deviance crime and criminals essay

Crime and Deviance Essay

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Introduction

Sociological perspective.

Deviance is an act perceived to be against one cultural belief and the act cannot be tolerated. Deviance acts are different from one community to another and also can vary depending on generational time.

For example, the homosexuality is allowed in American society, but in Africa the act is seen as satanic and can make the victims to be stoned to death. In some decades ago, divorce was seen to be against the rule of the church society, but with modernization, divorced has grown to be accepted as part of marriage life (Lukes 28).

Crime is an act that is against the norm of a society and the registered law of the entire country. If a person breaks a certain section of a country law, there is a correction sanction to that person. A person is usually taken to the court of law where the offence is listened to, by the judge and the person is either proven guilty or innocent.

A criminal can be put in jail for some time or for life, sentenced to death and even pay some money as a penalty (Lukes 28). A country law which is constitution is mostly formed by the parliament of that country.

Introduction . Sociologists have tried to understand crime and deviance in different ways. Most of the ancient sociologists have come up with different sociological perspectives that try to explain crime and deviance.

Emile Durkheim came up with rule of sociological methods that explained crime as part of society norms. Durkheim believed crime to be higher in modernized and industrialized society as compared to less modernized. In industrialized society, division of labor is the norm of life and each person is exposed to different work experiences (Moyer 54).

Division of labor exists in two ways, one is mechanical solidarity whereby the members of the society are similar and the organic solidarity in which society members creates a relationship among themselves through the division of labor. As in the division of labor, society people have different influences and situational experiences that distinguish one person from the other.

The personal differences make some people to be criminals and other to be good. No society lacks deviance or crime however perfect it could be. Every community has norms and traditions that put the members together and if the norms are broken, there is state of anomie and lawlessness.

Advantages of the perspective . Durkheim argued that besides division of labor helping to make production rise and improve the human capital it also possessed a moral character that created a sense of solidarity in humans. He explained with a married couple arguing that sexual desire would only exist after the material life has disappeared if the division of labor was to be reduced between the marriage partners.

Durkheim suggested that division of labor has more of social and moral order therefore married couple is bided by their common things they do. Durkheim saw that crime was beneficial to the society in some instances. Crime builds future morality by showing what law is to be followed.

For example a committed crime will lead to establishment of an order that will be followed by the people to avoid repetition of the same crime. Crime corrections or rewards were put not to punish a criminal and make the person stop the crime, but the punishment was to strengthen the entire law to help control crime. Durkheim saw that punishment and crime go together and cannot be separated (Marsh 98).

Drawbacks of the perspective . Crime is has negative impacts and dangerous to the people and the community at large if is at high levels. If crime is not controlled and increases more and more each day, the society can be unable to prevent the criminals. On the other hand, if the crime rate is too low, the society maybe abnormal.

According to Durkheim the breaking of the society way of living or the norms is what brings in the social change which is very important in community development. Otherwise the social change should be controlled or moderate to avoid social problem. In any case the deviance which motivate the social change should be regulated so that to prevent the loss of criminal identity which it is important in the future (Marsh 95).

Durkheim failed to explain how for example division of labor would be used to control crime in the society. Also not all crimes would be beneficial to the society because if a crime resulted to killing or a big damage then the society will drag behind on development.

Lukes, Steven. The rules of the sociological method . New York: Free press, 2007.

Marsh, Ian., Melville, Gaynor. Theories of crime . Canada: Routledge, 2006

Moyer, Imogene. Criminological theories: traditional and non traditional voices . London: sage publishers, 2001.

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7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society through four sociologist’s theories
• Explain how conflict theory understands deviance and crime in society
• Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labeling and other theories

Why does deviance occur? How does it affect a society? Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories that attempt to explain what deviance and crime mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with the way the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Strain theory and social disorganization theory represent two functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, when Black students across the United States participated in sit-ins during the civil rights movement, they challenged society’s notions of segregation. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1893). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Durkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the “collective conscience,” which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. “A crime is a crime because we condemn it,” he said (1893). He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. For example, in large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is an inherent part of a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. From birth, we’re encouraged to achieve the “American Dream” of financial success. A person who attends business school, receives an MBA, and goes on to make a million-dollar income as CEO of a company is said to be a success. However, not everyone in our society stands on equal footing. That MBA-turned-CEO may have grown up in the best school district and had means to hire tutors. Another person may grow up in a neighborhood with lower-quality schools, and may not be able to pay for extra help. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. According to Merton’s theory, an entrepreneur who can’t afford to launch their own company may be tempted to embezzle from their employer for start-up funds.

Merton defined five ways people respond to this gap between having a socially accepted goal and having no socially accepted way to pursue it.

• Conformity : Those who conform choose not to deviate. They pursue their goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
• Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means.
• Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These members of society focus on conformity rather than attaining a distant dream.
• Retreatism : Others retreat and reject society’s goals and means. Some people who beg and people who are homeless have withdrawn from society’s goal of financial success.
• Rebellion : A handful of people rebel and replace a society’s goals and means with their own. Terrorists or freedom fighters look to overthrow a society’s goals through socially unacceptable means.

Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. An individual who grows up in a poor neighborhood with high rates of drug use, violence, teenage delinquency, and deprived parenting is more likely to become engaged in crime than an individual from a wealthy neighborhood with a good school system and families who are involved positively in the community.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance. A person isn’t born as someone who will commit crimes but becomes one over time, often based on factors in their social environment. Robert Sampson and Byron Groves (1989) found that poverty and family disruption in given localities had a strong positive correlation with social disorganization. They also determined that social disorganization was, in turn, associated with high rates of crime and delinquency—or deviance. Recent studies Sampson conducted with Lydia Bean (2006) revealed similar findings. High rates of poverty and single-parent homes correlated with high rates of juvenile violence. Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. For instance, studies have found that children from disadvantaged communities who attend preschool programs that teach basic social skills are significantly less likely to engage in criminal activity. (Lally 1987)

Conflict Theory

Conflict theory looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike functionalists, conflict theorists don’t see these factors as positive functions of society. They see them as evidence of inequality in the system. They also challenge social disorganization theory and control theory and argue that both ignore racial and socioeconomic issues and oversimplify social trends (Akers 1991). Conflict theorists also look for answers to the correlation of gender and race with wealth and crime.

Karl Marx: An Unequal System

Conflict theory was greatly influenced by the work of German philosopher, economist, and social scientist Karl Marx. Marx believed that the general population was divided into two groups. He labeled the wealthy, who controlled the means of production and business, the bourgeois. He labeled the workers who depended on the bourgeois for employment and survival the proletariat. Marx believed that the bourgeois centralized their power and influence through government, laws, and other authority agencies in order to maintain and expand their positions of power in society. Though Marx spoke little of deviance, his ideas created the foundation for conflict theorists who study the intersection of deviance and crime with wealth and power.

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite

In his book The Power Elite (1956), sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of what he dubbed the power elite , a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources. Wealthy executives, politicians, celebrities, and military leaders often have access to national and international power, and in some cases, their decisions affect everyone in society. Because of this, the rules of society are stacked in favor of a privileged few who manipulate them to stay on top. It is these people who decide what is criminal and what is not, and the effects are often felt most by those who have little power. Mills’ theories explain why celebrities can commit crimes and suffer little or no legal retribution. For example, USA Today maintains a database of NFL players accused and convicted of crimes. 51 NFL players had been convicted of committing domestic violence between the years 2000 and 2019. They have been sentenced to a collective 49 days in jail, and most of those sentences were deferred or otherwise reduced. In most cases, suspensions and fines levied by the NFL or individual teams were more severe than the justice system's (Schrotenboer 2020 and clickitticket.com 2019).

Crime and Social Class

While crime is often associated with the underprivileged, crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful remain an under-punished and costly problem within society. The FBI reported that victims of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft lost a total of $15.3 billion dollars in 2009 (FB1 2010). In comparison, when former advisor and financier Bernie Madoff was arrested in 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reported that the estimated losses of his financial Ponzi scheme fraud were close to $50 billion (SEC 2009).

This imbalance based on class power is also found within U.S. criminal law. In the 1980s, the use of crack cocaine (a less expensive but powerful drug) quickly became an epidemic that swept the country’s poorest urban communities. Its pricier counterpart, cocaine, was associated with upscale users and was a drug of choice for the wealthy. The legal implications of being caught by authorities with crack versus cocaine were starkly different. In 1986, federal law mandated that being caught in possession of 50 grams of crack was punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. An equivalent prison sentence for cocaine possession, however, required possession of 5,000 grams. In other words, the sentencing disparity was 1 to 100 (New York Times Editorial Staff 2011). This inequality in the severity of punishment for crack versus cocaine paralleled the unequal social class of respective users. A conflict theorist would note that those in society who hold the power are also the ones who make the laws concerning crime. In doing so, they make laws that will benefit them, while the powerless classes who lack the resources to make such decisions suffer the consequences. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, states passed numerous laws increasing penalties, especially for repeat offenders. The U.S. government passed an even more significant law, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (known as the 1994 Crime Bill), which further increased penalties, funded prisons, and incentivized law enforcement agencies to further pursue drug offenders. One outcome of these policies was the mass incarceration of Black and Hispanic people, which led to a cycle of poverty and reduced social mobility. The crack-cocaine punishment disparity remained until 2010, when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased the disparity to 1 to 18 (The Sentencing Project 2010).

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviors as deviant or conventional.

Labeling Theory

Although all of us violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Those who do, however, have often been labeled “deviant” by society and have gradually come to believe it themselves. Labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures.

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory and identified two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person’s self-concept and behavior begin to change after his or her actions are labeled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, develops a reputation as a “troublemaker.” As a result, the student starts acting out even more and breaking more rules; the student has adopted the “troublemaker” label and embraced this deviant identity. Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts.

Techniques of Neutralization

How do people deal with the labels they are given? This was the subject of a study done by Sykes and Matza (1957). They studied teenage boys who had been labeled as juvenile delinquents to see how they either embraced or denied these labels. Have you ever used any of these techniques?

Let’s take a scenario and apply all five techniques to explain how they are used. A young person is working for a retail store as a cashier. Their cash drawer has been coming up short for a few days. When the boss confronts the employee, they are labeled as a thief for the suspicion of stealing. How does the employee deal with this label?

The Denial of Responsibility: When someone doesn’t take responsibility for their actions or blames others. They may use this technique and say that it was their boss’s fault because they don’t get paid enough to make rent or because they’re getting a divorce. They are rejecting the label by denying responsibility for the action.

The Denial of Injury: Sometimes people will look at a situation in terms of what effect it has on others. If the employee uses this technique they may say, “What’s the big deal? Nobody got hurt. Your insurance will take care of it.” The person doesn’t see their actions as a big deal because nobody “got hurt.”

The Denial of the Victim: If there is no victim there’s no crime. In this technique the person sees their actions as justified or that the victim deserved it. Our employee may look at their situation and say, “I’ve worked here for years without a raise. I was owed that money and if you won’t give it to me I’ll get it my own way.”

The Condemnation of the Condemners: The employee might “turn it around on” the boss by blaming them. They may say something like, “You don’t know my life, you have no reason to judge me.” This is taking the focus off of their actions and putting the onus on the accuser to, essentially, prove the person is living up to the label, which also shifts the narrative away from the deviant behavior.

Appeal to a Higher Authority: The final technique that may be used is to claim that the actions were for a higher purpose. The employee may tell the boss that they stole the money because their mom is sick and needs medicine or something like that. They are justifying their actions by making it seem as though the purpose for the behavior is a greater “good” than the action is “bad.” (Sykes & Matza, 1957)

Social Policy and Debate

The right to vote.

Before she lost her job as an administrative assistant, Leola Strickland postdated and mailed a handful of checks for amounts ranging from $90 to $500. By the time she was able to find a new job, the checks had bounced, and she was convicted of fraud under Mississippi law. Strickland pleaded guilty to a felony charge and repaid her debts; in return, she was spared from serving prison time.

Strickland appeared in court in 2001. More than ten years later, she is still feeling the sting of her sentencing. Why? Because Mississippi is one of twelve states in the United States that bans convicted felons from voting (ProCon 2011).

To Strickland, who said she had always voted, the news came as a great shock. She isn’t alone. Some 5.3 million people in the United States are currently barred from voting because of felony convictions (ProCon 2009). These individuals include inmates, parolees, probationers, and even people who have never been jailed, such as Leola Strickland.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states are allowed to deny voting privileges to individuals who have participated in “rebellion or other crime” (Krajick 2004). Although there are no federally mandated laws on the matter, most states practice at least one form of felony disenfranchisement .

Is it fair to prevent citizens from participating in such an important process? Proponents of disfranchisement laws argue that felons have a debt to pay to society. Being stripped of their right to vote is part of the punishment for criminal deeds. Such proponents point out that voting isn’t the only instance in which ex-felons are denied rights; state laws also ban released criminals from holding public office, obtaining professional licenses, and sometimes even inheriting property (Lott and Jones 2008).

Opponents of felony disfranchisement in the United States argue that voting is a basic human right and should be available to all citizens regardless of past deeds. Many point out that felony disfranchisement has its roots in the 1800s, when it was used primarily to block Black citizens from voting. These laws disproportionately target poor minority members, denying them a chance to participate in a system that, as a social conflict theorist would point out, is already constructed to their disadvantage (Holding 2006). Those who cite labeling theory worry that denying deviants the right to vote will only further encourage deviant behavior. If ex-criminals are disenfranchised from voting, are they being disenfranchised from society?

Edwin Sutherland: Differential Association

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behavior developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub 2006). His conclusions established differential association theory , which suggested that individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. For example, a young person whose friends are sexually active is more likely to view sexual activity as acceptable. Sutherland developed a series of propositions to explain how deviance is learned. In proposition five, for example, he discussed how people begin to accept and participate in a behavior after learning whether it is viewed as “favorable” by those around them. In proposition six, Sutherland expressed the ways that exposure to more “definitions” favoring the deviant behavior than those opposing it may eventually lead a person to partake in deviance (Sutherland 1960), applying almost a quantitative element to the learning of certain behaviors. In the example above, a young person may find sexual activity more acceptable once a certain number of their friends become sexually active, not after only one does so.

Sutherland’s theory may explain why crime is multigenerational. A longitudinal study beginning in the 1960s found that the best predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior in children was whether their parents had been convicted of a crime (Todd and Jury 1996). Children who were younger than ten years old when their parents were convicted were more likely than other children to engage in spousal abuse and criminal behavior by their early thirties. Even when taking socioeconomic factors such as dangerous neighborhoods, poor school systems, and overcrowded housing into consideration, researchers found that parents were the main influence on the behavior of their offspring (Todd and Jury 1996).

Travis Hirschi: Control Theory

Continuing with an examination of large social factors, control theory states that social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds and that deviance results from a feeling of disconnection from society. Individuals who believe they are a part of society are less likely to commit crimes against it.

Travis Hirschi (1969) identified four types of social bonds that connect people to society:

• Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society’s norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic partners.
• Commitment refers to the investments we make in the community. A well-respected local businessperson who volunteers at their synagogue and is a member of the neighborhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a person who doesn’t have a career or ties to the community.
• Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance. A child who plays little league baseball and takes art classes has fewer opportunities to ______.
• The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, they will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park, because a clean environment is a social value to them (Hirschi 1969).

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Sociology of Deviance and Crime

The Study of Cultural Norms and What Happens When They Are Broken

• News & Issues
• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
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• Recommended Reading
• Archaeology

Sociologists who study deviance and crime examine cultural norms, how they change over time, how they are enforced, and what happens to individuals and societies when norms are broken. Deviance and social norms vary among societies, communities, and times, and often sociologists are interested in why these differences exist and how these differences impact the individuals and groups in those areas.

Sociologists define deviance as behavior that is recognized as violating expected rules and norms . It is simply more than nonconformity, however; it is behavior that departs significantly from social expectations. In the sociological perspective on deviance, there is a subtlety that distinguishes it from our commonsense understanding of the same behavior. Sociologists stress social context, not just individual behavior. That is, deviance is looked at in terms of group processes, definitions, and judgments, and not just as unusual individual acts. Sociologists also recognize that not all behaviors are judged similarly by all groups. What is deviant to one group may not be considered deviant to another. Further, sociologists recognize that established rules and norms are socially created, not just morally decided or individually imposed. That is, deviance lies not just in the behavior itself, but in the social responses of groups to behavior by others.

Sociologists often use their understanding of deviance to help explain otherwise ordinary events, such as tattooing or body piercing, eating disorders, or drug and alcohol use. Many of the kinds of questions asked by sociologists who study deviance deal with the social context in which behaviors are committed. For example, are there  conditions under which suicide is acceptable ? Would one who commits suicide in the face of a terminal illness be judged differently from a despondent person who jumps from a window?

Four Theoretical Approaches

Within the sociology of deviance and crime, there are four key theoretical perspectives from which researchers study why people violate laws or norms, and how society reacts to such acts. We'll review them briefly here.

Structural strain theory was developed by American sociologist Robert K. Merton and suggests that deviant behavior is the result of strain an individual may experience when the community or society in which they live does not provide the necessary means to achieve culturally valued goals. Merton reasoned that when society fails people in this way, they engage in deviant or criminal acts in order to achieve those goals (like economic success, for example).

Some sociologists approach the study of deviance and crime from a structural functionalist standpoint . They would argue that deviance is a necessary part of the process by which social order is achieved and maintained. From this standpoint, deviant behavior serves to remind the majority of the socially agreed upon rules, norms, and taboos , which reinforces their value and thus social order.

Conflict theory is also used as a theoretical foundation for the sociological study of deviance and crime. This approach frames deviant behavior and crime as the result of social, political, economic, and material conflicts in society. It can be used to explain why some people resort to criminal trades simply in order to survive in an economically unequal society.

Finally, labeling theory   serves as an important frame for those who study deviance and crime. Sociologists who follow this school of thought would argue that there is a process of labeling by which deviance comes to be recognized as such. From this standpoint, the societal reaction to deviant behavior suggests that social groups actually create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. This theory further suggests that people engage in deviant acts because they have been labeled as deviant by society, because of their race, or class, or the intersection of the two, for example.

Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

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Social Construction of Crime & Deviance

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Social construction of crime and deviance is the theory that behaviors and actions are not inherently criminal, but are labeled deviant by those in power within a social context. What a society defines as deviant depends on norms, values, and interests of the powerful and privileged at a particular time and place.

Key Takeaways

• Social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of phenomena but one assigned to them by people through social interactions . Shifts in public perception can lead to an act taking on a different meaning than it once had.
• Spector and Kitusee introduced the idea of social constructionism into criminality.
• Social constructionism can influence whether or not something is seen as a crime, its severity, and the extent to which it is feared. How societies define and remedy crime is the outcome of numerous complex factors between different groups of actors.
• Sociologists can study crime on a systematic level, as well as through an examination of public reaction and the crimes themselves.
• There are numerous examples of crimes that were once considered not to be social problems, and actions that were once illegal that are now not widely considered to be crimes. For example, various laws have been created and nullified against homosexuality, bullying, and drug use depending on public perception.

Is Crime Socially Constructed?

Behaviors become crimes through a process of social construction . While a behavior may be considered criminal in one society, it may be considered benign, or even honorific, in another.

Thus, sociologists consider whether or not a behavior is defined as a crime to depend on the social response to the behavior or the persons who engage in it, whether in the content of the behavior itself.

The social response to crime is based not only on the qualities of the act but also on the social and moral standing of the offender and the victim. Theories of crime are ancient. Plato put forward theories of punishment.

An influential and infamous text published in Nuremberg in 1494 detailed the types of witches, as well as procedures for torture and extermination. However, the history of modern criminology is widely considered to have begun with the work of Cesar Beccaria, who published Essays on Crime and Punishment in 1764.

Sociologists have presented the most successful theories of crime (Heidensohn, 1989). In essence, sociologists see crime as a socially situated and defined problem (Morris and Tonry, 1980).

Overview of Social Constructionism

Social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of those phenomena but is assigned to them through social interactions.

In this view, meaning is socially defined and organized and thus subject to social change.

