Deviant Behavior and Social Control Chapters 2-5

Chapter 2Becker wrote:"Social groups constitute deviance by making rules who infractions constitute deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders."ABC's of DevianceAttitudesBehaviorsConditionsNegative Deviance- Refers to underconformity or nonconformity that is also negatively evaluated: metaphorically, negative deviance is the "Jeffrey Dahmer Phenomenon."Adler and Adler described this situation,attitudes, behaviors, or conditions can be deviant.Negative Deviants can range from most criminals to the mental ill to substance abusers to those with unpopular political or religious stances.Standard field of deviance is the negative reaction to (and sanctioning of ) underconformity or nonconformityNorms operate at two levelsThe Idealized -which is believed sublimely better but improbable for most peopleThe Realistic-which is viewed as achievable by typical peopleRate Busting- Occurs un various realms of life (determined that gifted students are often rejected by their peers.Deviance Admiration- Focuses on underconformity or nonconformity that is favorably assessed(could be labeled as the John Gotti Phenomenon)In a society that castigates those individuals who do not meet culturally dominant and created aesthetic images of apperance there are also many that admire the stigmatized attribute (people of size, and red heads) and individuals with that attribute. Positive Deviance- Describes overconformity that is responded to in a confirmatory fashion. ( Mother Teresa Phenomenon) Has been previous defined from various viewpoints, including from a normative perspective from a labeling point of view and from the perspective that positive deviance is overconformity that is positively evaluated Altruism is the positive deviance form of loyalty. Circumspection constitutes the positive deviance form of privacy Discretion composes the positive deviance aspect of prudence Properness is the positive deviance type of conventionality Hyper-responsibility is the positive deviance form of the norm of responsibility Cooperation represents the positive deviance profile of participation Temperance illustrates the positive deviance of moderation Forthrightness exemplifies positive deviance for the norm of honesty Gentility is the positive deviance form of courtesy Williams created the seminal and most comprehensive description of the value system of the United States, outlining the following dominant values: achievement and success, individualism, activity and work, efficiency, and practicality, science and technology, progress, material comfort, humanitarianism , freedom, democracy, equality, and racism, and group superiority.Henslin added education, religiosity, romantic love, and monogamy. Thus the American value system has been amply addressedTittle and Paternoster have expand sociological understanding by outlying not the idealized scheme of values but the normative system itself. Their outline is restricted to middle-class values in the United States and includes the following dominant norms: group loyalty, privacy, prudence, conventionality, responsibility, participation, moderation, honesty, peacefulness, and courtesy. Chapter 3 Becker's classic statement of labeling theory advances the relativistic perspective on defining deviance. He argued that the essence of deviance is not contained within individuals' behavior but in the response others have these.Becker locates the root of deviance in the response of people rather than the act itself, and in the chain of events that is unleashed once people have labeled acts and their perpetrators as deviantSocial Groups create deviance by making the rules whose infractions constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by other of rules and sanctions to an "offender"Deviance is a consequence of the responses of others to a person's act, students of deviance cannot assume that they are dealing with a homogeneous category when they study people who have been labeled deviantThey cannot assume that those people have actually committed a deviant act or broken some rule, because the process of labeling may not be infallible, some people may be labeled deviant who in fact have not broken a rule.Can not assume that in the category of those labeled deviant will contain all those who actually have broken a ruleA person believed to have committed a given "deviant" act may at one time be responded to much more leniently than he would be at some other timeThe degree to which an an act will be treated deviant depends also on who commits the act and who feels he has been harmed by itRules tend to be applied more to some persons than othersSoutherland's analysis of white collar crime: crimes committed by corporations are almost always prosecuted as a civil cases, but the same crime committed by an individual is ordinarily treated as a criminal offenseDeviance is not quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to itBeing branded as deviant has important consequences for one's further social participation and self-image. Most important consequence is drastic change in the individual's public identity. Committing the improper act being publicity caught at it place him in a new status. He has been revealed as a different kind of person from the kind he was supposed to be. Hughes' notes that most statues have one key trait which serves to distinguish those who belong from those who do not.Some statuses, in our society as in others, override all other statuses and have a certain priority Chapter 4Hendershott takes the absolutist perspective on defining deviance, proposing, a morally based view. She invokes the concept of morally based, unwritten laws that stretch from community to community over history. She criticizes the medical model of defining deviance as abdication the responsibilities of judgement, arguing that this glosses over views of good and evilCultural relativists urge us to adapt to the changes of our times, which they define as "process" rather than mere change whose inevitability is not assuredSociologist Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider cautioned us more than three decades ago that the medicalization of deviance would eventually "shroud conditions, events, and people and prevent them from being confronted as evil"Medicalizing deviance does not automatically render evil consequences good, the assumption that behavior is the prodcut of a "sick" mind or body gives it a staus similar to the of "accidents" removing