid battlefield • To guerilla warfare • To terrorism

Stop and Think!

Why is it terrorism when Al Qaeda kills Americans but not terrorism when the U.S. government engages in actions such as these?

QUESTION 4

How is social control maintained?

Institutions of Social Control Sanctions • Punishments that groups and societies establish to enforce norms Formal sanctions • Used to enforce norms that are written into law, and are usually carried out by group of people given specific task and power to do so Informal sanctions • Conveyed in actions such as insults, dirty looks, insults The ambiguities in the line between deviance and conformity have created pressures to expand formal sanctions

Institutions of Social Control Criminal justice system • Criminal law, police forces, lawyers, court system, jails, prisons, and parole office

Jails • Hold accused people before trial, misdemeanor offenders, and those with maximum sentence of less than one year

Prisons • Contain convicted felons serving sentence of more than one year

The Criminal Justice System Offenders of criminal laws are punished • To exact retribution for victims of criminal acts • To deter offenders, and others from future crimes • To incapacitate or prevent offenders from committing future crimes • To rehabilitate or reform offenders

Mass Incarceration in America Today WHY? • Latest moral crusade against certain kinds of individual behavior • Politics (tough on crime) • Conservative backlash to social and cultural movements of the 1960s • Economic downturn in 1970s

• Urban riots in 1960s

Role of Racism Racism • Involves stereotypes based on perceived characteristics rooted in skin color • Has influenced racial stereotyping about criminality throughout U.S. history • Rising prison population reflects “new Jim Crow” (Alexander 2010)

Consequences of Mass Incarceration Sociologists ask why people commit crimes, why societies choose to punish those actions, and what are the larger consequences for the society as a whole. Do you know what some of these consequences might be?

Check your text.

Deviance and the Sociological Imagination People and groups with power have a special capacity to define or impose particular definitions of deviance and to turn that definition into written laws and forms of punishment

Can you use your sociological imagination to look beneath the surface and examine the hidden forms of inequality related to “deviance”?