Spector and Kitsuse (1973) introduced social constructionism into the vocabulary of social problems theory – otherwise known as criminology (Schneider, 1985).

From the social constructionist perspective, any given behavior becomes a social problem through social movements or groups successfully convincing the general public that a phenomenon is a problem and advocating for a particular response to that problem.

Defining Crime

Early sociologists such as Paul Tappan (1947) defined crime as all actions in “violation of the criminal law.” However, this approach gave rise to many problems.

Criminal laws are not fixed or permanent in any society. The formal limits of criminal law can be shifted by many different social pressures. For example, in the 20th century, many countries removed sanctions against abortion under certain conditions.

Class and power have also influenced the scope of criminal law (Hay, 1975). In the first decades of the 20th century, middle-class American women and other anti-alcohol groups combined to introduce prohibition.

If criminal laws constitute the norms for behavior in a society, they must change to reflect social changes. This change can be technological in nature. For instance, the proliferation of car ownership has provided new opportunities for criminal behavior, such as causing death by reckless driving.

This has been accompanied by a host of laws regarding the speed, use, and parking of vehicles (Heidensohn, 1989). Crimes can also have different levels of severity, and be completely unrelated. The severity of crimes can also be subjective.

A starving person stealing a loaf of bread would be, in many eyes, a lesser crime than stealing luxurious mink coats intending not to pay for them (Heidensohn, 1989).

How Crimes Become Crimes: Complexity and Interaction

What is taken to be called crime is the outcome of a large number of complex interactions and negotiations between different groups of actors (Gibbons, 1968).

Records about the people who commit crimes, as many crimes have unknown perpetrators. Further, these so-called clear-up rates can vary — while most homicides result in an offender being found, most burglaries are left unsolved (Kinsey et al., 1986).

For sociologists, this means that concepts of crime — and deviance, for that matter, will likely remain both arbitrary and contested (Crime and Societal; Becker, 1963).

Researchers have studied what causes fear of crime, suggesting that the fear of crime in itself is a product of the relations between social vulnerability, perceived and actual, and the risks of victimization (Maxfield, 1984; Smith, 1986; Jones, 1987).

Crime can be examined as a social phenomenon on at least three levels. It can be studied systematically, using concepts, theories, and available data to test ideas.

Public reaction can also provide another level to studying crime, as it plays an important part in shaping responses to crime — and even crime itself. Finally, sociologists can study the phenomenon of crime itself.

Face Coverings (Coronavirus: The Lockdown Laws)

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, face coverings were not commonly worn by members of the public in most Western countries. However, as COVID-19 became a major public health issue, public perception shifted.

Not wearing a face mask, particularly in crowded indoor areas such as subways and grocery stores, began to be seen as reckless to both one’s own health and the health of others.

Eventually, municipalities, as well as national-level governments, began to enforce laws around wearing face masks in public, in some cases enforcing what types of face coverings needed to be worn.

Those who did not comply with these regulations risked denial of entry, fines, or, in rare cases, arrest.

Although there was push-back against wearing face masks by certain segments of the public, not wearing a face covering largely went from being seen as normal to between irresponsible and endangering in the public eye. Quickly, public perception shifted in favor of wearing face masks.

The War on Drugs

The spring of 1986 to 1992 saw a widespread push to solve the problem of drug use, especially crack cocaine. Politicians from both American political parties made increasingly strident calls for a “War on Drugs” (Reinarman and Levine, 1995).

Reinarmean and Levine note several reasons why crack cocaine in particular sparked the war on drugs. In 1985, the National Institute on Drug Abuse noted that, while more than 22 million Americans had tried cocaine, all phases of drug use tended to take place in the privacy of the homes and offices of middle and upper-class users.

In 1986, however, cocaine spread visibly to the lower classes, with increased visibility in ghettos and barrios. Crack was sold in small, cheap units on ghetto streets to poor, young buyers who were already seen as a threat.

During this time, politicians and the media depicted crack as “supremely evil — the most important cause of America’s problems”. This was surrounded by the political context of the emergence of a heavily fundamentalism-influenced new right republican party and competition between both political parties to be seen as “harder on drugs.”

All in all, the war on drugs resulted in the rejection of syringe distribution and exchange programs implemented in other countries to reduce AIDS prevalence, greatly stigmatized drug users, and resulted in the imprisonment of many, disproportionately from the lower classes, for drug-related crimes.

Homosexuality

Homosexuality was once widely illegal in many countries. In the United States prior to 1961, all 50 states criminalized same-sex sexual activity. By 2003, however, all remaining laws against same-sex sexual activity had been invalidated.

Homosexuality was also seen as a mental illness (Kirk and Kutchins, 1992). Constitutional challenges to sodomy laws — laws against same-sex sexual activity — were not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, a series of high court cases in the United States struck down state sodomy laws in the 1980s. The striking down of American sodomy laws in the latter half of the 20th century corresponded to widespread activism by the LGBTQ community toward social acceptance of homosexuality. This can be seen in trends such as the acceptance of same-sex marriage.

While in 1997, 68% of Americans believed that same-sex marriage should not be valid, in 2021, 70% of adults believed that same-sex marriage should be valid, signaling a reversal in attitudes (Gallup, 2021).

Spanking, beyond being a physical punishment used to make children behave, has endured competing ideas, beliefs, and vocabularies put forth by critics and advocates over its definition, appropriateness, and implications.

Davis (1994) argued that the debate over spanking has become more complex in its themes and vocabularies over time. Traditionally, advocates have presented spanking as an answer to overly permissive parents.

Alternatively, pro-spankers may claim that spanking effectively prepares children for the harsh tribulations of life, that it is religiously condoned, that it is a tool, technique, or method for correcting behavior, or that it can allow parents and children to “start over” after a conflict (Davis, 1994).

Critics, however, have claimed that, rather than preventing youth problems, spanking creates them by destroying parent-child trust, instilling fear in the children, and fails to teach children self-control. Following shifting social attitudes, however, the meaning of spanking in the debate has changed.

Critics, for example, have shifted to claiming that spanking is compulsive, habit-forming, or addictive. In this view, parents are people who have lost their autonomy by becoming dependent on highly satisfying behavior.

Critics have also taken to calling spanking a demeaning, violent act that teaches children that violence is socially acceptable. Indeed, articles and newspapers have further conflated spanking and abuse, often emphasizing that spanking can easily lead to abuse.

Davis (1994) argues that activities in the wider professional, scientific, religious, and political contexts have prompted and shaped these changing meanings for spanking. For example, the psychological research on aggression in the 1950ss and 1960s challenged once wide-spread behaviorist assumptions about the role of punishment.

Many widely-popularized studies have provided results that suggest that physical punishment for aggressive behavior is associated with more aggression by children. In addition, the development of the modern child-protection movement in the 1960s and 1970s led to violence against children becoming a major policy issue.

Oftentimes, these discussions about child abuse deliberately mentioned and highlighted spanking (Davis, 1994). There have also been a number of groups that have combined to advocate against corporal punishment and abuse who have distributed pamphlets, surveys, and press releases about physical punishment and spanking since the 1980s.

All in all, spanking has come to be defined widely as child abuse as societal attitudes have shifted.

Bullying can encompass vandalism, gestures, withholding of important information, and making faces, as well as making unwanted eye contact and openly belittling individuals (Furedi, 2001).

In the United Kingdom in particular, campaigns around the problem of workplace bullying have held great influence on the perceptions of society. Advocates also claimed that workplace bullying is more prevalent in Britain than elsewhere.

According to one 1996 survey, while bullying in the European Union affected 8 percent of workers, 53 percent of employees in the United Kingdom have been bullied at work, and 78 percent have witnessed bullying (Furedi, 2001).

One reason for the widespread reporting of bullying and its eventual criminalization was active lobbying by anti-bullying campaigners, which was met with little resistance. Over the course of the 1990s, an issue that was once unknown succeeded in winning widespread recognition as a major social problem.

Campaigners avoided raising controversy by avoiding targeting any vested interests and attempting to appeal to all relevant interest groups. The victims of workplace bullies were presented as normal, everyday people entitled to sympathy.

Additionally, bullying was depicted as a form of antisocial behavior, feeding into a more general concern with incivility in British society (Furedi, 2001). Eventually, workplace bullying and harassment was deemed unlawful under the Equality Act of 2010.

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Cook, P. J., Morris, N., & Tonry, M. (1980). Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research.

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Furedi, F. (2001). Paranoid parenting.

Gibbons, D. C. (1968). Society, crime, and criminal careers: An introduction to criminology.

Hay, D. (1975). Property, authority and the criminal law.

Heidensohn, F. (1989). Crime and society. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Jones, G. M. (1987). Elderly People and Domestic Crime: Reflections on Ageism, Sexsm, Victimology. the British Journal of Criminology, 27(2), 191-201.

Kinsey, R., Lea, J., & Young, J. (1986). Losing the fight against crime. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kirk S.A. & Kutchins H. (1992) The Selling of DSM. The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne.

Maxfield, M. G. (1984). The limits of vulnerability in explaining fear of crime: A comparative neighborhood analysis. Journal of research in Crime and Delinquency, 21(3), 233-250.

McCarthy J. (2021, June 8). Record-High 70% in U.S. Support Same-Sex Marriage. GALLUP. https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx

Reinarman, C., & Levine, H. G. (1995). The construction of America’s crack crisis. Am, 30, 2001.

Schneider, J. W. (1985). Social problems theory: The constructionist view. Annual review of sociology, 11(1), 209-229.

Smith, D. A. (1986). The neighborhood context of police behavior. Crime and justice, 8, 313-341.

Spector, M., & Kitsuse, J. I. (1973). Social problems: A re-formulation. Social problems, 21(2), 145-159.

Tappan, P. W. (1947). Who is the Criminal?. American Sociological Review, 12(1), 96-102.

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Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

8.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Crime and Deviance

Why do crime and deviance occur? How does one become “a criminal” or “a deviant”? How does crime affect society and how does society affect crime? How do sociologists explain crime? Since the early days of sociology, crime and deviance have been seen as social problems that call for sociological research and explanation in order to find solutions.

Sociologists have developed theories attempting to explain what causes deviance and crime and what they mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological types of knowledge: positivism, critical sociology and interpretive sociology (see Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology ).

Positivist types of theory focus on identifying the background variables in an offender’s social environment that determine or predict criminal and deviant behaviour. Crime or deviance are taken as relatively straightforward to define. They are simply rule-breaking or law-breaking acts, which can be linked to objective variables in the offenders social backgrounds.

With critical sociology the picture gets more complicated. Critical types of theory focus on the historical context of class, gender, racial, colonial and other power relations in society to explain crime and deviance. Why are certain acts punished as criminal or deviant and certain acts not? Why are certain types of crime or deviance prevalent in one community, gender or social strata and not in others? Institutional regulation, the criminal justice system, and crime itself are seen as arms of different types of power, sometimes as extensions of power and sometimes as resistance.

Finally, interpretive types of theory focus on how the meanings of criminality or deviance get established. Key to understanding crime and deviance is not simply the objective fact of law-breaking or rule-breaking, but the intentions of the individuals involved, the variable meanings the acts or behaviours hold for people, and the social processes through which acts and individuals get defined as criminal or deviant. As Jack Katz (1988) puts it, “What are people trying to do when they commit a crime?” should be the first thing a sociologist asks.

The different paradigms within these types of knowledge lead to different ways of researching and addressing the problems of crime and deviance.

Sociologists who follow the positivist approach view the social world as a place governed by predictable and regular social patterns that can be uncovered through systematic observation. They are concerned with describing law-like relationships between variables that can predict outcomes: if this , then that. What are the background variables — age, family circumstances, economic position, racial or ethnic background, gender, etc. — that cause criminal or deviant behaviours or predict their likelihood in the future? The emphasis in positivism is on identifying factors that are directly observable or measurable, which implies that infractions themselves are straightforward to define. Tappan (1947) defines crime, for instance, as an intentional act that violates criminal law and is subject to penalization by the state. This is a relatively easy thing to identify through crime statistics and victimization surveys.

Early positivism relied on a biological or psychological defect model of crime and deviance to explain law-breaking and rule-breaking behaviours. As Box (1981) describes it, “people who break the rules of society were [seen as] defective, and … the root of this defect lay within them.” It was noted at the beginning of the chapter, for example, that Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) founded the 19th century school of positivism by attempting to isolate specific physiological characteristics of “degeneracy” that could distinguish “born criminals” from normal individuals (Rimke, 2011). Similarly, from the point of view of psychology, deviants could be distinguished by personality defects or traumas that cognitively or libidinally prevented them from adjusting to normal rule-following behaviour. The idea of the sociopath is a case in point.

In sociological positivism, the background variables identified in explanations of crime and deviance are not usually individual defects but “social defects.”  “Deviant behaviour [is] not to be perceived as the manifestation of a defective human being, but as the indicator of a defective social environment” (Box, 1981). Background variables like social disorganization, absence of social controls, and social strain (discussed below) are expected to predict a higher likelihood of criminal or deviant behaviour.

There are numerous frameworks in positivist sociology for identifying which variables of social environment are key. For example, Pratt and Cullen’s (2005) meta-analysis of 214 empirical studies discussed the relative strengths of seven different macro-level predictors of crime derived from seven different positivist theories including social disorganization theory, strain theory, economic deprivation theory, routine activity theory, deterrence theory, social support theory and subcultural theory. Their findings showed the strongest empirical support for explanations based on indicators of concentrated disadvantage, whereas explanations that emphasized lack of deterrence (increased policing, “tough on crime” policies) had the weakest support.

Four influential positivist theories of deviance are Durkheim’s functionalist theory, social disorganization theory, control theory and strain theory.

Émile Durkheim and Functionalism

Within positivism, the functionalist paradigm has been a productive source of explanatory frameworks for crime and deviance. Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach analyse the functions of different social structures, norms or patterns of behaviour in the maintenance of society, understood as a systematic whole.  This, oddly enough, includes crime and deviance, which are persistent social facts in all societies. Deviance, by definition, would appear to be the opposite of normal, yet Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) believed that deviance is a necessary, normal and functional part of normal society. Crime and deviance are disruptive, sometimes brutally so, but they also perform important functions.

Durkheim was aware of the diversity of acts or behaviours that different societies defined as criminal or deviant. He therefore defined crime by the one common external property it shared across different cultures and periods of history: crime is an act that offends the collective conscience and evokes collective punishment.  “[W]e note the existence of certain acts, all presenting the external characteristic that they evoke from society the particular reaction called punishment. We constitute them as a separate group, to which we give a common label; we call every punished act a crime…” (1938 (1895)). Crime and deviance are not defined by their individual motivations or by specific rules and infractions but by the collective response they evoke.

As such, crime and deviance have four important functions in supporting the social solidarity or cohesiveness of societies. They have: (1) a boundary-setting function , marking the moral boundaries that members of society should not cross; (2) a group solidarity function, uniting the group against a common enemy; (3) an adaptive function, allowing society to change its boundaries in response to new circumstances and innovative crimes (for example, the “sit in” protests of the Civil Rights Movement); and (4) a tension-reduction function , reducing the internal tensions of a society by projecting them onto criminal or deviant groups or scapegoats (Kramar, 2011).

Therefore, for Durkheim, the persistent patterns of crime and deviance observed in society could be explained by the functions they performed in maintaining society as a whole. These functions did not cause crime and deviance per se , but they explained why they existed and what their role in society was. It suggests that if crime and deviance did not exist they would have to be invented, otherwise substitutes for these functions would have to be found.

Social Disorganization Theory and Control Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. What they observed from the Chicago court records of juvenile offenders was that rates of crime were not evenly distributed across Chicago. High crime rates were concentrated in particular zones of the city and these rates remained stable over time, regardless of which particular individuals or groups resided there. In other words, crime rates seemed to be products of the areas, not the people per se . As the different ethnic, immigrant and racialized groups transitioned out of these zones and moved to other parts of the city, their crime rates decreased accordingly but the rates in the high crime zones remained stable. This lead the Chicago School sociologists to propose a social ecology theory of the city in which, like the biotic communities of  a natural ecosystem, different groups of people occupied specific niches in an over all system. Human communities were complex systems of mutual dependence that, like ecosystems, go through stages of succession from disruption to climax (or stable) communities.

They termed the disrupted areas zones of transition.  These had emerged near the center of Chicago along the transportation conduits into the city and between the established working class neighbourhoods and the manufacturing district. 1920s and 1930s Chicago was a city in flux. The city’s poorest and newest residents tended to live in these transitional, economically deprived zones, where there was a fractious mixture of racialized groups, immigrant ethnic groups, and non-English speakers. The Chicago School sociologists proposed that the zones themselves were socially disorganized.  They were sites of poor social control and regulation because their populations were fluid and transient and conventional institutions of control like family, schools, work, churches, and voluntary community organizations had not become established there (Shaw and McKay, 1942). In a certain way, this is the opposite of Durkheim’s thesis. Rather than deviance being a force that reinforces moral and social solidarity, it is the absence of moral and social solidarity that provides the conditions for social deviance to emerge.

Social disorganization theory points to the built environment and overall social organization of cities as the cause of deviance. A person is not born a criminal but becomes one over time, based on factors in their social environment. This theme was taken up by Travis Hirschi’s (1935-2017) control theory , which examines social disorganization from the point of view of the individual.

According to Hirschi, social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds that tie an individual to the institutional life of society (1969). Many people would be willing to break laws or deviate from the rules to reap the rewards of pleasure, excitement, and profit, etc. if they had the opportunity to do so. Those who do have the opportunity are those who are only weakly controlled by the type of social bonds that tie others to mainstream society and give them a stake in it. Similar to Durkheim’s theory of anomie ( Chapter 4. Society and Modern Life ), deviance is seen to result where disconnection from society predominates over social integration. Individuals who believe they are a part of society or believe they have a future in society are less likely to commit crimes against it.

Hirschi identified four types of social bond that connect people to society (1969):

•   Attachment measures the degree of connection to others. When one is closely attached to other people, one worries about their opinions. People conform to society’s norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, colleagues and romantic partners.
• Commitment refers to the investments people make in conforming to conventional behaviour. A well-respected local businesswoman who volunteers at her synagogue and is a member of the neighbourhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a woman who does not have a career or ties to the community. There is a cost/benefit calculation in the decision to commit a crime in which the costs of being caught are much higher for some than others.
• Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance simply due to lack of opportunity. Children who are members of Little League baseball teams have less time and opportunity to engage in deviant behaviour. “The person involved in conventional activities is tied to appointments, deadlines, working hours, plans, and the like, so the opportunity to commit deviant acts rarely arises” (Hirschi, 1969).
• The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, they will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park because a clean environment is a social value to that person.

Thus each of the types of bond Hirschi identifies describes a background variable which predicts who is more or less likely to engage in criminal acts. An individual who grows up under conditions where ties to legitimate institutions and authorities are weak, difficult to establish, or distant from the individual’s lived reality and future prospects is more likely to become a criminal than an individual from a privileged background who has a lot more at stake and a lot more to lose by breaking the law. The latter has “skin in the game”, whereas, for the former, the mutual dependencies and complex relationships that form the basis of a healthy “ecosystem” of social control do not get established.

Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. How can socially disorganized communities be reorganized?  Evidence from Pratt and Cullen’s (2005) meta-analysis suggests that social disorganization at the neighbourhood level is a stronger predictor of crime than variables concerning the implementation of “harder” law and order criminal justice policies (with the exception of the use of incarceration, which increases crime rates). The public policy implications of the sociological research therefore suggest that rather than using the police to crack down on crime in designated neighbourhoods, public spending and private investment should be used on programs physically located in the most economically deprived neighbourhoods and run by people from those neighbourhoods. This serves to create not only local employment but local institutions of community control, whose absence is in fact the source of the problem of social disorganization. Investments in community based agencies work to strengthen ties within the community and between people in the community and external social services. Research shows that social control is least effective when imposed by outside forces (Figueira-McDonough, 1991). In a similar vein, funding family preservation programs, which focus on keeping families intact and empowered rather than punishing individual offenders, strengthen families’ abilities to resist social disorganization (Nelson, Landsman and Duetelman, 1990). However, in proposing that social disorganization is essentially a moral problem of anomie — that it is shared moral values and social integration that hold communities together  — questions about historical relations of economic inequality, racism, and power do not get asked.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton (1910-2003) agreed that deviance is, ironically, a normal behaviour in modern society, but expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory (1938). He noted that social strains or contradictory forces are built into the structure of society when access to the legitimate means of achieving socially acceptable goals like material or financial success was not evenly distributed. A kind of anomie or normlessless emerged in segments of North American society because of a dysfunctional relationship or disequilibrium between values and norms.