intent or motive hinders us from comprehending the human element in the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the social strutures we create.From the earliest day of sociology, scholars were concerned about the question of social order and the common good.Moynihan warned that society's mechanisms for social control were breaking down.In the 1950's and 1960's identifying racism an bigotry as deviance led to positive social change in which discrimination and was appropriately stigmatized in our culture and censured in our legal system This dynamic process of boundary maintenance can also create the kind of social change that is not positiveStrong cultural values and clear concepts of good and evil integrate members into the group and provide meaning. When traditional cultural attachments are disrupted, or when behavior is no longer regulated by these common norms and values, individuals are left without a moral compassDurkheim knew that social facts like crime statistics and suicide rates can be adequately explained only by analyzing the unique social conditions that evolve when norms break down. The resulting anomie state leads to deviant behavior as the individual's attachment to social bonds is weekendWhen people are unsure of the norms or the norms are changing there is a growing unwillingness to make moral judgements about all behavior. The door is open to moral panics, which flourish in such a climate of anomieIn an effort to avoid alienating members with diverse lifestyles and values, some religious leaders have become hesitant to speak of morals at all. But in their place, a powerful advocacy community stand ready, willing, and able to define deviance. The only sufficient response to the compelling marketing techniques of these advocacy groups is a renewed willingness to make moral judgements.Chapter 5Quinneys' conflict theory of crime represents the social power perspective on defining deviance.The conflict perspective envisions two groups in society: The dominant class and those they dominate. Criminals are conceptualized as powerless and oppressed people who threaten the interests of the ruling class. Quinney's conflict theory suggest that definitions of deviance represent one to the coercive means through which the elite maintain their dominance over the massesSocial reality of crime- We think crime as it is affected by the dynamics that mold the society's social, economic, and political structureOffical definition of crime- Crime is a legal definition of human conduct is created by agents of the dominant class in a politically organized societyCrime is a definition of behavior that is conferred on some people by those in power.Upon formulation and application of these definitions of crime, persons and behaviors become criminalFormulation Definitions of Crime-Definitions of crime are composed of behaviors that conflict with the interests of the dominate classApplying Definitions of crime- Definitions of crime are applied by the class that has the power to shape the enforcement and administration of criminal lawThe probability that definitions of crime will be applied varies according to how much the behaviors of the powerless conflict with the interests of those in powerTurk has argued that during "criminalization", a criminal label may be affixed to people because of real or fancied attributes: "Indeed, a person is evaluated, either, favorably or unfavorably, not because he does something, or even because he is something but because others react to their perceptions of him as offensive or inoffensiveHow Behaviors Patterns Develop in Relation to Definitions of Crime-Behavior patterns are structed in relation to definition of crime, and within this context people engage in actions that have relative probabilities of being defined as criminalPersonal action patterns continually develop for each person as he moves from one experience to anotherDevelop action patterns with a High potential for being defined as criminal depends on Structured opportunities learning experiences interpersonal associations and identifications self- conceptions After they have had continued experience in being defined as criminal, they learn to manipulate the application of criminal definitionConstructing an Ideology of Crime- An ideology of crime is constructed and diffused by the dominant class to secure its hegemonyThe more the government acts in reference to crime, the more probable it is that definitions of crime will be created and that behavior patterns will develop in opposition to those definitionsConstructing the Social Reality of Crime- The social reality of crime is constructed by the formulation and application of definitions of crime, the development of behavior patterns in relation to these definition, and the construction of ideology of crimeLomborsos- People's "detective" criminal tendencies could be classified into distinctive criminal types and inherited from one generation to the nextAlbert Bandura proposed a social learning theory that suggest exposure to aggressive or aversive behaviors could reinforce people's tendencies to become aggressiveSamuel Yochelson ans Stanton Samenow proposed that criminals have distinctive personalities and thinking patternsThe problem with many of these psychological theories is that they focus almost exclusively on individuals' personalities, ignoring their social conditions or life situations.The dominant theory in sociology for the first half of the twentieth century structural functionalismDurkheim advanced the theory that society is a moral phenomenon. He believed that at its root, the morals, that individuals and taught constrain their behaviorRobert Melton, claimed that contradictions are implicit in a stratified system in which the culture dictates success goals for all citizens, while institutional access is limited to just the middle and upper strataThe Cultural Perspective -Theorist believed that deviance was a collective art, driven and carried out by groups of peopleDavid Matza proposed drift theory, nothing that this movement into deviant subcultures occurs through a process of drift, as people gradually leave their old crowd and become enmeshed in a circle of deviant associatesJoel Best- Believe when some citizens have access to greater degrees of social power that enables the dominant groups to rationalize that their ideologies and behavior may be legitimate, they are simultaneously defining the actions of less powerful groups as deviant.

Chapters 2-5