SOC100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter SP: CH 6, RS: CH 17, 19: Governmentality, Marital Rape, Michel Foucault
SP: Chapter 6: Deviance, Crime, and Punishment
●The selective punishment of deviance
○Deviance is an indicator of social order, or what sociologists usually call social structure
■Social structure: any enduring, predictable pattern of social relations among
people in society
○Deviance demonstrates the failure to make everyone behave the same way in a given
situation or to adapt in expected ways as they pass from one situation to another
■Failure of social controls to enforce an expected degree of conformity
●Varieties of deviant behavior
○Appearance deviance: the violation of appearance norms
○Mental illness: people who suffer from mental illness are often breaking rules and
violating people's expectations without meaning to
■It is feared, stigmatized, and treated as though it is statistically unusual
○Sexual deviance:
■Violations of the sexual double standard by women
■Violations of sexual fidelity by married people
■Violations of heteronormativity
■Pronography, prostitution
■Paraphilia: any sexual deviation or departure from the norm
●Classic studies: Edwin Schur’s Crimes without Victims
○Argued that what he called “victimless crimes” should be decriminalized
■“Crimes without victims” - consensual acts by adults that break the rules
prescribed in law -- for example, selling or sharing marijuana. No third party is
involved, therefore, no third party has a reason to complain to the police
●The social construction of crime: the moral panic
○Moral panic: popular controversy or dispute that provokes feelings and fears so intense
that they threaten the social order, often an overreaction to certain deviant behaviors that
may be fairly trivial in nature or frequency
■Fuelled by a moral entrepreneur, someone who stands to gain from the panic
and may have defined the problem
●Ways of looking at deviance
○Functionalism
■Durkheim argued that by violating social boundaries, criminals -- and deviants,
more generally -- help renew commitment to those very boundaries
●The punishment of crime and deviance therefore strengthens social
bonds and reminds people of the need to obey the rules
■People can normally be relied upon to play their learned, necessary social roles
in all of society’s key institutions
●However, a number of factors, such as rapid social change, can upset
these processes
■Assume that we can correctly identify the deviant acts worthy of censure, and
that there is some agreement among people about which acts are unacceptable.
●Because of this agreement, people who break the rules suffer the
censure of their peers
■Classical studies: John Hagen and Bill McCarthy’s “mean streets”
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find more resources at oneclass.com
●Street youths learn to get by on criminal capital -- a term that includes
criminal knowledge and skill but that also describes social
embeddedness in a community of young people whom crime is a
necessary way of life
○Symbolic-interactionism
■Stresses the importance of social interaction and negotiation, symbolic
meanings, stigmatization, and the effects of external labelling on sense of self as
factors determining deviant and conforming behavior
●Underlying all of this behavior is the human need to make sense of life,
self, and society
■Social life is like a game, and it is as children that we learn how to participate in
society -- how to play social games by taking coordinates roles and anticipating
the role of others
■Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory
●Deviant behavior is learned in association with others in intimate social
relationships
●Views about deviance are learned through communication with others
who share the cultural meanings of particular deviant behavior
●Deviant behavior occurs when people share an excess of favorable
definitions of deviance, compared to unfavorable ones
○Conflict theory
■Ask who benefits and who suffers from the existing social order. Look for
particular groups that will benefit most and have the power to seize this benefit
■Powerful members of society make and enforce the laws to their advantage, and
that less powerful members of society break laws when it is to their advantage
■Rule-making and rule0breaking are simply manifestations of a conflict aimed at
gaining material benefits like property, money, or power
■Robert Merton’s strain theory
●Criminal behavior is a result of the desire for material success combined
with a lack of legitimate opportunities to obtain that success
●Marxist terms: deviance happens when people are caught in the
structural contradictions of a capitalist system that depends at once on
accumulation and exploitation
●The desire for material success is universal and culturally learned
●Those who are denied socially acceptable opportunities to attain material
success will likely break the rules in efforts to meet this goal
○Feminism
■Focuses on relations of dominance and subordination between men and women
■Victimization: experience of being made a victim of a crime or a victim of unjust
treatment such as sexism or racism
○Postmodernism
■Michel Foucault’s analysis of prisons and imprisonment
●Technologies of power
●Three principal techniques of control
○Hierarchical observation
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find more resources at oneclass.com
■Control over people can be achieved merely by watching
then
○Normalizing judgement
○Examination
●Violent crime
○Result of an interaction between economic disadvantage (and related stress), cultural
attitudes that encourage and reward extreme disputatiousness, and an absence of
neighborhood or community cohesion that would moderate the violent expression of
conflict
○Likely to arise in communities where people have little wealth or property to defend
○Conflicts likely to arise in families, between friends and acquaintances, or in school and
workplaces
■These clashes occur in private places, where violence is able to erupt without
any public visibility or control
○This kind of irrational behavior is often gendered
■“Proving masculinity’ - factor for violent crimes committed by men against other
men and women
■Varies from culture to culture, communities vary in the importance they attach to
honor and respect, and in their willingness to use violence as a “brave” and
“masculine” way of seeking respect
○Violence declines with the development of the rational-legal modern state and the rise of
a fair judicial system
○Sociologists explain violence in terms of both social disorganization -- an absence of a
regulatory mechanisms -- and subcultural variations in the value placed on violence
■Dome societies hold values and beliefs that glorify aggression and violence,
while others do not.
■Some societies have confidence in their public institutions of law and order, while
others do not
○Family violence: child abuse, incest, marital rape, etc.
○Childhood abuse may express itself in behavioral issues, addiction issues, or mental
health issues such as PTSD
■Once they become adults, they are more prone to victimization and partner
violence
○In canada, people are more oriented towards human rights than to issues of honor.
■Ex: we supply the poor with a social welfare net that aims to affirm their human
right and to reduce the felt need for crime
●Non-violent crime
○Goal for most non-violent crimes is to gain money or property, not to inflict harm; usually,
people engaged in this kind of activity resort to violence only if its needed to bring out
those material goals
○More frequent and repetitive than violent crimes
○More likely to be committed against strangers, or at least against people who are not
closely related to the criminal
○Seemingly based on a rational calculation of costs and benefits
○Three types:
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SOC100H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Deviance is an indicator of social order, or what sociologists usually call social structure. Social structure: any enduring, predictable pattern of social relations among people in society. Deviance demonstrates the failure to make everyone behave the same way in a given situation or to adapt in expected ways as they pass from one situation to another. Failure of social controls to enforce an expected degree of conformity. Appearance deviance: the violation of appearance norms. Mental illness: people who suffer from mental illness are often breaking rules and violating people"s expectations without meaning to. It is feared, stigmatized, and treated as though it is statistically unusual. Violations of the sexual double standard by women. Violations of sexual fidelity by married people. Paraphilia: any sexual deviation or departure from the norm. Classic studies: edwin schur"s crimes without victims. Argued that what he called victimless crimes should be decriminalized.