The North American value system glorifies the value and prestige of wealth, while its normative system defines and regulates acceptable means of attaining wealth: a good job, a good education, a good network of contacts, a good familial background, a good neighbourhood, etc. For the majority of people this works without too much conflict. However, not everyone in North American society stands on equal footing. In a class based society not everyone has access to the legitimate means of obtaining success. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. This is a cause of mental and moral conflict for many.

According to Merton’s theory, a person growing up in a neighbourhood where conventional occupational opportunities are limited to unskilled, manual labour will see few opportunities to “get ahead” through legal means. Similarly, an entrepreneur who can not afford to launch his own company may be tempted to embezzle from his employer for start-up funds. When motivated by success but confronted with barriers to attaining it, individuals are caught in a quandary or strain that is built in to the structure of North American society. They are tempted to abandon the norms and rules and adopt alternative, illegitimate solutions (what Merton refered to as “innovations”) to attain the universally revered standards of success. The discrepancy between the reality of structural inequality and the high cultural value placed on economic success creates a strain that has to be resolved by some means.

Merton (1938) in fact defined five ways that people adapt to this strain between socially accepted goals and socially accepted ways to pursue them. These are indicated in Table 8.1 in which “+” indicates acceptance, “−” indicates rejection, and “+/−” indicates “rejection and substitution of new goals and standards.”

• Conformity : The majority of people in society choose to conform to institutionalized means of attaining success. They pursue their society’s valued goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
• Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by substituting criminal or deviant means.
• Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These “social ritualists” like middle management bureaucrats, hard workers who accept they will never get ahead or people who “go through the motions” focus on conformity to the accepted means of goal attainment while abandoning the distant, unobtainable dream of success.
• Retreatism : Others retreat from the structural strain and reject both society’s goals and accepted means. Some street people, hermits, religious cloisters, voluntary simplicity advocates or “back-to-the-landers” have withdrawn from society’s goal of financial success. They drop out.
• Rebellion : Some people rebel, seeking to replace a society’s goals and means with an alternate or revolutionary model.

With respect to crime and deviance, the second category “innovation” is the most relevant. In a class divided society, many youth from poor backgrounds are exposed to the high value placed on material success in capitalist society but face insurmountable odds to achieving it, so turning to illegal means to achieve success is a rational, more effective, in fact normal, solution to the problem. As Merton sums up, “On the one hand, they are asked to orient their conduct toward the prospect of accumulating wealth and on the other, they are largely denied effective opportunities to do so institutionally” (Merton, 1938). Al Capone’s ruthless choice of purely instrumental means over moral means to achieve success is a rational, if anomic, choice within a dysfunctional society.

Critical Sociology

Critical sociology examines macro-level social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike positivists, critical sociologists do not see these factors as objective social facts, but as evidence of operations of power and entrenched social inequalities. The normative order and the criminal justice system are not simply neutral or “functional” with regard to the collective interests of society. Institutions of normalization, law, and the criminal justice system have to be seen in context as mechanisms that actively maintain the power structure of the political-economic order.

The rich, the powerful, and the privileged have unequal influence on who and what gets labelled deviant or criminal, particularly in instances where their privilege or interests are being challenged. As capitalist society is based on the institution of private property, for example, it is not surprising that theft is a major category of crime. By the same token, when street people, addicts, or hippies drop out of society, they are labelled deviant and are subject to police harassment because they have refused to participate in the productive labour that is the basis of capital accumulation and profit.

Richard Quinney (1977) examined the role of law, policing and punishment in modern society. He argued that, as a result of inequality, many crimes can be understood as crimes of accommodation , or ways in which individuals cope with conditions of inequality and oppression. Predatory crimes like break and enter, robbery, and drug dealing are often simply economic survival strategies. Personal crimes like murder, assault, and sexual assault are products of the strains of living under stressful conditions of scarcit, deprivation and humiliation. Defensive crimes like economic sabotage, illegal strikes, civil disobedience, and eco-terrorism are direct political challenges to social injustice.

On the other hand, crimes committed by people in power are often crimes of domination . Crimes of control are committed by police and law enforcement, such as violations of rights, over-policing minority communities, illegal surveillance and use of excessive force. Crimes of government are committed by elected and appointed officials of the state through misuse of state powers, including corruption, misallocation of funds, political assassinations and illegal wars. Crimes of economic domination comprise white collar and corporate crime, including embezzlement, fraud, price-fixing, insider trading, tax evasion, unsafe work conditions, pollution, and marketing of hazardous products. Crimes of social injury include practices of institutional racism and economic exploitation, violations of basic human rights, or denials of gender, sexual and racial equality, that are often not considered unlawful.

Those in power define what crime is and who is excluded from full participation in society as a matter of course. Quinney pointed out that crimes of domination are not criminalized and policed to the degree that crimes of accommodation are, even though the harms they pose to society are greater and affect more people.

Inequality in normative regulation, law, policing and punishment is compounded in Canada through the legacy of colonialism. Although racial inequality has been formally eliminated by law and policy, racialized minorities are overrepresented in the criminal justice system in large part due to historical colonial narratives linking criminality and race (Mawani and Sealy, 2011). While crime rates have been declining overall, incarceration rates for Indigenous people and Blacks have increased, as has the use of racial profiling and the unequal application of discretionary powers by police and criminal justice authorities. A pattern of prejudice, racial bias and stereotyping is pervasive within the administration of justice.

Critical sociologists argue that this is not so much a product of a few “bad seeds” within the criminal justice system, but of the institutional repercussions of colonialism,  the process whereby Europeans established control over other people’s territories and lives. As the formal structures of colonial segregation were dismantled — i.e.,slavery, the Reserve system, residential schools,legal disenfranchisement, etc. — informal post-colonial segregation was reestablished to control the “freed” populations, who continue to be defined by the same colonial narratives as dangerous, violent, irrational, child-like, unassimmilable, un-civil, or degenerate Others.

Garland (1985) describes one outcome of this colonial legacy as the penal welfare complex . This refers to a system of control that effectively uses the prison and criminal justice system to manage the surplus, largely racialized, underclass of people who have been excluded from normal circuits of civility. Generations of people find themselves caught in a vicious circle of broken households, incarcerated parents or family members, engagement in minor crimes (petty theft, drinking alcohol in public, loitering, drugs, etc.), prison, parole, and back to prison because of parole violations. In the era of neoliberal capitalism, welfare budgets are cut and imprisonment expands, leading to the construction of a semi-permanent quasi-criminal population managed by police, judges, parole officers and social workers.

Crime and Social Class

While positivist theories often emphasize crime and deviance associated with the underprivileged, there is in fact no clear evidence that crimes are committed disproportionately by the poor or lower classes. There is an established association between the underprivileged and serious street crimes like armed robbery or assault, but these do not constitute the majority of crimes in society, nor the most serious crimes in terms of their overall social, personal, and environmental harms.

On the other hand, “suite crimes” or crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful remain an underpunished and costly problem within society. White-collar crime  refers to “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his [or her] occupation” (Sutherland, 1949). Corporate crime refers to crimes committed by corporate employees or owners in the pursuit of profit or other organization goals. White collar crime benefits the individual involved whereas corporate crime benefits the company or corporation. Both types of crime are more difficult to detect than street crime because the transactions take place in private and are more difficult to prosecute because the criminals can secure expert legal advice on how to bend the rules.

In the United States it has been estimated that the yearly value of all street crime is roughly 5 per cent of the value of corporate crime or “suite crime” (Snider, 1994). Comparable data is not compiled in Canada; however, the Canadian Department of Justice reported that the total value of property stolen or damaged due to property crime in 2008 was an estimated $5.8 billion (Zhang, 2008), which would put the cost of corporate crime at $116 billion (if the same ratio holds true in Canada). For example, Revenue Canada estimates that wealthy Canadians had a combined total of between $75.9 billion and $240.5 billion  in 2013 concealed in untaxed offshore tax havens (Canada Revenue Agency, 2018). In 2020, the Canada Revenue Agency was reported as pursuing an estimated $4.4 billion in taxes from individuals and corporations suspected of concealing wealth in offshore tax havens (Nardi, 2020).

PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 36 per cent of Canadian companies were subject to white-collar crime in 2013 (theft, fraud, embezzlement, cybercrime). One in ten lost $5 million or more (McKenna, 2014). Recent high-profile Ponzi scheme and investment frauds run into tens of millions of dollars each, destroying investors’ retirement savings. Vincent Lacroix was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2009 for defrauding investors of $115 million; Earl Jones was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2010 for defrauding investors of $50 million; Weizhen Tang was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2013 for defrauding investors of $52 million. These were highly publicized cases in which jail time was demanded by the public (although as nonviolent offenders the perpetrators are eligible for parole after serving one-sixth of their sentence). However, in 2011–2012 prison sentences were nearly twice as likely for the typically lower-class perpetrators of break and enters (59 per cent) as they were for typically middle- and upper-class perpetrators of fraud (35 per cent) (Boyce, 2013).

This imbalance based on class power can also be put into perspective with respect to homicide rates (Samuelson, 2000). In 2005, there were 658 homicides in Canada recorded by police, an average of 1.8 a day. This is an extremely serious crime, which merits the attention given to it by the criminal justice system. However, in 2005 there were also 1,097 workplace deaths that were, in principle, preventable. Canadians work on average 230 days a year, meaning that there were on average five workplace deaths a day for every working day in 2005 (Sharpe & Hardt, 2006). Estimates from the United States suggest that only one-third of on-the-job deaths and injuries can be attributed to worker carelessness (Samuelson, 2000).

In 2005, 51 per cent of the workplace deaths in Canada were due to occupational diseases like cancers from exposure to asbestos (Sharpe & Hardt, 2006). The Ocean Ranger oil rig collapse that killed 84 workers off Newfoundland in 1982 and the Westray Mine explosion that killed 26 workers in Nova Scotia in 1992 were due to design flaws and unsafe working conditions that were known to the owners. However, whereas corporations are prosecuted for regulatory violations governing health and safety, it is rare for corporations or corporate officials to be prosecuted for the consequences of those violations. “For example, a company would be fined for not installing safety bolts in a construction crane, but not prosecuted for the death of several workers who were below the crane when it collapsed (as in a recent case in Western Canada)” (Samuelson, 2000).

Corporate crime is arguably a more harmful type of crime than street crime, yet white-collar criminals are treated relatively leniently. Fines, when they are imposed, are typically absorbed as a cost of doing business and passed on to consumers, and many crimes, from investment fraud to insider trading and price fixing, are simply not prosecuted. For example, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that law enforcement fail to apprehend money launderers 99.8% of the time (UNODC, 2011). From a critical sociology point of view, this is because white-collar crime is committed by elites who are able to use their power and financial resources to evade punishment. Here are some examples:

• An expert panel estimated that annual money laundering activity in Canada in 2018 was $46.7 billion and $7.4 billion in British Columbia (Maloney, Somerville and Unger, 2019). The use of real estate as a means to launder money is estimated to be a major contributer to the inflation of real estate prices in Vancouver, increasing property values by approximately 5% and contributing to the affordability crisis. However because of laws protecting the privacy of financial transactions and property ownership information, law enforcement agencies have difficulty tracing who has committed money-laundering crime, where the crime has been committed, or even that a crime has been committed at all.
• The KPMG offshore tax avoidance scheme involved creating shell companies for Canadian multimillionaires and billionaires in the Isle of Man, where clients could “give away” their wealth and get back regular tax-free “gifts,”  thus avoiding paying federal taxes. Because of difficultities in prosecuting the cases, the Canada Revenue Agency offered secret amnesty to some clients who had been using the scheme and “settled out of court” with others (Cashore and Zalac, 2021;  Cashore, Ivany & Findlay , 2017).
• In the United States, not a single criminal charge was filed against a corporate executive after the financial mismanagement of the 2008 financial crisis. The American Security and Exchange Commission levied a total of $2.73 billion in fines and out-of-court settlements, but the total cost of the financial crisis was estimated to be between $6 and $14 trillion (Pyke, 2013).
• In Canada, three Nortel executives were charged by the RCMP’s Integrated Market Enforcement Team (IMET) with fraudulently altering accounting procedures in 2002–2003 to make it appear that Nortel was running a profit (thereby triggering salary bonuses for themselves totalling $12 million), but were acquitted in 2013. The accounting procedures were found to inflate the value of the company, but the intent to defraud could not be proven. The RCMP’s IMET, implemented in 2003 to fight white-collar crime, managed only 11 convictions over the first nine years of its existence (McFarland & Blackwell, 2013).
• Canadian pipeline company Enbridge’s 20,000-barrel spill of bitumen (tar sands) oil into the Kalamazoo River, Michigan in 2010 was allowed to continue for 17 hours and involved the company twice re-pumping bitumen into the pipeline. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report noted that the spill was the result of  “pervasive organizational failures,” and documents revealed that the pipeline operators were more concerned about getting home for the weekend than solving the problem (Rusnell, 2012). No criminal charges were laid.

Feminist Contributions

Women who are regarded as criminally deviant are often seen as being  doubly deviant . They have broken the law but they have also broken gender norms about appropriate female behaviour, whereas men’s criminal behaviour is seen as consistent with their aggressive, self-assertive character.

This double standard explains the tendency to medicalize women’s deviance, to see it as the product of physiological or psychiatric pathology. For example, in the late 19th century, kleptomania was a diagnosis used in legal defences that linked an extreme desire for department store commodities with various forms of female physiological or psychiatric illness. The fact that “good” middle- and upper-class women, who were at that time coincidentally beginning to experience the benefits of independence from men, would turn to stealing in department stores to obtain the new feminine consumer items on display there, could not be explained without resorting to diagnosing the activity as an illness of the “weaker sex” (Kramar, 2011).

Feminist analysis focuses on the way gender inequality influences the opportunities to commit crime and the definition, detection, and prosecution of crime. In part the gender difference revolves around patriarchal attitudes toward women and the disregard for matters considered to be of a private or domestic nature. For example, until 1969 abortion was illegal in Canada, meaning that hundreds of women died or were injured each year when they received illegal abortions (McLaren & McLaren, 1997). It was not until the Supreme Court ruling in 1988 that struck down the law that it was acknowledged that women are capable of making their own choice, in consultation with a doctor, about the procedure.

Similarly, until the 1970s two major types of criminal deviance were largely ignored or were difficult to prosecute as crimes: sexual assault and spousal assault. Through the 1970s, women worked to change the criminal justice system and establish rape crisis centres and battered women’s shelters, bringing attention to domestic violence. In 1983 the Criminal Code was amended to replace the crimes of rape and indecent assault with a three-tier structure of sexual assault (ranging from unwanted sexual touching that violates the integrity of the victim to sexual assault with a weapon or threats or causing bodily harm to aggravated sexual assault that results in wounding, maiming, disfiguring, or endangering the life of the victim) (Kong et al., 2003). Holly Johnson (1996) reported that in the mid-1990s, when violence against women began to be surveyed systematically in Canada, 51 per cent of Canadian women had been the subject to at least one sexual or physical assault since the age of 16.

The goal of the amendments was to emphasize that sexual assault is an act of violence, not a sexual act. Previously, rape had been defined as an act that involved penetration and was perpetrated against a woman who was not the wife of the accused. This had excluded spousal sexual assault as a crime and had also exposed women to secondary victimization by the criminal justice system when they tried to bring charges. Secondary victimization occurs when the women’s own sexual history and her willingness to consent are questioned in the process of laying charges and reaching a conviction, which as feminists pointed out, increased victims’ reluctance to lay charges.

In particular, feminists challenged the twin myths of rape that were often the subtext of criminal justice proceedings presided over largely by men (Kramar, 2011). The first myth is that women are untrustworthy and tend to lie about assault out of malice toward men, as a way of getting back at them for personal grievances. The second myth, is that women will say no to sexual relations when they really mean yes. Typical of these types of issues was the judge’s comment in a Manitoba Court of Appeal case in which a man pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his twelve- or thirteen-year-old babysitter:

The girl, of course, could not consent in the legal sense, but nonetheless was a willing participant. She was apparently more sophisticated than many her age and was performing many household tasks including babysitting the accused’s children. The accused and his wife were somewhat estranged (as cited in Kramar, 2011).

Because the girl was willing to perform household chores in place of the man’s estranged wife, the judge assumed she was also willing to engage in sexual relations. In order to address these types of issue, feminists successfully pressed the Supreme Court to deliver rulings that restricted a defence attorney’s access to a victim’s medical and counselling records and rules of evidence were changed to prevent a woman’s past sexual history being used against her. Consent to sexual discourse was redefined as what a woman actually says or does, not what the man believes to be consent. Feminists also argued that spousal assault was a key component of patriarchal power. Typically it was hidden in the household and largely regarded as a private, domestic matter in which police were reluctant to get involved.

Interestingly women and men report similar rates of spousal violence — in 2009, 6 per cent had experienced spousal violence in the previous five years — but women are more likely to experience more severe forms of violence including multiple victimizations and violence leading to physical injury (Sinha, 2013). In order to empower women, feminists pressed lawmakers to develop zero-tolerance policies that would support aggressive policing and prosecution of offenders. These policies oblige police to lay charges in cases of domestic violence when a complaint is made, whether or not the victim wished to proceed with charges (Kramar, 2011).

In 2009, 84 per cent of violent spousal incidents reported by women to police resulted in charges being laid. However, according to victimization surveys only 30 per cent of actual incidents were reported to police. The majority of women who did not report incidents to the police stated that they dealt with them in another way, felt they were a private matter, or did not think the incidents were important enough to report. A significant proportion, however, did not want anyone to find out (44 per cent), did not want their spouse to be arrested (40 per cent), or were too afraid of their spouse (19 per cent) (Sinha, 2013).

Interpretive Sociology

Interpretive sociology is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviours as deviant or conventional. The key emphasis is on the way that the meanings which guide behaviour are constructed in the course of social interactions and become attached to things and people. Research focuses on the social processes through which specific activities and identities are socially defined as “deviant” and then come to be “lived” as deviant. Deviance is something that, in essence, is learned. In interpretive research, crime, deviance and deviants are not approached as quantifiable things or objects, but as the products of processes of criminalization, Othering and identity formation .

• Criminalization is “the process by which behaviors and individuals are transformed into crime and criminals” (Michalowski, 1985). For example, Becker (1963) notes the processes whereby moral entrepreneurs and authorities come to decide that specific activities are criminal, as well as the sequence of interactions with the criminal justice system that a person goes through in being assigned a criminal identity.
• Othering is the process in which an individual becomes recognized and stigmatized as socially deviant. In Othering, a deviant,  abnormal or Other group is defined in opposition to a “normal” group.  Negative or deviant characteristics are attributed to behaviours, individuals or groups that set them apart as abnormal, different or “other.” This is a process that involves power relations because not all groups have the power to determine what heir social identity is. For example, Michel Foucault describes the institutional “dividing practices” used in psychology, medicine and criminology to objectify the subjects under their control in relation to norms of sanity, health, and innocence that the institutions themselves define: the “mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys'” (Foucault, 1994).
• Identity formation is the process in which an individual creates and sustains a self-image and position in the world. In the study of crime and deviance, identity formation describes the process in which an individual goes from committing an act of deviance or rule breaking to assuming a deviant identity in which rule breaking is a matter of course. It involves a process of aligning subjective self-understanding with external definitions of self.

To sum up, social groups and authorities create deviance by first making the rules and then applying them to people who are thereby labelled as outsiders (Becker, 1963). Deviance is not an intrinsic quality of individuals but is created through the social interactions of various authorities, institutions and individuals.

Deviance as Learned Behaviour

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland (1883-1950) sought to understand how deviant behaviour developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub, 2006). His conclusions established differential association theory , stating that individuals learn deviant behaviour from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. Differential association refers to the balance of a persons criminal and non-criminal associations. “A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of the law over definitions unfaviourable to violation of law” (Sutherland and Cressey, 1977). In other words, having a social milieu in which most of ones contacts encourage or normalize criminality predicts the likelihood of becoming criminal, whereas a social milieu where ones contacts discourage criminality predict the opposite. A teenager whose friends shoplift is more likely to view shoplifting as acceptable.

The concept of deviance as learned behaviour can be illustrated by Howard Becker’s (b. 1928) study of marijuana users in the jazz club scene of Chicago in the 1950s (1953). Becker paid his way through graduate studies by performing as a jazz pianist and took the opportunity to study his fellow musicians. He conducted 50 interviews and noted that becoming a marijuana user involved a social process of initiation into a deviant role that could not be accounted for by either the physiological properties of cannabis or the psychological needs (for intoxication, escape, fantasy, etc.) of the individual. Rather the “career” of the marijuana user involved a sequence of changes in attitude and experience learned through social interactions with experienced users before cannabis could be regularly smoked for pleasure.

Regular cannabis use was a social achievement that required the individual to pass through three distinct stages. Failure to do so meant that the individual would not assume a deviant role as a regular user of cannabis.

• Firstly, individuals had to learn to smoke cannabis in a way that would produce real effects. Many first-time users do not feel the effects. If they are not shown how to inhale the smoke or how much to smoke, they might not feel the drug had any effect on them. Their “career” might end there if they are not encouraged by others to persist.
• Secondly, they had to learn to recognize the effects of “being high” and connect them with drug use. Although people might display different symptoms of intoxication — feeling hungry, elated, rubbery, etc. — they might not recognize them as qualities associated with the cannabis or even recognize them as different at all. Through listening to experienced users talk about their experiences, novices are able to locate the same type of sensations in their own experience and notice something qualitatively different going on.
• Thirdly, they had to learn how to enjoy the sensations. They had to learn how to define the situation of getting high as pleasurable. Smoking cannabis is not necessarily pleasurable and often involves uncomfortable experiences like loss of control, impaired judgement, insecurity, distorted perception, and paranoia. Unless the experiences can be redefined as pleasurable, the individual will not become a regular user. Often experienced users are able to coach novices through difficulties and encourage them by telling them they will learn to like it. It is through differential association with a specific set of individuals that a person learns and assumes a deviant role. The role needs to be learned and its value recognized before it can become routine or normal for the individual.

Procurement into prostitution involves a similar process, one which is manipulated by the procurers or pimps. Hodgson (1997) describes two methods of procurement that pimps use to draw girls into a life of prostitution. After judging a girl’s level of vulnerability, they deploy either a seduction method , providing affection, attention and emotional support for the most isolated girls, or a stratagem method, promising wealth, glamour and excitement for those who are less vulnerable. After a girl has “chosen” to stay with the “family,” they are socialized step by step to comply to the roles, rules and expectations of the world of prostitution. Their former identity is neutralized and attachment to previously learned values and norms is weakened through a process that begins with (a) training in the rules of the sex trade by the pimp’s “wife-in-law” or “main lady,” (b) turning the first trick, which deepens the girl’s identification with street culture and the other prostitutes, and (c) the use of violence to enforce compliance when the girl has second thoughts and the relationship with the pimp deteriorates. At each stage the girl finds herself more deeply entrenched in a world of norms, values and behaviours that are strongly stigmatized in the dominant culture. While various levels of coercion are present, the process of learning, internalizing and acknowledging the deviant self-image and social role of the prostitute is necessary for continued participation in prostitution.

Labeling Theory

Although many people violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Often, those who do, however, have gradually come to believe they are deviant because they been labelled “deviant” by society. Labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behaviour to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviours themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviours. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures. As Becker put it, “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to the offender. The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour people so label” (1963).

It is important to note that labeling theory does not address the initial motives or reasons for the rule-breaking behaviour, which might be unknowable, but the outcome of criminal justice procedures that process offenders as deviants. It does not attempt to answer the questions of why people break the rules so much as why particular acts or particular individuals are labelled deviant while others are not. How do certain acts get labelled deviant and what are the consequences?

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory, identifying two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is the initial violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view the offender as a bad person, nor does it alter offender’s own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

However, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person’s self-concept and behaviour begin to change after their actions are labelled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labelled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, develops a reputation as a “troublemaker.” As a result, the student might take these reprimands as a mark of status and start acting out even more, breaking more rules, adopting the troublemaker label and embracing this deviant identity.

Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts. The criminal justice system is ironically one of the primary agencies of socialization into the criminal “career path.” The labels “juvenile delinquent” or “criminal” are not automatically applied to individuals who break the law. A teenager who is picked up by the police for a minor misdemeanour might be labelled as a “good kid” who made a mistake and who then is released after a stern talking to, or they might be labelled a juvenile delinquent and processed as a young offender. In the first case, the incident may not make any impression on the teenager’s personality or on the way others react to them. In the second case, being labelled a juvenile delinquent sets up a set of responses to the teenager by police and authorities that lead to criminal charges, more severe penalties, and a process of socialization into the criminal identity.

In detention in particular, individuals learn how to assume the identity of serious offenders as they interact with hardened, long-term inmates within the prison culture (Wheeler, 1961). The act of imprisonment itself modifies behaviour, to make individuals more criminal. Aaron Cicourel’s (b. 1928) research in the 1960s showed how police used their discretionary powers to label rule-breaking teenagers who came from homes where the parents were divorced as juvenile delinquents and to arrest them more frequently than teenagers from “intact homes” (1968). Judges were also found to be more likely to impose harsher penalties on teenagers from divorced families. Unsurprisingly, Cicourel noted that subsequent research conducted on the social characteristics of teenagers who were charged and processed as juvenile delinquents found that children from divorced families were more likely to be charged and processed. Divorced families were seen as a cause of youth crime. This set up a vicious circle in which the research confirmed the prejudices of police and judges who continued to label, arrest, and convict the children of divorced families disproportionately. The labeling process acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy in which police found what they expected to see.

Once a label is applied it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy . Self-fulfilling prophecies refer to the mechanisms put in play by the act of labeling, which “conspire to shape the person in the image people have of him” (Becker, 1963). A person may or may not fit the label given, but through a series of processes eventually does. Becker notes several elements in the process in which a label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Firstly, someone who has been labelled a criminal or deviant based on committing a specific act of deviance or crime is often considered as criminal and deviant in other respects as well. Their entire personality is tainted. They are considered, at their core, “to be a person ‘without respect for the law'” (Becker, 1963). Secondly, once characterized as such, a person tends to get cut off and isolated from participation in conventional social life even if, prior to the labeling, their deviant activity did not affect their participation. The use of intravenous drugs might not affect a user’s work performance but the public knowledge and subsequent reaction to their drug use will most likely lead to them losing their job. The person who is labelled as an addict is seen as “weak-willed” and unemployable, whether actual job performance is affected or not. Thirdly, as a consequence of the resulting social isolation, the labelled person finds it difficult not to break other norms and laws, which they had otherwise no intention of breaking. They are also more likely to turn to social support from criminal or deviant subcultures where the support from conventional society has been withdrawn. To continue to enjoy the pleasures of using prohibited drugs, the user is obliged to turn to the black market where drugs are expensive and dangerous and forge relationships there. “Hence the treatment of the addict’s deviance places him in a position where it will probably be necessary to resort to deceit and crime in order to support his habit. The behavior is a consequence of the public reaction to the deviance rather than a consequence of the inherent qualities of the deviant act” (Becker, 1963).

Micro sociology: The Foreground of Crime and Deviance

Much of the sociological explanation of crime and deviance focuses on the background variables that lead or make it likely that individuals will break rules. Positivist sociology often examines background factors like broken homes, employment status, neighbourhood or social strain, etc. as causes of criminality or deviance. Critical sociology examines structural inequalities based on class, gender or race, etc. as the historical context of crime and deviance. Micro-sociologists do not necessarily disagree, but emphasize that crime or rule-breaking, whatever its likelihood predicted by background variables, always takes place in a particular situation and a particular moment in time. They draw attention to the foreground variables of rule breaking: the immediate circumstances of the violation, the opportunities and impediments to rule breaking that are present, the different motives, experiences and interpretations of the people involved, and the moods and emotional process of perpetrators (or victims). Without these foreground factors the crime or violation would not take place.

As Katz (1988) puts it, something “in the moment” must exist to propel an individual to commit a crime. Each crime has unique situational or micro-sociological variables that provide the foreground of the crime.

By way of explanation, I will propose for each type of crime a different set of individually’ necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, each set containing (1) a path of action — distinctive practical requirements for successfully committing the crime, (2) a line of interpretation — unique ways of understanding how one is and will be seen by others, and (3) an emotional process — seductions and compulsions that have special dynamics (Katz, 1988).

Katz notes in particular that there is an emotional quality that accompanies different types of crime: the hot-blooded murder, the furtive sneakiness of shoplifting, the hardening of the stickup “hardman,” etc. Each type of crime has its own “seductions and compulsions”— a distinctive and compelling feeling or attraction to the perpetrator in the moment that leads them to overcome resistance. Types of moral emotion such as “humiliation, righteousness, arrogance, ridicule, cynicism, defilement, and vengeance” (Katz, 1988) are especially central to experiences of criminal rule breaking. One of the most compelling attractions of rule breaking is to overcome a challenge and “prove oneself” in some fashion. The highschool shooter seeks to overcome the humiliation of having his masculinity challenged by committing an act of exaggerated violent masculinity. The teenage shoplifter engages in a “thrilling melodrama about the self” in being able to demonstrate personal competence and get away with shoplifting under the noses of adults. These claims to “moral existence,” as Katz describes them, (i.e.,claims to self-validity, self-righteousness or self-vindication, etc.), are compelling motivators in the moment of the act.

Similarly, Collins (2008) argues that micro-sociological or situational variables have to be taken into account in explaining violence. Although background conditions of poverty, racial discrimination, toxic masculinity, family disorganization, abuse, stress, frustration or exposure to media violence, etc. might predispose someone to violence, they are not sufficient to explain specific acts of violence. Micro-sociological evidence shows that in order for violence to take place in actual face-to-face situations, a person has to overcome powerful barriers that are built in to the processes of social interaction itself. He refers to this as a confrontational tension/fear barrier. Violence is difficult to accomplish because the natural tendency in any social interaction is agreement. Dischord and confrontation cause tension, which is uncomfortable and usually avoided, but if the confrontation escalates towards violence, a potent physiological “cocktail” in the form of fear, anxiety and adrenalin kicks in as a barrier to the confrontation going further. “No matter how motivated someone may be, if the situation does not unfold so that confrontational tension/fear is overcome, violence will not proceed” (Collins, 2008). This applies to ordinary street violence, domestic violence and other criminal violence, as well as professional violence such as police violence or military combat, where direct confrontations take place face to face. Violence is correspondingly easier the more distant the combatants are from each other.

For example, Collins describes the escalation of tensions and “bluster” that lead to street fights. Tensions escalate in a confrontation when the individuals start breaking the codes of conversational turn taking and start talking over each other. The argument gets louder and more heated as each person tries to control the “conversational space,” interrupting the other and disrupting the other’s ability to speak. The cognitive content of the dispute tends to dissipate and is replaced by staccato utterances,  insults, and swearing, which have more dramatic impact. However, usually the confrontation will end before coming to violence. One person will leave “in a huff” even if it means loss of face, or the exchange will become boring and lose energy, for both the participants and the audience. Only if specific situational conditions are met will the confrontation become violent.

[C]onfrontations bring tension and fear, which inhibits effective violence; emotional tension gets released into violent attack only where there is a weak victim, or where the conflict is hedged round with social supports to make it a staged fight fought within socially enforced limits. Thus bluster is likely to lead onward to a fight in one of these two circumstances: First, if one side feels much stronger than the other, at least at that moment, the stronger launches an attack. The bluster itself may provide the test of who is weaker; wavering or cringing in the face of bluster, or retreating from it, is one thing that can trigger an attack. Second, if there is a highly interested audience, witnessing the buildup of boast and bluster, the scene is set for a fight, and the principals may not be able to back out of it if they wished (Collins, 2008).

As a result, Collins defines violence micro-sociologically as a process:  “a set of pathways around confrontational tension and fear” (Collins, 2008).

From the micro-sociological perspective, it is important for sociology to determine the situational circumstances of rule-breaking or crime in forming an explanation therefore: “I suggest that a seemingly simple question be asked persistently in detailed application to the facts of criminal experience: what are people trying to do when they commit a crime?” (Katz, 1988).

Media Attributions

• Figure 8.9 Joker Mask Crime Clown Thug Goon 7241 by Brecht Bug, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.
• Figure 8.10 Face measurements based on Lombroso’s criminal anthropology by Nicolasbuenaventura, via Wikimedia Commons, is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.
• Figure 8.11 File:Camden NJ poverty.jpg by Phillies1fan777 at English Wikipedia, is in the public domain . (Uploaded by Apollo1758.) 
• Figure 8.12 Mug shot of Capone in Miami, Florida, 1930 by Miami Police Department, via Wikipedia, is in the public domain .
• Figure 8.13   Spy vs Sci 573 by Anonymous9000, via OpenVerse, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
• Figure 8.14 Cocaine Fact Sheet via US Drug Enforcement Agency/ Department of Justice, is in the public domain .
• Figure 8.15   63rd St. by Howard Becker (Used by permission of Howard Becker).
• Figure 8.16   Chopper by Daniel Grosvenor, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

Introduction to Sociology – 3rd Canadian Edition Copyright © 2023 by William Little is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Labelling Theory of Crime

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Last Updated on November 22, 2023 by Karl Thompson

The labelling Theory of Crime is associated with Interactionism – the Key ideas are that crime is socially constructed, agents of social control label the powerless as deviant and criminal based on stereotypical assumptions and this creates effects such as the self-fulfilling prophecy, the criminal career and deviancy amplification.

Interactionists argue that people do not become criminals because of their social background, but rather argue that crime emerges because of labelling by authorities. They see crime as the product of micro-level interactions between certain individuals and the police, rather than the result of external social forces such as socialisation or blocked opportunity structures.

Deviance is seen a moral career consisting of interlocking phases, each has different problems and opportunities, different actors, and each phase is contingent, never inevitable or irreversible. 

Four Key concepts associated with Interactionist theories of deviance

Crime is socially constructed.

Rather than taking the definition of crime for granted, labelling theorists are interested in how certain acts come to be defined or labelled as criminal in the first place.

Howard Becker illustrates how crime is the product of social interactions by using the example of a fight between young people. In a low-income neighbourhood, a fight is more likely to be defined by the police as evidence of delinquency, but in a wealthy area as evidence of high spirits. The acts are the same, but the meanings given to them by the audience (in this case the public and the police) differ . Those who have the power to make the label stick thus create deviants or criminals.

You could apply the same thinking to criminal behaviour more generally in Britain – According to a recent 2015 survey of 2000 people, the average person in Britain breaks the law 17 ties per year, with 63% admitting speeding, 33% steeling and 25% taking illegal drugs – clearly the general public is tolerant of ‘ordinary’ deviance – but every now and then someone will get spotted doing ‘ordinary’ criminal activities and publicly shamed.

In summary – deviance is not a quality that lies in behaviour itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it . From this point of view, deviance is produced by a process of interaction between the potential deviant and the wider public (both ordinary people and agencies of social control).

Application of the concept of ‘social constructionism’ to drug crime –

Looking at how drug laws have changed over time, and how they vary from country to country to country is a very good way of looking at how the deviant act of drug-taking is socially constructed…

NB – There’s a lot more information about the social construction of drug use out there – think about the difference between coffee, nicotine, alcohol (all legal) and cannabis. 

Discussion Question

Not everyone who is deviant gets labelled.

Those in Power are just as deviant/ criminal as actual ‘criminals’ but they are more able to negotiate themselves out of being labelled as criminals.

This leads labelling theorists to look at how laws are applied and enforced. Their studies show that agencies of social control are more likely to label certain groups of people as deviant or criminal.

Aaron Cicourel – Power and the negotiation of justice

The first stage is the decision by the police to stop and interrogate an individual. This decision is based on meanings held by the police of what is ‘strange’, ‘unusual’ and ‘wrong’. Whether or not the police stop and interrogate an individual depends on where the behaviour is taking place and on how the police perceive the individual(s). Whether behaviour is deemed to be ‘suspicious’ will depend on where the behaviour is taking place, for example an inner city, a park, a suburb. If a young person has a demeanour like that of a ‘typical delinquent’ then the police are more likely to both interrogate and arrest that person.

As a result, the middle class delinquent is more likely to be defined as ill rather than criminal, as having accidentally strayed from the path of righteousness just the once and having a real chance of reforming.

Discussion Questions

Q2 – From a research methods point of view, what research methods could you use to test this theory?

The Consequences of Labelling

Primary and secondary deviance.

In such meetings, criminals and deviants are forced to confront their own primary deviance (and others fleeting and insubstantial reactions) BUT ALSO content publicly with the formal reaction of others.  Then deviance becomes a response to a response, it is secondary . 

Thus public response and measures of control come to be written into the fabric of their identities. 

And once labelled it becomes more difficult for the deviant to slip back into ordinary life. 

Edwin Lemert’s study of the Coastal Inuit

To illustrate this, Lemert studied the the coastal Inuit of Canada, who had a long-rooted problem of chronic stuttering or stammering. Lemert suggested that the problem was ’caused’ by the great importance attached to ceremonial speech-making. Failure to speak well was a great humiliation. Children with the slightest speech difficulty were so conscious of their parents’ desire to have well-speaking children that they became over anxious about their own abilities. It was this anxiety which lead to chronic stuttering.

Labelling, The Deviant Career and the Master Status

This is Howard Becker’s classic statement of how labelling theory can be applied across the whole criminal justice system to demonstrated how criminals emerge, possibly over the course of many years. Basically the public, the police and the courts selectively label the already marginalised as deviant, which the then labelled deviant responds to by being more deviant.

Labelling Theory Applied to Education

There is also evidence of a similar process happening with African Caribbean children. Sociologists such as David Gilborn argue that teachers hold negative stereotypes of young black boys, believing them to be more threatening and aggressive than White and Asian children. They are thus more likely to interpret minor rule breaking by black children in a more serious manner than when White and Asian children break minor rules.

For a more in-depth post on the material in this section you might like: Teacher Labelling and the Self Fulfilling Prophecy .

Labelling Theory Applied to the Media

A moral panic is “an exaggerated outburst of public concern over the morality or behaviour of a group in society.” Deviant subcultures have often been the focus of moral panics. According to Interactionists, the Mass Media has a crucial role to play in creating moral panics through exaggerating the extent to which certain groups and turning them into ‘Folk Devils’ – people who are threatening to public order.

The term ‘moral panic’ was first used in Britain by Stan Cohen in a classic study of two youth subcultures of the 1960s – ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’. Cohen showed how the media, for lack of other stories exaggerated the violence which sometimes took place between them. The effect of the media coverage was to make the young people categorise themselves as either mods or rockers which actually helped to create the violence that took place between them, which further helped to confirm them as violent in the eyes of the general public.

Labelling and Criminal Justice Policy

According to Interactionist theory, decriminalisation should reduce the number of people with criminal convictions and hence the risk of secondary deviance, an argument which might make particular sense for many drugs offences because these are often linked to addiction, which may be more effectively treated medically rather than criminally. (The logic here is that drug-related crime isn’t intentionally nasty, drug-addicts do it because they are addicted, hence better to treat the addiction rather than further stigmatise the addict with a criminal label).

Reintegrative Shaming

Braithwaite argues that crime rates are lower where policies of reintegrative shaming are employed.

Evaluation of Labelling Theory

Labelling theory emphasises the following, criticisms of labelling theory, revision bundle for sale.

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

Signposting/ Related Posts

My main page of links to crime and deviance posts .

Labelling Theory is related to Interpretivism in that it focuses on the small-scale aspects of social life.

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Chapter 7 Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Social issues in the news.

“Attack Leaves Voter, 73, in Pain and Fear,” the headline said. A 73-year-old woman had just voted in the primary election in Boston, Massachusetts. As she walked home, two men rushed up, grabbed her purse, and knocked her down. She later said, “In this situation, you don’t think too much. Only, you get scared when people try to take everything from you.” A neighbor who came to the victim’s aid recalled, “I heard a woman in distress, screaming for help. I just jumped out of bed and looked out the window. And I could see an elderly person on her knees, crying.” The police later arrested a 19-year-old suspect for robbery and assault and battery. The city’s district attorney said of the crime, “It’s despicable. Only a coward would attack a 73-year-old woman from behind. He’s brought shame to himself and his family, and he can count on an extremely aggressive prosecution.” (Ellement, 2008) Ellement, J. R. (2008, September 18). Attack leaves voter, 73, in pain and fear. The Boston Globe, p. B1.

This terrible crime was just one of millions that occur in the United States each year. A central message of this book so far is that society is possible because people conform to its norms, values, and roles. As the sad story of the 73-year-old Boston voter illustrates, this chapter has a different message: that people often violate their society’s norms and are sometimes punished for doing so. Why do they commit deviance and crime? What influences their chances of being punished? How do behaviors come to be defined as deviant or criminal? Recalling this book’s emphasis on changing society, how can crime and deviance be reduced? These are questions that sociologists have long tried to answer, and we explore possible answers in the pages that follow.

7.1 Social Control and the Relativity of Deviance

Learning objectives.

• Define deviance, crime, and social control.
• Understand why Émile Durkheim said deviance is normal.
• Understand what is meant by the relativity of deviance.

Deviance Behavior that violates norms and arouses negative social reactions. is behavior that violates social norms and arouses negative social reactions. Some behavior is considered so harmful that governments enact written laws that ban the behavior. Crime Behavior that violates criminal laws. is behavior that violates these laws and is certainly an important type of deviance that concerns many Americans.

The fact that both deviance and crime arouse negative social reactions reminds us that every society needs to ensure that its members generally obey social norms in their daily interaction. Social control The ways in which society prevents and sanctions behavior that violates social norms. refers to ways in which a society tries to prevent and sanction behavior that violates norms. Just as a society like the United States has informal and formal norms (see Chapter 2 "Eye on Society: Doing Sociological Research" ), so does it have informal and formal social control. Generally, informal social control is used to control behavior that violates informal norms, and formal social control is used to control behavior that violates formal norms. We typically decline to violate informal norms, if we even think of violating them in the first place, because we fear risking the negative reactions of other people. These reactions, and thus examples of informal social control, include anger, disappointment, ostracism, and ridicule. Formal social control in the United States typically involves the legal system (police, judges and prosecutors, corrections officials) and also, for businesses, the many local, state, and federal regulatory agencies that constitute the regulatory system.

Social control is never perfect, and so many norms and people exist that there are always some people who violate some norms. In fact, Émile Durkheim (1895/1962), Durkheim, É. (1962). The rules of sociological method (Ed. S. Lukes). New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1895) a founder of sociology discussed in Chapter 1 "Sociology and the Sociological Perspective" , stressed that a society without deviance is impossible for at least two reasons. First, the collective conscience (see Chapter 1 "Sociology and the Sociological Perspective" ) is never strong enough to prevent all rule breaking. Even in a “society of saints,” such as a monastery, he said, rules will be broken and negative social reactions aroused. Second, because deviance serves several important functions for society (which we discuss later in this chapter), any given society “invents” deviance by defining certain behaviors as deviant and the people who commit them as deviants. Because Durkheim thought deviance was inevitable for these reasons, he considered it a normal part of every healthy society.

Although deviance is normal in this regard, it remains true that some people are more likely than others to commit it. It is also true that some locations within a given society have higher rates of deviance than other locations; for example, U.S. cities have higher rates of violent crime than do rural areas. Still, Durkheim’s monastery example raises an important point about the relativity of deviance: whether a behavior is considered deviant depends on the circumstances in which the behavior occurs and not on the behavior itself. Although talking might be considered deviant in a monastery, it would certainly be considered very normal elsewhere. If an assailant, say a young male, murders someone, he faces arrest, prosecution, and, in many states, possible execution. Yet if a soldier kills someone in wartime, he may be considered a hero. Killing occurs in either situation, but the context and reasons for the killing determine whether the killer is punished or given a medal.

Deviance is also relative in two other ways. First, it is relative in space : a given behavior may be considered deviant in one society but acceptable in another society. Recall the discussion of sexual behavior in Chapter 3 "Culture" , where we saw that sexual acts condemned in some societies are often practiced in others. Second, deviance is relative in time : a behavior in a given society may be considered deviant in one time period but acceptable many years later; conversely, a behavior may be considered acceptable in one time period but deviant many years later. In the late 1800s, many Americans used cocaine, marijuana, and opium, because they were common components of over-the-counter products for symptoms like depression, insomnia, menstrual cramps, migraines, and toothaches. Coca-Cola originally contained cocaine and, perhaps not surprisingly, became an instant hit when it went on sale in 1894 (Goode, 2008). Goode, E. (2008). Drugs in American society . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Today, of course, all three drugs are illegal.

The relativity of deviance in all these ways is captured in a famous statement by sociologist Howard S. Becker (1963, p. 9), Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance . New York, NY: Free Press. who wrote several decades ago that

deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules or sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.

This insight raises some provocative possibilities for society’s response to deviance and crime. First, harmful behavior committed by corporations and wealthy individuals may not be considered deviant, perhaps because “respectable” people engage in them. Second, prostitution and other arguably less harmful behaviors may be considered very deviant because they are deemed immoral or because of bias against the kinds of people (poor and nonwhite) thought to be engaging in them. These considerations yield several questions that need to be answered in the study of deviance. First, why are some individuals more likely than others to commit deviance? Second, why do rates of deviance differ within social categories such as gender, race, social class, and age? Third, why are some locations more likely than other locations to have higher rates of deviance? Fourth, why are some behaviors more likely than others to be considered deviant? Fifth, why are some individuals and those from certain social backgrounds more likely than other individuals to be considered deviant and punished for deviant behavior? Sixth and last but certainly not least, what can be done to reduce rates of violent crime and other serious forms of deviance? The sociological study of deviance and crime aims to answer all of these questions.

Key Takeaways

• Deviance is behavior that violates social norms and arouses negative social reactions.
• Crime is behavior that is considered so serious that it violates formal laws prohibiting such behavior.
• Social control refers to ways in which a society tries to prevent and sanction behavior that violates norms.
• Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a normal part of every society.
• Whether a behavior is considered deviant depends on the circumstances under which it occurs. Considerations of certain behaviors as deviant also vary from one society to another and from one era to another within a given society.

For Your Review

• In what ways is deviance considered relative?
• Why did Durkheim consider deviance a normal part of society?

7.2 Explaining Deviance

Learning objective.

• State the major arguments and assumptions of the various sociological explanations of deviance.

If we want to reduce violent crime and other serious deviance, we must first understand why it occurs. Many sociological theories of deviance exist, and together they offer a more complete understanding of deviance than any one theory offers by itself. Together they help answer the questions posed earlier: why rates of deviance differ within social categories and across locations, why some behaviors are more likely than others to be considered deviant, and why some kinds of people are more likely than others to be considered deviant and to be punished for deviant behavior. As a whole, sociological explanations highlight the importance of the social environment and of social interaction for deviance and the commision of crime. As such, they have important implications for how to reduce these behaviors. Consistent with this book’s public sociology theme, a discussion of several such crime-reduction strategies concludes this chapter.

We now turn to the major sociological explanations of crime and deviance. A summary of these explanations appears in Table 7.1 "Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime" .

Table 7.1 Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime

Functionalist Explanations

Several explanations may be grouped under the functionalist perspective in sociology, as they all share this perspective’s central view on the importance of various aspects of society for social stability and other social needs.

Émile Durkheim: The Functions of Deviance

As noted earlier, Émile Durkheim said deviance is normal, but he did not stop there. In a surprising and still controversial twist, he also argued that deviance serves several important functions for society.

First, Durkheim said, deviance clarifies social norms and increases conformity. This happens because the discovery and punishment of deviance reminds people of the norms and reinforces the consequences of violating them. If your class were taking an exam and a student was caught cheating, the rest of the class would be instantly reminded of the rules about cheating and the punishment for it, and as a result they would be less likely to cheat.

A second function of deviance is that it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant. An example comes from the classic story The Ox-Bow Incident (Clark, 1940), Clark, W. V. T. (1940). The ox-bow incident . New York, NY: Random House. in which three innocent men are accused of cattle rustling and are eventually lynched. The mob that does the lynching is very united in its frenzy against the men, and, at least at that moment, the bonds among the individuals in the mob are extremely strong.

A final function of deviance, said Durkheim, is that it can help lead to positive social change. Although some of the greatest figures in history—Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. to name just a few—were considered the worst kind of deviants in their time, we now honor them for their commitment and sacrifice.

Émile Durkheim wrote that deviance can lead to positive social change. Many Southerners had strong negative feelings about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, but history now honors him for his commitment and sacrifice.

Source: Photo courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3c26559 .

Sociologist Herbert Gans (1996) Gans, H. J. (1996). The war against the poor: The underclass and antipoverty policy . New York, NY: Basic Books. pointed to an additional function of deviance: deviance creates jobs for the segments of society—police, prison guards, criminology professors, and so forth—whose main focus is to deal with deviants in some manner. If deviance and crime did not exist, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people in the United States would be out of work!

Although deviance can have all of these functions, many forms of it can certainly be quite harmful, as the story of the mugged voter that began this chapter reminds us. Violent crime and property crime in the United States victimize millions of people and households each year, while crime by corporations has effects that are even more harmful, as we discuss later. Drug use, prostitution, and other “victimless” crimes may involve willing participants, but these participants often cause themselves and others much harm. Although deviance according to Durkheim is inevitable and normal and serves important functions, that certainly does not mean the United States and other nations should be happy to have high rates of serious deviance. The sociological theories we discuss point to certain aspects of the social environment, broadly defined, that contribute to deviance and crime and that should be the focus of efforts to reduce these behaviors.

Social Ecology: Neighborhood and Community Characteristics

An important sociological approach, begun in the late 1800s and early 1900s by sociologists at the University of Chicago, stresses that certain social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods raise the odds that people growing up and living in these neighborhoods will commit deviance and crime. This line of thought is now called the social ecology approach The view that certain characteristics of neighborhoods and communities influence the likelihood of committing deviance and crime. (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008). Mears, D. P., Wang, X., Hay, C., & Bales, W. D. (2008). Social ecology and recidivism: Implications for prisoner reentry. Criminology, 46, 301–340. Many criminogenic (crime-causing) neighborhood characteristics have been identified, including high rates of poverty, population density, dilapidated housing, residential mobility, and single-parent households. All of these problems are thought to contribute to social disorganization The weakening of social bonds and conventional social institutions in a community. , or weakened social bonds and social institutions, that make it difficult to socialize children properly and to monitor suspicious behavior (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008; Sampson, 2006). Mears, D. P., Wang, X., Hay, C., & Bales, W. D. (2008). Social ecology and recidivism: Implications for prisoner reentry. Criminology, 46, 301–340; Sampson, R. J. (2006). How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates. In P.-O. H. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 31–60). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Sociology Making a Difference

Improving Neighborhood Conditions Helps Reduce Crime Rates

One of the sociological theories of crime discussed in the text is the social ecology approach. To review, this approach attributes high rates of deviance and crime to the neighborhood’s social and physical characteristics, including poverty, high population density, dilapidated housing, and high population turnover. These problems create social disorganization that weakens the neighborhood’s social institutions and impairs effective child socialization.

Much empirical evidence supports social ecology’s view about negative neighborhood conditions and crime rates and suggests that efforts to improve these conditions will lower crime rates. Some of the most persuasive evidence comes from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (directed by sociologist Robert J. Sampson), in which more than 6,000 children, ranging in age from birth to 18, and their parents and other caretakers were studied over a 7-year period. The social and physical characteristics of the dozens of neighborhoods in which the subjects lived were measured to permit assessment of these characteristics’ effects on the probability of delinquency. A number of studies using data from this project confirm the general assumptions of the social ecology approach. In particular, delinquency is higher in neighborhoods with lower levels of “collective efficacy,” that is, in neighborhoods with lower levels of community supervision of adolescent behavior.

The many studies from the Chicago project and data in several other cities show that neighborhood conditions greatly affect the extent of delinquency in urban neighborhoods. This body of research in turn suggests that strategies and programs that improve the social and physical conditions of urban neighborhoods may well help decrease the high rates of crime and delinquency that are so often found there. (Bellair & McNulty, 2009; Sampson, 2006) Bellair, P. E., & McNulty, T. L. (2009). Gang membership, drug selling, and violence in neighborhood context. Justice Quarterly, 26 , 644–669; Sampson, R. J. (2006). How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates. In P.-O. H. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 31–60). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Strain Theory

Failure to achieve the American dream lies at the heart of Robert Merton’s (1938) Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. famous strain theory Robert Merton’s view that deviance is caused by a failure to achieve the American goal of financial success through the conventional means of working. (also called anomie theory). Recall from Chapter 1 "Sociology and the Sociological Perspective" that Durkheim attributed high rates of suicide to anomie, or normlessness, that occurs in times when social norms are unclear or weak. Adapting this concept, Merton wanted to explain why poor people have higher deviance rates than the nonpoor. He reasoned that the United States values economic success above all else and also has norms that specify the approved means, working, for achieving economic success. Because the poor often cannot achieve the American dream of success through the conventional means of working, they experience a gap between the goal of economic success and the means of working. This gap, which Merton likened to Durkheim’s anomie because of the resulting lack of clarity over norms, leads to strain or frustration. To reduce their frustration, some poor people resort to several adaptations, including deviance, depending on whether they accept or reject the goal of economic success and the means of working. Table 7.2 "Merton’s Anomie Theory" presents the logical adaptations of the poor to the strain they experience. Let’s review these briefly.

Table 7.2 Merton’s Anomie Theory

Despite their strain, most poor people continue to accept the goal of economic success and continue to believe they should work to make money. In other words, they continue to be good, law-abiding citizens. They conform to society’s norms and values, and, not surprisingly, Merton calls their adaptation conformity .

Faced with strain, some poor people continue to value economic success but come up with new means of achieving it. They rob people or banks, commit fraud, or use other illegal means of acquiring money or property. Merton calls this adaptation innovation .

Other poor people continue to work at a job without much hope of greatly improving their lot in life. They go to work day after day as a habit. Merton calls this third adaptation ritualism . This adaptation does not involve deviant behavior but is a logical response to the strain poor people experience.

In Merton’s fourth adaptation, retreatism , some poor people withdraw from society by becoming hobos or vagrants or by becoming addicted to alcohol, heroin, or other drugs. Their response to the strain they feel is to reject both the goal of economic success and the means of working.

Merton’s fifth and final adaptation is rebellion . Here poor people not only reject the goal of success and the means of working but work actively to bring about a new society with a new value system. These people are the radicals and revolutionaries of their time. Because Merton developed his strain theory in the aftermath of the Great Depression, in which the labor and socialist movements had been quite active, it is not surprising that he thought of rebellion as a logical adaptation of the poor to their lack of economic success.

Although Merton’s theory has been popular over the years, it has some limitations. Perhaps most important, it overlooks deviance such as fraud by the middle and upper classes and also fails to explain murder, rape, and other crimes that usually are not done for economic reasons. It also does not explain why some poor people choose one adaptation over another.

Merton’s strain theory stimulated other explanations of deviance that built on his concept of strain. Differential opportunity theory Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s view that differential access to illegitimate means helps determine the types of deviance in which poor people engage. , developed by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs . New York, NY: Free Press. tried to explain why the poor choose one or the other of Merton’s adaptations. Whereas Merton stressed that the poor have differential access to legitimate means (working), Cloward and Ohlin stressed that they have differential access to illegitimate means . For example, some live in neighborhoods where organized crime is dominant and will get involved in such crime; others live in neighborhoods rampant with drug use and will start using drugs themselves.

In a more recent formulation, two sociologists, Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (2007), Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. expanded Merton’s view by arguing that in the United States crime arises from several of our most important values, including an overemphasis on economic success, individualism, and competition. These values produce crime by making many Americans, rich or poor, feel they never have enough money and by prompting them to help themselves even at other people’s expense. Crime in the United States, then, arises ironically from the country’s most basic values.

In yet another extension of Merton’s theory, Robert Agnew (2007) Agnew, R. (2007). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory . Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. reasoned that adolescents experience various kinds of strain in addition to the economic type addressed by Merton. A romantic relationship may end, a family member may die, or students may be taunted or bullied at school. Repeated strain-inducing incidents such as these produce anger, frustration, and other negative emotions, and these emotions in turn prompt delinquency and drug use.

Deviant Subcultures

Some sociologists stress that poverty and other community conditions give rise to certain subcultures through which adolescents acquire values that promote deviant behavior. One of the first to make this point was Albert K. Cohen (1955), Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang . New York, NY: Free Press. whose status frustration theory Albert Cohen’s view that delinquency results from school failure and the concomitant need to regain self-esteem by being successful in delinquent activities. says that lower-class boys do poorly in school because schools emphasize middle-class values. School failure reduces their status and self-esteem, which the boys try to counter by joining juvenile gangs. In these groups, a different value system prevails, and boys can regain status and self-esteem by engaging in delinquency. Cohen had nothing to say about girls, as he assumed they cared little about how well they did in school, placing more importance on marriage and family instead, and hence would remain nondelinquent even if they did not do well. Scholars later criticized his disregard for girls and assumptions about them.

Another sociologist, Walter Miller (1958), Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14 , 5–19. said poor boys become delinquent because they live amid a lower-class subculture that includes several focal concerns Walter Miller’s term for the key values of lower-class subcultures. , or values, that help lead to delinquency. These focal concerns include a taste for trouble, toughness, cleverness, and excitement. If boys grow up in a subculture with these values, they are more likely to break the law. Their deviance is a result of their socialization. Critics said Miller exaggerated the differences between the value systems in poor inner-city neighborhoods and wealthier, middle-class communities (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

A very popular subcultural explanation is the so-called subculture of violence Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti’s term for the value system of poor, urban neighborhoods that calls for violent responses to insults and other interpersonal problems. thesis, first advanced by Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti (1967). Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence . London, England: Social Science Paperbacks. In some inner-city areas, they said, a subculture of violence promotes a violent response to insults and other problems, which people in middle-class areas would probably ignore. The subculture of violence, they continued, arises partly from the need of lower-class males to “prove” their masculinity in view of their economic failure. Quantitative research to test their theory has failed to show that the urban poor are more likely than other groups to approve of violence (Cao, Adams, & Jensen, 1997). Cao, L., Adams, A., & Jensen, V. J. (1997). A test of the black subculture of violence thesis: A research note. Criminology, 35, 367–379. On the other hand, recent ethnographic (qualitative) research suggests that large segments of the urban poor do adopt a “code” of toughness and violence to promote respect (Anderson, 1999). Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city . New York, NY: W. W. Norton. As this conflicting evidence illustrates, the subculture of violence view remains controversial and merits further scrutiny.

Social Control Theory

Travis Hirschi (1969) Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency . Berkeley: University of California Press. argued that human nature is basically selfish and thus wondered why people do not commit deviance. His answer, which is now called social control theory Travis Hirschi’s view that deviance results from weak bonds to conventional social institutions, such as the family and schools. (also known as social bonding theory ), was that their bonds to conventional social institutions such as the family and the school keep them from violating social norms. Hirschi’s basic perspective reflects Durkheim’s view that strong social norms reduce deviance such as suicide.

Hirschi outlined four types of bonds to conventional social institutions: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

• Attachment refers to how much we feel loyal to these institutions and care about the opinions of people in them, such as our parents and teachers. The more attached we are to our families and schools, the less likely we are to be deviant.
• Commitment refers to how much we value our participation in conventional activities such as getting a good education. The more committed we are to these activities and the more time and energy we have invested in them, the less deviant we will be.
• Involvement refers to the amount of time we spend in conventional activities. The more time we spend, the less opportunity we have to be deviant.
• Belief refers to our acceptance of society’s norms. The more we believe in these norms, the less we deviate.

Hirschi’s theory has been very popular. Many studies find that youths with weaker bonds to their parents and schools are more likely to be deviant. But the theory has its critics (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. One problem centers on the chicken-and-egg question of causal order. For example, many studies support social control theory by finding that delinquent youths often have worse relationships with their parents than do nondelinquent youths. Is that because the bad relationships prompt the youths to be delinquent, as Hirschi thought? Or is it because the youths’ delinquency worsens their relationship with their parents? Despite these questions, Hirschi’s social control theory continues to influence our understanding of deviance. To the extent it is correct, it suggests several strategies for preventing crime, including programs designed to improve parenting and relations between parents and children (Welsh & Farrington, 2007). Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (Eds.). (2007). Preventing crime: What works for children, offenders, victims and places . New York, NY: Springer.

Conflict and Feminist Explanations

Explanations of crime rooted in the conflict perspective reflect its general view that society is a struggle between the “haves” at the top of society with social, economic, and political power and the “have-nots” at the bottom. Accordingly, they assume that those with power pass laws and otherwise use the legal system to secure their position at the top of society and to keep the powerless on the bottom (Bohm & Vogel, 2011). Bohm, R. M., & Vogel, B. (2011). A Primer on crime and delinquency theory (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. The poor and minorities are more likely because of their poverty and race to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. These explanations also blame street crime by the poor on the economic deprivation and inequality in which they live rather than on any moral failings of the poor.

Some conflict explanations also say that capitalism helps create street crime by the poor. An early proponent of this view was Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger (1916), Bonger, W. (1916). Criminality and economic conditions (H. P. Horton, Trans.). Boston, MA: Little, Brown. who said that capitalism as an economic system involves competition for profit. This competition leads to an emphasis in a capitalist society’s culture on egoism , or self-seeking behavior, and greed . Because profit becomes so important, people in a capitalist society are more likely than those in noncapitalist ones to break the law for profit and other gains, even if their behavior hurts others.

Not surprisingly, conflict explanations have sparked much controversy (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Many scholars dismiss them for painting an overly critical picture of the United States and ignoring the excesses of noncapitalistic nations, while others say the theories overstate the degree of inequality in the legal system. In assessing the debate over conflict explanations, a fair conclusion is that their view on discrimination by the legal system applies more to victimless crime (discussed in a later section) than to conventional crime, where it is difficult to argue that laws against such things as murder and robbery reflect the needs of the powerful. However, much evidence supports the conflict assertion that the poor and minorities face disadvantages in the legal system (Reiman & Leighton, 2010). Reiman, J., & Leighton, P. (2010). The rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, class, and criminal justice (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Simply put, the poor cannot afford good attorneys, private investigators, and the other advantages that money brings in court. As just one example, if someone much poorer than O. J. Simpson, the former football player and media celebrity, had been arrested, as he was in 1994, for viciously murdering two people, the defendant would almost certainly have been found guilty. Simpson was able to afford a defense costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and won a jury acquittal in his criminal trial (Barkan, 1996). Barkan, S. E. (1996). The social science significance of the O. J. Simpson case. In G. Barak (Ed.), Representing O. J.: Murder, criminal justice and mass culture (pp. 36–42). Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston. Also in accordance with conflict theory’s views, corporate executives, among the most powerful members of society, often break the law without fear of imprisonment, as we shall see in our discussion of white-collar crime later in this chapter. Finally, many studies support conflict theory’s view that the roots of crimes by poor people lie in social inequality and economic deprivation (Barkan, 2009). Barkan, S. E. (2009). The value of quantitative analysis for a critical understanding of crime and society. Critical Criminology, 17 , 247–259.

Feminist Perspectives

Feminist perspectives on crime and criminal justice also fall into the broad rubric of conflict explanations and have burgeoned in the last two decades. Much of this work concerns rape and sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and other crimes against women that were largely neglected until feminists began writing about them in the 1970s (Griffin, 1971). Griffin, S. (1971, September). Rape: The all-American crime. Ramparts, 10 , 26–35. Their views have since influenced public and official attitudes about rape and domestic violence, which used to be thought as something that girls and women brought on themselves. The feminist approach instead places the blame for these crimes squarely on society’s inequality against women and antiquated views about relations between the sexes (Renzetti, 2011). Renzetti, C. (2011). Feminist criminology . Manuscript submitted for publication.

Another focus of feminist work is gender and legal processing. Are women better or worse off than men when it comes to the chances of being arrested and punished? After many studies in the last two decades, the best answer is that we are not sure (Belknap, 2007). Belknap, J. (2007). The invisible woman: Gender, crime, and justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Women are treated a little more harshly than men for minor crimes and a little less harshly for serious crimes, but the gender effect in general is weak.

A third focus concerns the gender difference in serious crime, as women and girls are much less likely than men and boys to engage in violence and to commit serious property crimes such as burglary and motor vehicle theft. Most sociologists attribute this difference to gender socialization. Simply put, socialization into the male gender role, or masculinity, leads to values such as competitiveness and behavioral patterns such as spending more time away from home that all promote deviance. Conversely, despite whatever disadvantages it may have, socialization into the female gender role, or femininity, promotes values such as gentleness and behavior patterns such as spending more time at home that help limit deviance (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004). Chesney-Lind, M., & Pasko, L. (2004). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Noting that males commit so much crime, Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind (1988, p. 527) Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5, 497–538. wrote,

A large price is paid for structures of male domination and for the very qualities that drive men to be successful, to control others, and to wield uncompromising power.…Gender differences in crime suggest that crime may not be so normal after all. Such differences challenge us to see that in the lives of women, men have a great deal more to learn.

Two decades later, that challenge still remains.

Symbolic Interactionist Explanations

Because symbolic interactionism focuses on the means people gain from their social interaction, symbolic interactionist explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social interaction and social processes that normal individuals experience. These explanations help us understand why some people are more likely than others living in the same kinds of social environments. Several such explanations exist.

Differential Association Theory

One popular set of explanations, often called learning theories , emphasizes that deviance is learned from interacting with other people who believe it is OK to commit deviance and who often commit deviance themselves. Deviance, then, arises from normal socialization processes. The most influential such explanation is Edwin H. Sutherland’s (1947) Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology . Philadelphia, PA: J. P. Lippincott. differential association theory Edwin Sutherland’s view that deviance stems from interacting with primary group members who commit deviance and have values conducive to deviance. , which says that criminal behavior is learned by interacting with close friends and family members. These individuals teach us not only how to commit various crimes but also the values, motives, and rationalizations that we need to adopt in order to justify breaking the law. The earlier in our life that we associate with deviant individuals and the more often we do so, the more likely we become deviant ourselves. In this way, a normal social process, socialization, can lead normal people to commit deviance.

Sutherland’s theory of differential association was one of the most influential sociological theories ever. Over the years much research has documented the importance of adolescents’ peer relationships for their entrance into the world of drugs and delinquency (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. However, some critics say that not all deviance results from the influences of deviant peers. Still, differential association theory and the larger category of learning theories it represents remain a valuable approach to understanding deviance and crime.

Labeling Theory

If we arrest and imprison someone, we hope they will be “scared straight,” or deterred from committing a crime again. Labeling theory The view that extralegal factors affect whether someone acquires a deviant label and that being labeled deviant increases the chances of future deviance. assumes precisely the opposite: it says that labeling someone deviant increases the chances that the labeled person will continue to commit deviance. According to labeling theory, this happens because the labeled person ends up with a deviant self-image that leads to even more deviance. Deviance is the result of being labeled (Bohm & Vogel, 2011). Bohm, R. M., & Vogel, B. (2011). A primer on crime and delinquency theory (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

This effect is reinforced by how society treats someone who has been labeled. Research shows that job applicants with a criminal record are much less likely than those without a record to be hired (Pager, 2009). Pager, D. (2009). Marked: Race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Suppose you had a criminal record and had seen the error of your ways but were rejected by several potential employers. Do you think you might be just a little frustrated? If your unemployment continues, might you think about committing a crime again? Meanwhile, you want to meet some law-abiding friends, so you go to a singles bar. You start talking with someone who interests you, and in response to this person’s question, you say you are between jobs. When your companion asks about your last job, you reply that you were in prison for armed robbery. How do you think your companion will react after hearing this? As this scenario suggests, being labeled deviant can make it difficult to avoid a continued life of deviance.

Labeling theory also asks whether some people and behaviors are indeed more likely than others to acquire a deviant label. In particular, it asserts that nonlegal factors such as appearance, race, and social class affect how often official labeling occurs.

William Chambliss’s (1973) Chambliss, W. J. (1973). The saints and the roughnecks. Society, 11, 24–31. classic analysis of the “Saints” and the “Roughnecks” is an excellent example of this argument. The Saints were eight male high-school students from middle-class backgrounds who were very delinquent, while the Roughnecks were six male students in the same high school who were also very delinquent but who came from poor, working-class families. Although the Saints’ behavior was arguably more harmful than the Roughnecks’, their actions were considered harmless pranks, and they were never arrested. After graduating from high school, they went on to college and graduate and professional school and ended up in respectable careers. In contrast, the Roughnecks were widely viewed as troublemakers and often got into trouble for their behavior. As adults they either ended up in low-paying jobs or went to prison.

Labeling theory’s views on the effects of being labeled and on the importance of nonlegal factors for official labeling remain controversial. Nonetheless, the theory has greatly influenced the study of deviance and crime in the last few decades and promises to do so for many years to come.

• Both biological and psychological explanations assume that deviance stems from problems arising inside the individual.
• Sociological explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social environment.
• Several functionalist explanations exist. Durkheim highlighted the functions that deviance serves for society. Merton’s strain theory assumed that deviance among the poor results from their inability to achieve the economic success so valued in American society. Other explanations highlight the role played by the social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods, of deviant subcultures, and of weak bonds to social institutions.
• Conflict explanations assume that the wealthy and powerful use the legal system to protect their own interests and to keep the poor and racial minorities subservient. Feminist perspectives highlight the importance of gender inequality for crimes against women and of male socialization for the gender difference in criminality.
• Interactionist explanations highlight the importance of social interaction in the commitment of deviance and in reactions to deviance. Labeling theory assumes that the labeling process helps ensure that someone will continue to commit deviance, and it also assumes that some people are more likely than others to be labeled deviant because of their appearance, race, social class, and other characteristics.
• In what important way do biological and psychological explanations differ from sociological explanations?
• What are any two functions of deviance according to Durkheim?
• What are any two criminogenic social or physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods?
• What are any two assumptions of feminist perspectives on deviance and crime?
• According to labeling theory, what happens when someone is labeled as a deviant?

7.3 Crime and Criminals

• Describe how gender and race affect public opinion about crime.
• Explain problems in the accurate measurement of crime.
• Describe the demographic backgrounds (race, gender, age, location) of conventional criminals.
• Be familiar with examples of white-collar crime and with the various harms of such crime.
• Explain the arguments over laws prohibiting victimless crime.

We now turn our attention from theoretical explanations of deviance and crime to certain aspects of crime and the people who commit it. What do we know about crime and criminals in the United States?

Crime and Public Opinion

One thing we know is that the American public is very concerned about crime. In a 2009 Gallup Poll, about 55% said crime is an “extremely” or “very” serious problem in the United States, and in other national surveys, about one-third of Americans said they would be afraid to walk alone in their neighborhoods at night (Maguire & Pastore, 2009; Saad, 2008). Maguire, K., & Pastore, A. L. (2009). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics . Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook ; Saad, L. (2008). Perceptions of crime problem remain curiously negative. Retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/102262/Perceptions-Crime-Problem-Remain-Curiously-Negative.aspx

Recall that according to the sociological perspective, our social backgrounds affect our attitudes, behavior, and life chances. Do gender and race affect our fear of crime? Figure 7.1 "Gender and Fear of Crime" shows that gender has quite a large effect. About 46% of women are afraid to walk alone at night, compared to only 17% of men. Because women are less likely than men to be victims of crime other than rape, their higher fear of crime reflects their heightened fear of rape and other types of sexual assault (Warr, 2000). Warr, M. (2000). Public perceptions of and reactions to crime. In J. F. Sheley (Ed.), Criminology: A contemporary handbook (3rd ed., pp. 13–31). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Figure 7.1 Gender and Fear of Crime

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

Race also makes a difference. Figure 7.2 "Race and Fear of Crime" shows that African Americans are more afraid than whites of walking near their homes alone at night. This difference reflects the fact that African Americans are more likely than whites to live in large cities with high crime rates and to live in higher crime neighborhoods within these cities (Peterson & Krivo, 2009). Peterson, R. D., & Krivo, L. J. (2009). Segregated spatial locations, race-ethnic composition, and neighborhood violent crime. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623 , 93–107.

Figure 7.2 Race and Fear of Crime

Race also affects views about the criminal justice system. For example, African Americans are much less likely than whites to favor the death penalty ( Figure 7.3 "Race and Support for the Death Penalty" ), in part because they perceive that the death penalty and criminal justice system in general are racially discriminatory (Johnson, 2008). Johnson, D. (2008). Racial prejudice, perceived injustice, and the black–white gap in punitive attitudes. Journal of Criminal Justice, 36, 198–206.

Figure 7.3 Race and Support for the Death Penalty

The Measurement of Crime

It is surprisingly difficult to know how much crime occurs. Crime is not like the weather, when we all can see whether it is raining, snowing, or sunny. Usually when crime occurs, only the criminal and the victim, and sometimes an occasional witness, know about it. Although we have an incomplete picture of the crime problem, because of various data sources we still have a fairly good understanding of how much crime exists and of who is most likely to do it and be victimized by it.

The government’s primary source of crime data is the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) The FBI’s regular compilation of crime statistics, most of them on Index Crimes. , published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI gathers its data from police departments around the country, who inform the FBI about crimes that have come to their attention. The police also tell the FBI whether someone is arrested for the crime and, if so, the person’s age, gender, and race. The FBI gathers all of these UCR data and reports them in an annual volume called Crime in the United States .

Most UCR data concern the so-called Part I Offenses The FBI’s term for the major crimes included in the Uniform Crime Reports, including homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson. , eight felonies that the FBI considers the most serious. Four of these are violent crimes: homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery; four are property crimes: burglary, larceny (e.g., shoplifting, pickpocketing, purse snatching), motor vehicle theft, and arson.

According to the FBI, in 2008 almost 1.4 million violent crimes and 9.8 million property crimes occurred, for a total of almost 11.2 million serious crimes, or 3,667 for every 100,000 Americans. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2009). Crime in the United States, 2008 . Washington, DC: Author. This is the nation’s official crime rate, and by any standard it is a lot of crime. However, this figure is in fact much lower than the actual crime rate because, according to surveys of random samples of crime victims, more than half of all crime victims do not report their crimes to the police , leaving the police unaware of the crimes. (Reasons for nonreporting include the belief that police will not be able to find the offender and fear of retaliation by the offender.) The true crime problem is therefore much greater than suggested by the UCR.

This underreporting of crime represents a major problem for the UCR’s validity. Several other problems exist (Lynch & Addington, 2007). Lynch, J. P., & Addington, L. A. (2007). Understanding crime statistics: Revisiting the divergence of the NCVS and the UCR . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. First, the UCR omits crime by corporations and thus diverts attention away from their harm (see a little later in this chapter). Second, police practices affect the UCR. For example, the police do not record every report they hear from a citizen as a crime. Sometimes they have little time to do so, sometimes they do not believe the citizen, and sometimes they deliberately fail to record a crime to make it seem that they are doing a good job of preventing crime. If they do not record the report, the FBI does not count it as a crime. If the police start recording every report, the official crime rate will rise, even though the actual number of crimes has not changed. In a third problem, if crime victims become more likely to report their crimes to the police, which might have happened after the 911 emergency number became common, the official crime rate will again change, even if the actual number of crimes has not changed.

To get a more accurate picture of crime, the federal government began in the early 1970s to administer a survey, now called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) An annual survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice that asks a representative sample of the American public about crimes they have suffered. , to tens of thousands of randomly selected U.S. households. People in the households are asked whether they or their residence has been the victim of several different types of crimes in the past half year. Their responses are then extrapolated to the entire U.S. population to yield fairly accurate estimates of the actual number of crimes occurring in the nation. Still, the NCVS’s estimates are not perfect. Among other problems, some respondents decline to tell NCVS interviewers about victimizations they have suffered, and the NCVS’s sample excludes some segments of the population, such as the homeless, whose victimizations therefore go uncounted.

Table 7.3 "Number of Crimes: Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey, 2009" lists the number of violent and property crimes as reported by the UCR (see earlier) and estimated by the NCVS. Note that these two crime sources do not measure exactly the same crimes. For example, the NCVS excludes commercial crimes such as shoplifting, while the UCR includes them. The NCVS includes simple assaults (where someone receives only a minor injury), while the UCR excludes them. These differences notwithstanding, we can still see that the NCVS estimates about twice as many crimes as the UCR reports to us.

Table 7.3 Number of Crimes: Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey, 2009

Source: Data from Pastore, A. L., & Maguire, K. (2010). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics . Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook .

A third source of crime information is the self-report survey A survey given to individuals, usually adolescents, that asks them about offenses they have committed. . Here subjects, usually adolescents, are given an anonymous questionnaire and asked to indicate whether and how often they committed various offenses in a specific time period, usually the past year. They also answer questions about their family relationships, school performance, and other aspects of their backgrounds. Although these respondents do not always report every offense they committed, self-report studies yield valuable information about delinquency and explanations of crime. Like the NCVS, they underscore how much crime is committed that does not come to the attention of the police.

The Types and Correlates of Crime and Victimization

The three data sources just discussed give us a fairly good understanding of the types of crime, of who does them and who is victimized by them, and of why the crimes are committed. We have already looked at the “why” question when we reviewed the many theories of deviance. Let’s look now at the various types of crime and highlight some important things about them.

Conventional Crime

By conventional crime Violent and property offenses, including homicide, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. we mean the violent and property offenses listed previously that worry average citizens more than any other type of crime. As Table 7.3 "Number of Crimes: Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey, 2009" indicated, more than 20 million violent and property victimizations occurred in the United States in 2009. These offenses included some 15,240 murders; 126,000 rapes and sexual assaults; 534,000 robberies; and 823,000 aggravated assaults. Even more property crime occurs: 3.1 million burglaries, 11.8 million larcenies, and 736,000 motor vehicle thefts (Pastore & Maguire, 2010). Pastore, A. L., & Maguire, K. (2010). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics . Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook The NCVS estimates that the crimes it measures cost their victims almost $20 billion each year in property losses, medical expenses, and time lost from work.

Generally, African Americans and other people of color are more likely than whites to be victims of conventional crime, poor people more likely than wealthy people, men more likely than women (excluding rape and sexual assault), and urban residents more likely than rural residents. To illustrate these differences, Figure 7.4 "Correlates of Violent Crime Victimization, 2008" presents some relevant comparisons for violent crime victimization.

Figure 7.4 Correlates of Violent Crime Victimization, 2008

Note: Income data are for 2007; rural and urban data are for 2005.

Source: Data from Maston, C. T., & Klaus, P. (2010). Criminal victimization in the United States, 2007—Statistical tables . Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice; Rand, M. R. (2009). Criminal victimization, 2008 . Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.

As this figure illustrates, violent crime is more common in urban areas than in rural areas. It varies geographically in at least one other respect, and that is among the regions of the United States. In general, violent crime is more common in the South and West than in the Midwest or Northeast. Figure 7.5 "U.S. Homicide Rates, 2008" depicts this variation for homicide rates. Louisiana has the highest homicide rate, 14.24 homicides per 100,000 residents, and New Hampshire has the lowest rate, 1.1 per 100,000 residents. Although homicide is thankfully a rare occurrence, it is much more common in Louisiana than in New Hampshire, and it is generally more common in the South and West than in other regions. Scholars attribute the South’s high rate of homicide and other violent crime to several factors, among them a subculture of violence, its history of slavery and racial violence, and its high levels of poverty (Lee, Bankston, Hayes, & Thomas, 2007). Lee, M. R., Bankston, W. B., Hayes, T. C., & Thomas, S. A. (2007). Revisiting the Southern subculture of violence. The Sociological Quarterly, 48, 253–275.

Figure 7.5 U.S. Homicide Rates, 2008

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2010. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

When it comes to crime, we fear strangers much more than people we know, but NCVS data suggest our fear is somewhat misplaced (Truman & Rand, 2010). Truman, J. L., & Rand, M. R. (2010). Criminal victimization, 2009 . Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. In cases of assault, rape, or robbery, the NCVS asks respondents whether they knew the offender. Strangers commit only about 42% of these offenses, meaning that 58% of the offenses, or well over half, are committed by someone the victim knows. There is also a gender difference in this area: 68% of women victims are attacked by someone they know (usually a man), compared to only 45% of male victims. Women have more to fear from men they know than from men they do not know.

Another important fact about conventional crime is that most of it is intraracial , meaning that the offender and victim are usually of the same race. For example, 84% of all single offender–single victim homicides in 2009 involved persons who were either both white or both African American (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010). Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2010). Crime in the United States, 2009 . Washington, DC: Author.

Who is most likely to commit conventional crime? As noted earlier, males are more likely than females to commit it (see Figure 7.6 "Gender and Arrest, 2008" ) because of gender differences in socialization. Opportunity may also matter, as during adolescence boys have more freedom than girls to be outside the home and to get into trouble.

Figure 7.6 Gender and Arrest, 2008

Source: Data from Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2010). Crime in the United States, 2009 . Washington, DC: Author.

Despite much controversy over what racial differences in arrest mean, African Americans have higher rates of arrest than whites for conventional crime. Criminologists generally agree that these rates indicate higher rates of offending (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2007). Walker, S., Spohn, C., & DeLone, M. (2007). The color of justice: Race, ethnicity, and crime in America . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Although African Americans are about 13% of the U.S. population, they accounted for about 39% of all arrests for violent crime in 2009 and 30% of all arrests for property crime (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010). Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2010). Crime in the United States, 2009 . Washington, DC: Author. Much of these higher crime rates stem from the fact that African Americans are much poorer than whites on average and much more likely to live in the large cities with high crime rates and in the neighborhoods in these cities with the highest crime rates (McNulty & Bellair, 2003). McNulty, T. L., & Bellair, P. E. (2003). Explaining racial and ethnic differences in serious adolescent violent behavior. Criminology, 41, 709–748. If whites lived under the same conditions, their crime rates would be much higher as well.

Social class also makes a difference in conventional crime rates. Most people arrested for conventional crime have low education and low incomes. Such class differences in arrest can be explained by several of the explanations of deviance already discussed, including strain theory. Note, however, that wealthier people commit most white-collar crimes. If the question is whether social class affects crime rates, the answer depends on what kind of crime we have in mind.

One final factor affecting conventional crime rates is age. The evidence is very clear that conventional crime is disproportionately committed by people 30 and under. For example, people in the 10–24 age group are about 22% of the U.S. population but account for about 45% of all arrests (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010). Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2010). Crime in the United States, 2009 . Washington, DC: Author. During adolescence and young adulthood, peer influences are especially strong and “stakes in conventional activities,” to use some sociological jargon, are weak. Once we start working full time and get married, our stakes in society become stronger and our sense of responsibility grows. We soon realize that breaking the law might prove more costly than when we were 15.

White-Collar Crime

White-collar crime Crime committed in the course of one’s occupation. is crime committed as part of one’s occupation. It ranges from fraudulent repairs by auto repair shops to corruption in the high-finance industry to unsafe products and workplaces in some of our largest corporations. It also includes employee theft of objects and cash. Have you ever taken something without permission from a place where you worked? Whether or not you have, many people steal from their employees, and the National Retail Federation estimates that employee theft involves some $20 billion annually (National Retail Federation, 2007). National Retail Federation. (2007, June 11). Retail losses hit $41.6 billion last year, according to National Retail Security Survey [Press release]. Retrieved from http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=318 White-collar crime also includes health-care fraud, which is estimated to cost some $100 billion a year as, for example, physicians and other health-care providers bill Medicaid for exams and tests that were never done or were unnecessary (Rosoff, Pontell, & Tillman, 2010). Rosoff, S. M., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. (2010). Profit without honor: White collar crime and the looting of America (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. And it also involves tax evasion: the IRS estimates that tax evasion costs the government some $300 billion annually, a figure many times greater than the cost of all robberies and burglaries (Montgomery, 2007). Montgomery, L. (2007, April 16). Unpaid taxes tough to recover. The Washington Post , p. A1.

In June 2009, investment expert Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for defrauding thousands of investors of tens of billions of dollars. This was the largest such crime in U.S. history.

Source: Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Justice, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BernardMadoff.jpg .

One of the most serious recent examples of white-collar crime came to light in December 2008, when it was discovered that 70-year-old investment expert Bernard Madoff had engaged in a Ponzi scheme (in which new investments are used to provide the income for older investments) since the early 1990s in which he defrauded thousands of investors of an estimated $50 billion, the largest such scandal in U.S. history (Creswell & Thomas, 2009). Creswell, J., & Thomas, L., Jr. (2009, January 25). The talented Mr. Madoff. The New York Times , p. BU1. Madoff pleaded guilty in February 2009 to 11 felonies, including securities fraud and money laundering, and was sentenced to 150 years in prison (Henriques & Healy, 2009). Henriques, D. B., & Healy, J. (2009, March 13). Madoff goes to jail after guilty pleas. The New York Times , p. A1.

Some of the worst crime is committed by our major corporations ( corporate crime ). As just one example, price fixing in the corporate world costs the U.S. public about $60 billion a year (Simon, 2006). Simon, D. R. (2006). Elite deviance . Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Even worse, an estimated 50,000 workers die each year from workplace-related illnesses and injuries that could have been prevented if companies had obeyed regulatory laws and followed known practices for safe workplaces (AFL-CIO, 2007). AFL-CIO. (2007). Death on the job: The toll of neglect . Washington, DC: AFL-CIO. A tragic example of this problem occurred in April 2010, when an explosion in a mining cave in West Virginia killed 29 miners. It was widely thought that a buildup of deadly gases had caused the explosion, and the company that owned the mine had been cited many times during the prior year for safety violations related to proper gas ventilation (Urbina, 2010). Urbina, I. (2010, April 10). No survivors found after West Virginia mine disaster. The New York Times, p. A1.

Corporations also make deadly products. In the 1930s the asbestos industry first realized their product was dangerous but hid the evidence of its danger, which was not discovered until 40 years later. In the meantime thousands of asbestos workers came down with deadly asbestos-related disease, and the public was exposed to asbestos that was routinely put into buildings until its danger came to light. It is estimated that more than 200,000 people will eventually die from asbestos (Lilienfeld, 1991). Lilienfeld, D. E. (1991). The silence: The asbestos industry and early occupational cancer research—a case study. American Journal of Public Health, 81, 791–800.

Asbestos is not the only unsafe product. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about 10,000 Americans die annually from dangerous products, including cars, drugs, and food (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 2003; Petersen & Drew, 2003). U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. (2003). Annual report to Congress, 2002 . Washington, DC: Author; Petersen, M., & Drew, C. (2003, October 9). New safety rules fail to stop tainted meat. The New York Times , p. A1. In perhaps the most notorious case, Ford Motor Company marketed the Pinto even though company officials knew the gas tank could catch fire and explode when hit from the rear end at low speeds. Ford had determined it could fix each car’s defect for $11 but that doing so would cost it more money than the amount of lawsuits it would eventually pay to the families of dead and burned Pinto victims if it did not fix the defect. Because Ford decided not to fix the defect, many people—estimates range from two dozen up to 500—people died in Pinto accidents (Cullen, Maakestad, & Cavender, 2006). Cullen, F. T., Maakestad, W. J., & Cavender, G. (2006). Corporate crime under attack: The fight to criminalize business violence . Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. In a more recent example involving a motor vehicle company, Toyota was fined $16.4 million by the federal government in April 2010 for allegedly suppressing evidence that its vehicles were at risk for sudden acceleration. The government’s announcement asserted that Toyota “knowingly hid a dangerous defect for months from U.S. officials and did not take action to protect millions of drivers and their families” (Maynard, 2010, p. A1). Maynard, M. (2010, April 6). U.S. is seeking a fine of $16.4 million against Toyota. The New York Times, p. A1.

Corporations also damage the environment, as the BP oil spill that began in April 2010 reminds us. Because federal laws are lax or nonexistent, corporations can and do pollute the environment with little fear of serious consequences. According to one report, one-fifth of U.S. landfills and incinerators and one-half of wastewater treatment plants violate health regulations (Armstrong, 1999). Armstrong, D. (1999, November 16). U.S. lagging on prosecutions. The Boston Globe, p. A1. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans and 300,000 Europeans die every year from the side effects (including heart disease, respiratory problems, and cancer) of air pollution (BBC News, 2005); BBC News. (2005, February 21). Air pollution causes early deaths. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4283295.stm many of these deaths would not occur if corporations followed the law and otherwise did not engage in unnecessary pollution of the air, water, and land. Critics also assert that laws against pollution are relatively weak and that government enforcement of these laws is often lax.

Is white-collar crime worse than conventional crime? The evidence seems to say yes. A recent estimate put the number of deaths from white-collar crime annually at about 110,000, compared to “only” 16,000 to 17,000 from homicide. The financial cost of white-collar crime to the public was also estimated at about $565 billion annually, compared to about $18 billion from conventional crime (Barkan, 2012). Barkan, S. E. (2012). Criminology: A sociological understanding (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Although we worry about conventional crime much more than white-collar crime, the latter harms the public more in terms of death and financial costs.

Victimless Crime

Victimless crime Illegal behavior in which people participate voluntarily, including drug use, prostitution, and gambling. is illegal behavior in which people willingly engage and in which there are no unwilling victims. The most common examples are drug use, prostitution, pornography, and gambling. Many observers say these crimes are not really victimless, even if people do engage in them voluntarily. For example, many drug users hurt themselves and members of their family from their addiction and the physical effects of taking drugs. Prostitutes put themselves at risk for sexually transmitted disease and abuse by pimps and customers. Illegal gamblers can lose huge sums of money. Although none of these crimes is truly victimless, the fact that the people involved in them are not unwilling victims makes victimless crime different from conventional crime.

Victimless crime raises controversial philosophical and sociological questions. The philosophical question is this: should people be allowed to engage in behavior that hurts themselves (Meier & Geis, 2007)? Meier, R. F., & Geis, G. (2007). Criminal justice and moral issues . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. For example, our society lets adults smoke cigarettes, even though tobacco use kills several hundred thousand people every year. We also let adults gamble legally in state lotteries, at casinos and racetracks, and in other ways. We obviously let people of all ages eat “fat food” such as hamburgers, candy bars, and ice cream. Few people would say we should prohibit these potentially harmful behaviors. Why, then, prohibit the behaviors we call victimless crime? Some scholars say that any attempt to decide which behaviors are so unsafe or immoral that they should be banned is bound to be arbitrary, and they call for these bans to be lifted. Others say that the state does indeed have a legitimate duty to ban behavior the public considers unsafe or immoral and that the present laws reflect public opinion on which behaviors should be banned.

The sociological question is just as difficult to resolve: do laws against victimless crimes do more harm than good (Meier & Geis, 2007)? Meier, R. F., & Geis, G. (2007). Criminal justice and moral issues . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Some scholars say these laws in fact do much more harm than good, and they call for the laws to be abolished or at least reconsidered for several reasons: the laws are ineffective even though they cost billions of dollars to enforce, and they lead to police and political corruption and greater profits for organized crime. Laws against drugs further lead to extra violence, as youth gangs and other groups fight each other to corner the market for the distribution of drugs in various neighborhoods. The opponents of victimless crime laws commonly cite the example of Prohibition during the 1920s, where the banning of alcohol led to all of these problems, which in turn forced an end to Prohibition by the early 1930s. If victimless crimes were made legal, opponents add, the government could tax the behaviors now banned and collect billions of additional tax dollars.

Those in favor of laws against victimless crimes cite the danger these behaviors pose for the people engaging in them and for the larger society. If we made drugs legal, they say, even more people would use them, and even more death and illness would occur. Removing the bans against behaviors such as drug use and prostitution, these proponents add, would imply that these behaviors are acceptable in a civil society.

The debate over victimless crimes and victimless crime laws will not end soon, as both sides have several good points to make. One thing that is clear is that our current law enforcement approach is not working. More than 1 million people are arrested annually for drug use and trafficking and other victimless crimes, but there is little evidence that using the law in this manner has lowered people’s willingness to take part in victimless crime behavior (Meier & Geis, 2007). Meier, R. F., & Geis, G. (2007). Criminal justice and moral issues . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Perhaps it is not too rash to say that a serious national debate needs to begin on the propriety of the laws against victimless crimes to determine what course of action makes the most sense for American society.

Learning From Other Societies

Crime and Punishment in Denmark and the Netherlands

As the text notes, since the 1970s the United States has used a get-tough approach to fight crime; a key dimension of this approach is mandatory sentencing and long prison terms and, as a result, a huge increase in the number of people in prison and jail. Many scholars say this approach has not reduced crime to a great degree and has cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

The experience of Denmark and the Netherlands suggests a different way of treating criminals and dealing with crime. Those nations, like most others in Western Europe, think prison makes most offenders worse and should be used only as a last resort for the most violent and most incorrigible offenders. They also recognize that incarceration is very expensive and much more costly than other ways of dealing with offenders. These concerns have led Denmark, the Netherlands, and other Western European nations to favor alternatives to imprisonment for the bulk of their offenders. These alternatives include the widespread use of probation, community service, and other kinds of community-based corrections. Studies indicate that these alternatives may be as effective as incarceration in reducing recidivism (repeat offending) and cost much less than incarceration. If so, an important lesson from Denmark, the Netherlands, and other nations in Western Europe is that it is possible to keep society safe from crime without using the costly get-tough approach that has been the hallmark of the U.S. criminal justice system since the 1970s. (Bijleveld & Smit, 2005; Dammer & Fairchild, 2006) Bijleveld, C. C. J. H., & Smit, P. R. (2005). Crime and punishment in the Netherlands, 1980–1999. Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 33, 161–211; Dammer, H. R., & Fairchild, E. (2006). Comparative criminal justice systems. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

• The public is very concerned about crime. At the same time, race and gender influence public perceptions of crime.
• Accurate measurement of crime is difficult to achieve for many reasons, including the fact that many crime victims do not report their victimization to their police.
• Conventional crime is disproportionately committed by the young, by persons of color, by men, and by urban residents. The disproportionate involvement of African Americans in crime arises largely from their poverty and urban residence.
• White-collar crime is more costly in terms of personal and financial harm than conventional crime.
• For several reasons, laws against victimless crime may do more harm than good.
• Why are African Americans more likely than whites to fear walking around their homes at night?
• Why is it difficult to measure crime accurately? Why is measurement of crime by the FBI inaccurate?
• Do you think any victimless crimes should be made legal? Why or why not? In what ways is deviance considered relative?

7.4 The Get-Tough Approach: Boon or Bust?

• Explain the get-tough approach to conventional crime, and describe its disadvantages according to several scholars.

It would be presumptuous to claim to know exactly how to reduce crime, but a sociological understanding of its causes and dynamics points to several directions that show strong crime-reduction potential. Before sketching these directions, we first examine the get-tough approach, a strategy the United States has used to control crime since the 1970s.

Harsher law enforcement, often called the get-tough approach , has been the guiding strategy for the U.S. criminal justice system since the 1970s. This approach has involved increased numbers of arrests and, especially, a surge in incarceration, which has quintupled since the 1970s. Reflecting this surge, the United States now has the highest incarceration rate by far in the world. Many scholars trace the beginnings of the get-tough approach to efforts by the Republican Party to win the votes of whites by linking crime to African Americans. These efforts increased public concern about crime and pressured lawmakers of both parties to favor more punitive treatment of criminals to avoid looking soft on crime (Beckett & Sasson, 2004; Pratt, 2008). Beckett, K., & Sasson, T. (2004). The politics of injustice: Crime and punishment in America . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Pratt, T. C. (2008). Addicted to incarceration: Corrections policy and the politics of misinformation in the United States . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. According to these scholars, the incarceration surge stems much more from political decisions and pronouncements, many of them racially motivated, by lawmakers than from trends in crime rates. As Beckett and Sasson (2004, pp. 104, 128) Beckett, K., & Sasson, T. (2004). The politics of injustice: Crime and punishment in America . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. summarize this argument,

Crime-related issues rise to the top of the popular agenda in response to political and media activity around crime—not the other way around. By focusing on violent crime perpetrated by racial minorities…politicians and the news media have amplified and intensified popular fear and punitiveness.…Americans have become most alarmed about crime and drugs on those occasions when national political leaders and, by extension, the mass media have spotlighted these issues.

Today more than 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated in jail or prison at any one time, compared to only about one-fourth that number 30 years ago (Warren, 2009). Warren, J. (2009). One in 31: The long reach of American corrections . Washington, DC: Pew Center on the States. This increase in incarceration has cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars since then.

Despite this very large expenditure, criminologists question whether it has helped lower crime significantly (Piquero & Blumstein, 2007; Raphael & Stoll, 2009). Piquero, A. R., & Blumstein, A. (2007). Does incapacitation reduce crime? Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23, 267–285; Raphael, S., & Stoll, M. A. (2009). Why are so many Americans in prison? In S. Raphael & M. A. Stoll (Eds.), Do prisons make us safer? The benefits and costs of the prison boom (pp. 27–72). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Although crime fell by a large amount during the 1990s as incarceration rose, scholars estimate that the increased use of incarceration accounted for at most only 10%–25% of the crime drop during this decade. They conclude that this result was not cost effective and that the billions of dollars spent on incarceration would have had a greater crime-reduction effect had they been spent on crime-prevention efforts. They also point to the fact that the heavy use of incarceration today means that some 700,000 prisoners are released back to their communities every year, creating many kinds of problems (Clear, 2007). Clear, T. R. (2007). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. A wide variety of evidence, then, indicates that the get-tough approach has been more bust than boon.

Recognizing this situation, several citizens’ advocacy groups have formed since the 1980s to call attention to the many costs of the get-tough approach and to urge state and federal legislators to reform harsh sentencing practices and to provide many more resources for former inmates. One of the most well-known and effective such groups is the Sentencing Project ( http://www.sentencingproject.org ), which describes itself as “a national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing law and practice, and alternatives to incarceration.” The Sentencing Project was founded in 1986 and has since sought “to bring national attention to disturbing trends and inequities in the criminal justice system with a successful formula that includes the publication of groundbreaking research, aggressive media campaigns and strategic advocacy for policy reform.” The organization’s Web site features a variety of resources on topics such as racial disparities in incarceration, women in the criminal justice system, and drug policy.

• The get-tough approach to crime has not proven effective even though it has cost billions of dollars and led to other problems.
• Racialized politics are thought to have led to the surge in incarceration that has been the highlight of this approach.
• Why did the get-tough approach begin during the 1970s, and why has it continued since then?
• Do you think the expense of the get-tough approach has been worth it? Why or why not?

What Sociology Suggests

Not surprisingly, many sociologists and other social scientists think it makes more sense to try to prevent crime than to wait until it happens and then punish the people who commit it. That does not mean abandoning all law enforcement, of course, but it does mean paying more attention to the sociological causes of crime as outlined earlier in this chapter and to institute programs and other efforts to address these causes.

Several insights for (conventional) crime reduction may be gleaned from the sociological explanations of deviance and crime discussed earlier. For example, the social ecology approach suggests paying much attention to the social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods that are thought to generate high rates of crime. These characteristics include, but are not limited to, poverty, joblessness, dilapidation, and overcrowding. Strain theory suggests paying much attention to poverty, while explanations regarding deviant subcultures and differential association remind us of the need to focus on peer influences. Social control theory calls attention to the need to focus on family interaction in general and especially on children in families marked by inadequate parenting, stress, and disharmony. Despite mixed support for its assumptions, labeling theory reminds us of the strong possibility that harsh punishment may do more harm than good, and feminist explanations remind us that much deviance and crime is rooted in masculinity. In sum a sociological understanding of deviance and crime reminds us that much conventional crime is ultimately rooted in poverty, in negative family functioning and negative peer relationships, in criminogenic physical and social conditions of urban neighborhoods, and in the “macho” socialization of boys.

With this backdrop in mind, a sociological understanding suggests the potential of several strategies and policies for reducing conventional crime (Currie, 1998; Greenwood, 2006; Jacobson, 2005; Welsh & Farrington, 2007). Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America . New York, NY: Henry Holt; Greenwood, P. W. (2006). Changing lives: Delinquency prevention as crime-control policy . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Jacobson, M. (2005). Downsizing prisons: How to reduce crime and end mass incarceration . New York, NY: New York University Press; Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (Eds.). (2007). Preventing crime: What works for children, offenders, victims and places . New York, NY: Springer. Such efforts would include, at a minimum, the following:

• Establish good-paying jobs for the poor in urban areas.
• Establish youth recreation programs and in other ways strengthen social interaction in urban neighborhoods.
• Improve living conditions in urban neighborhoods.
• Change male socialization practices.
• Establish early childhood intervention programs to help high-risk families raise their children.
• Improve the nation’s schools by establishing small classes and taking other measures.
• Provide alternative corrections for nondangerous prisoners in order to reduce prison crowding and costs and to lessen the chances of repeat offending.
• Provide better educational and vocational services and better services for treating and preventing drug and alcohol abuse for ex-offenders.

This is not a complete list, but it does point the way to the kinds of strategies that would help get at the roots of conventional crime and, in the long run, help greatly to reduce it. Although the United States has been neglecting this crime-prevention approach, programs and strategies such as those just mentioned would in the long run be more likely than our current get-tough approach to create a safer society. For this reason, sociological knowledge on crime and deviance can indeed help us make a difference in our larger society.

What about white-collar crime? Although we have not stressed the point, the major sociological explanations of deviance and crime, especially those stressing poverty, the conditions of poor urban neighborhoods, and negative family functioning, are basically irrelevant for understanding why white-collar crime occurs and, in turn, do not suggest very much at all about ways to reduce it. Instead, scholars attribute the high level of white-collar crime, and especially of corporate crime, to one or more of the following: (a) greed arising from our society’s emphasis on economic success, (b) the absence of strong regulations governing corporate conduct and a severe lack of funding for the federal and state regulatory agencies that police such conduct, and/or (c) weak punishment of corporate criminals when their crimes are detected (Cullen, Maakestad, & Cavender, 2006; Leaf, 2002; Rosoff, Pontell, & Tillman, 2010). Cullen, F. T., Maakestad, W. J., & Cavender, G. (2006). Corporate crime under attack: The fight to criminalize business violence . Cincinnati, OH: Anderson; Leaf, C. (2002, March 18). Enough is enough. Fortune, pp. 60–68; Rosoff, S. M., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. (2010). Profit without honor: White collar crime and the looting of America (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Drawing on this understanding, many scholars think that more effective corporate regulation and harsher punishment of corporate criminals (that is, imprisonment in addition to the fines that corporations typically receive when they are punished) may help deter corporate crime. As a writer for Fortune magazine observed, corporate crime “will not go away until white-collar thieves face a consequence they’re actually scared of: time in jail” (Leaf, 2002, p. 62). Leaf, C. (2002, March 18). Enough is enough. Fortune 60–68.

7.5 End-of-Chapter Material

• Deviance is behavior that violates social norms and arouses negative reactions. What is considered deviant depends on the circumstances in which it occurs and varies by location and time period.
• Durkheim said deviance performs several important functions for society. It clarifies social norms, strengthens social bonds, and can lead to beneficial social change.
• Biological explanations of deviance assume that deviants differ biologically from nondeviants. Psychological explanations of deviance assume that deviants have a psychological problem that produces their deviance.
• Sociological theories emphasize different aspects of the social environment as contributors to deviance and crime.
• Crime in the United States remains a serious problem that concerns the public. Public opinion about crime does not always match reality and is related to individuals’ gender and race among other social characteristics. Women and African Americans are especially likely to be afraid of crime.
• Crime is difficult to measure, but the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and self-report studies give us a fairly accurate picture of the amount of crime and of its correlates.
• Several types of crime exist. Conventional crime includes violent and property offenses and worries Americans more than any other type of crime. Such crime tends to be intraracial, and a surprising amount of violent crime is committed by people known by the victim. White-collar crime is more harmful than conventional crime in terms of personal harm and financial harm. Victimless crime is very controversial, as it involves behavior by consenting adults. Scholars continue to debate whether the nation is better or worse off with laws against victimless crimes.
• To reduce crime, most criminologists say that a law-enforcement approach is not enough and that more efforts aimed at crime prevention are needed. These efforts include attempts to improve schools and living conditions in inner cities and programs aimed at improving nutrition and parenting for the children who are at high risk for impairment to their cognitive and social development.

Using Sociology

Imagine that you are a member of your state legislature. As a sociology major in college, you learned that the get-tough approach to crime, involving harsher criminal sentencing and the increased use of incarceration, costs much money and is not very effective in reducing crime. A bill comes before the legislature that would double the minimum prison term for several types of violent crime. You realize that this change in policy would probably do little to reduce the crime rate and eventually cost millions of dollars in increased incarceration costs, but you also recognize that if you vote against the bill, your opponent in the upcoming election will charge that you are soft on crime. Do you vote for or against the bill? Why? Regardless of your vote, what else would you do as a state legislator to try to reduce the crime rate? How would your efforts relate to a sociological understanding of crime and deviance?

7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Sociologists have tried to understand why people engage in deviance or crime by developing theories to help explain this behavior. It is important to note that these theories focus primarily on why people engage in crime, why some behaviors are defined as criminal while others aren’t, and how people learn criminal behavior rather than on deviance more broadly. The focus of these theories reflects that society is much more concerned about crime than people who break other kinds of social or cultural norms.

7.3.1 Historical Theories of Deviance

Inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species , early scholars trying to explain crime turned to the concept of evolution to understand differences among humans by claiming physical features were identifying markers of criminals. Several characteristics were said to indicate criminality, including skull shape, size, body type, and facial features. For example, Cesare Lombroso (1911), the father of positivist criminology, claimed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks. He claimed that criminals can be identified by their abnormal apelike facial and physical features. A visual depiction of these features can be seen below in figure 7.4 .This school of thought is closely associated with the eugenics movement, discussed more in-depth in Chapter 11 . These theories were quickly disproven and have received harsh critiques for their blatantly racist foundation.

7.3.1.1 Durkheim and Functionalism

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence challenged people’s ideas about racial inequality in the United States. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1960[1893]). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Durkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the collective conscience, which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. In large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.

Modern theories have a few significant critiques of Durkheim’s perspective on crime. Sociologists have critiqued Durkheim’s argument that deviance is functional for not being generalizable to all crimes. For instance, it can be hard to argue that murder is functional for society solely because it reaffirms currently held social norms. Moreover, the idea that law is an expression of collective consciousness has also been critiqued. Conflict theorists argue that the bourgeois or elite have significant influence over political and legal institutions, allowing them to pass laws that benefit their interests and avoid harsh punishments when they commit crimes. This challenges the idea that the law reflects what society thinks is just or right.

7.3.1.2 Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control.

Some research supports this theory. Even today, crimes like theft or murder are more likely to occur in low-income neighborhoods with many social problems. Still, a critique of this research is that many of these studies rely on official crime rates, much of which reflect police surveillance rather than actual crime rates. For this reason, social disorganization theory does not adequately explain white collar crimes committed by individuals living in wealthy neighborhoods, such as financial fraud or insider trading. Similarly, research from a social disorganization theory often uses circular logic: an area with a high crime rate is assumed to signal a disorganized neighborhood, leading to a high crime rate (Bursik 1988).

7.3.1.3 Cultural Deviance Theory

Cultural deviance theory suggests that conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society causes crime. Researchers Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) studied crime patterns in Chicago in the early 1900s. They found that violence and crime were at their worst in the middle of the city and gradually decreased the farther someone traveled from the urban center toward the suburbs. Shaw and McKay noticed that this pattern matched the migration patterns of Chicago citizens. As the urban population expanded, wealthier people moved to the suburbs and left behind the less privileged. Shaw and McKay concluded that socioeconomic status correlated to race and ethnicity resulted in a higher crime rate.

This theory has many similar critiques to social disorganization theory, as they were developed around the same time and strongly emphasize the role of the environment on crime and deviance. One other critique of cultural deviance theory is that while it attributes crime to lower class cultures and values, there is no substantial evidence that these attitudes are limited to people in this class.

7.3.2 Modern Theories of Deviance

In response to the historical theories of deviance, new theories emerged that critiqued or expanded upon them to address shortfalls in their explanations. At the end of this section, figure 7.6 summarizes these key theories.

7.3.2.1 Robert Merton’s Strain Theory: Rethinking Durkheim

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is an inherent part of a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. Merton defined five ways people respond to this gap between having a socially accepted goal and having no socially accepted way to pursue it. To understand the five ways people respond, we’ll look at the example of the American Dream: the idea that to be successful, you should own a house, car, and have a happy and functional family.

Example: “I may not be able to afford to buy a house in my lifetime, but I have a working car, a loving partner, and a cute dog. I’m content with the lot I’ve been given in life.”

Example: “I grew up in a neighborhood that didn’t have good schools, and I never had an opportunity to get ahead. I want a house, nice car, and to take care of my family, but the only way I can see myself doing that is by continuing to sell cocaine and counterfeit goods.”

Example: “I’m never going to be able to afford a nice home and car, but I don’t need those things anyways! I like the apartment I rent, and my cat’s only other form of life I want to be responsible for. Why not just love the things that I do have?”

Example: “ Why would I even participate in society at all? The deck is stacked against me. I know I’m only 20, but (illegally) hopping on trains and travelling around the country with my friends is where it’s at! ”

Example: “I’m gonna overthrow the government, that’s what I’m going to do! The system is unjust and it’s not one that’s designed for how humans really are!”

7.3.2.2 William Julius Wilson: Rethinking the Role of Neighborhoods

William Julius Wilson refined ideas in social disorganization theory to explain why people in poverty, particularly those living in black and immigrant communities, are more likely to live in high-crime neighborhoods. Rather than focusing on the role of cultural factors like previous theorists, Wilson (1987) focused on how economic changes have contributed to these groups being more likely to live in high-crime neighborhoods.

Wilson (1997) argued that before the decline of industrial and manufacturing jobs, these groups could be economically successful despite having low levels of education given their access to high paying factory jobs. After manufacturing jobs left these cities, black people and recent immigrants became trapped in low-income high-crime areas with few jobs or low-wage, service sector jobs. According to Wilson’s (1997) theory, crime emerges because policy leads to little economic opportunity and traps disadvantaged groups in poor, high-crime areas where turning to crime is one of the few opportunities for advancement.

7.3.2.3 Karl Marx’s Unequal System Theory

Karl Marx believed that the bourgeoisie centralized their power and influence through government and law. Though Marx spoke little of deviance, his ideas created the foundation for other theorists who study the intersection of deviance and crime with wealth and power. Later Marxists, such as Richard Quinney (1974), expanded upon these ideas. He believed that the bourgeoisie set up laws to maintain their class rankings rather than to reduce crime. Similarly, he argued that the legal system is uninterested in addressing the root causes of crime. Instead, the legal system is preoccupied with controlling the lower class.

7.3.2.4 C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite Theory

Power Elite theory differs from unequal system theory in that it further refines the ideas of unequal system theory. It more clearly specifies which actors influence laws, rather than broadly characterizing the bourgeois as having this power. Still, many similarities exist between the two theories in that they both look at how the groups in power exploit their influence for their benefit at the expense of marginalized populations.

In his book The Power Elite (1956), sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of what he dubbed the power elite, a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources. Wealthy executives, politicians, celebrities, and military leaders often have access to national and international power, and in some cases, their decisions affect everyone in society. Because of this, the rules of society are stacked in favor of a privileged few who manipulate them to stay on top. It is these people who decide what is criminal and what is not, and the effects are often felt most by those who have little power.

7.3.2.5 Michele Foucault: Discipline and Punishment Theory

The panopticon, as seen below in figure 7.5, is a late eighteenth century circular prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the panopticon prison design, guards could continuously monitor prisoners without the prisoners knowing if guards were watching. Since prisoners would not know when guards were watching them, they would constantly surveil their behavior to avoid punishment. French philosopher Michele Foucault (1977) drew parallels between Jeremy Benthan’s panopticon and how modern institutions control the population. He argued that punishment currently occurs through discipline and surveillance by institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals, schools, and workplaces. These institutions produce compliant citizens without the threat of violence.

Ultimately, Foucault (1977) argued that surveillance created an effect where individuals conformed to society since they never knew if they were being watched. His ideas have gained new importance with the rise of surveillance technologies, which make it harder to engage in deviance without getting caught. Examples of this phenomenon are federal mass surveillance policies and the rise of police departments using technologies to scour social media networks for information about criminal activities. Broadly, Foucault (1977) proposed that social control and punishment are not just formal sanctions, like a prison sentence or ticket, but also something more mundane and built into social institutions.

7.3.2.6 Lemert’s Labeling Theory

Rooted in symbolic interactionism, labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. What is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures.

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory and identified two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance . In secondary deviance a person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. In many ways, secondary deviance is captured by the phrase, “If you tell a child enough that they’re a bad kid, they’ll eventually believe that they’re a bad kid.” This perspective hits on how negative social labels, especially of juveniles, have the power to create more deviant or criminal behavior.

7.3.2.7 Sykes and Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization

How do people deal with the labels they are given? This was the subject of a study done by Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957). They studied teenage boys who had been labeled as juvenile delinquents to see how they either embraced or denied these labels. They argued that criminals don’t have vastly different cultural values but rather adopt attitudes to justify criminal behavior at times. Sykes and Matza developed five techniques of neutralization to capture how people justify engaging in criminal acts. Individuals may not necessarily internalize labels if they have developed strategies to reject associating their actions with these labels.

Let’s apply each of these techniques by pretending to be a teenager justifying shoplifting at a major retail chain department store. From this example, we can see how individuals can justify engaging in an act that may be illegal and violates social norms through these kinds of cognitive strategies

Example: “I don’t want to steal from this store, but I’ve applied to so many jobs and no one seems to want to hire a teenager these days.”

Example: “It’s not like anyone is being hurt by me stealing.”

Example: “Who am I hurting anyways? This is a big corporation! They expect some level of theft.”

Example: “This corporation is way more corrupt considering the fact most of their goods come from sweatshops where there is child labor.

Example: “I’m only stealing because I really don’t have enough money to get my sister a nice birthday present and she matters way more to me than any stupid corporation does. I’m a modern day Robin Hood.”

7.3.2.8 Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behavior developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub 2006) and the work of George Herbert Mead, whose ideas are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 . His conclusions established differential association theory , which suggested that individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance.

According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. He argues that people learn all aspects of criminal behavior through interacting with others and being part of intimate personal groups. Sutherland’s theory captures not only how people learn criminal behavior, but also how people learn motives, rationalizations, and attitudes towards crime. Differential association theory also demystifies crime, conceptualizing it as a behavior just like any other: a radical departure from early theories of crime that viewed criminals as inherently biologically different or all individuals as naturally pleasure seeking, selfish, and prone to crime. In Sutherland’s theory, anyone has the potential to engage in crime if they learn how to commit crime and embrace favorable definitions of crime. This theory also helps explain why not all children who grow up in poverty end up engaging in criminal activity—as historical theories such as cultural deviance theory suggest—because they encounter different situations that shape their definitions towards violating the law.

Figure 7.6. Modern Theories of Deviance and Crime  

7.3.3 Licenses and Attributions for Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

“Durkheim and Functionalism” paragraphs 1 and 2 edited for clarity and brevity are from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Social Disorganization Theory” paragraph 1 edited for clarity and brevity is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Cultural Deviance Theory” paragraph 1 is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance” by Heather Griffiths and Nathan Keirns in Openstax Sociology 2e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-2e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance

“Robert Merton’s Strain Theory: Rethinking Durkheim” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Karl Marx’s Unequal System Theory” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite Theory” paragraph two edited for clarity and brevity from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Lemert’s Labeling Theory” paragraphs 1 and 2, and sentences 1 and 2 in paragraph 3 edited for clarity and brevity from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

Figure 7.4. Plate 6 of L’Homme Criminel by Cesar Lombroso, Public domain , via the Wellcome Collection .

Figure 7.5. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon Prison Design, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Figure 7.6 is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime . Substantial modifications and additions have been made.

All other content in this section is original content by Alexandra Olsen and licensed under CC BY 4.0 .

Sociology in Everyday Life Copyright © by Matt Gougherty and Jennifer Puentes. All Rights Reserved.

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• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Deviance and Crime

Crime implies an illegal which is worthy of societal condemnation and punishment, because it not just harmful to an individual, but the public at large. There are various types of crimes such as – personal crimes, property crimes, victimless crimes, whitecollar crimes, juvenile delinquency, cybercrime, violation of public safety, etc.

With the progression of time, the rate of crime throughout the world has increased, resulting from various situations and causes. In this article, we will talk about the difference between deviance and crime.

Content: Deviance Vs Crime

Comparison chart.

Definition of Deviance

Deviance can be understood as the divergence from those standards and norms which are widely accepted by society. It is a behaviour which is labelled as ‘abnormal’ by the people of the society. It covers a range of socially condemned behaviour – any type of conduct that evokes the social penalty, which can be a mild criticism or a capital punishment.

Put it another way, whether or not an act or behaviour is regarded as deviant, depends greatly on the way people look and label that act or behaviour. In essence, the deviance is decided on the basis of social setting or the context in which the deviance happens. Smoking in a public place is an example of deviance .

Further, the behaviour that is deemed as ‘deviant’ may change with time, i.e. with the development of society, its principles and norms are also modified. And so, what is called ‘deviant behaviour’ previously, may not be considered in future.

In addition to this, it is not necessary that what is labelled as ‘deviant’ in one society, is considered as ‘deviant’ in other societies as well. This means, the acts included in a ‘deviant behaviour’ may differ across societies and cultures.

What are Norms?

Norms are the rules which guide the members of the society about what is to be done and what should not be done in a particular situation. Whenever there is a deviation from these norms, it is called as deviance. Norms are of two types:

• Formal Norms : It covers laws and rules, which indicates the formal standards that must be applied in a particular circumstance. Punishments are defined, for deviations (if any).
• Informal Norms : Informal norms differ from one group to another, and no punishment is defined for deviations.

Definition of Crime

Crime refers to any unlawful act or negligence causing physical or psychological harm to someone, often forbidden and punishable by the statute. It is detrimental to the welfare of the public, or to the interest of the state and so, it is prosecuted by the state. The punishment for committing a crime can be fine or imprisonment or both.

Crime is the offensive act which breaks the statutory law, as well as it is strongly opposed by society.

Examples : Murder, rape, robbery, theft, burglary, childhood abuse, antisocial behaviour, domestic abuse, sexual harassment, terrorism, cybercrime, hate crime, fraud, etc. are some of the common examples of crime.

The definition of crime varies from one country to another, however, there are certain acts which are considered a crime in all the countries of the world.

Causes of Crime

We all are aware of the fact that no person is criminal by birth. It is the circumstances and environment which make him/her perform a criminal act, prohibited by law. These causes can be social, economical, psychological or biological. These are discussed as under:

• Family disorganization
• Upbringing of the person
• Defective education
• Hype created by media
• Drinking and drug use
• Unhappy marriages and dowry system
• Social disorganization
• Unemployment
• Industrialization and urbanization
• Intellectual weakness
• Mental diseases
• Characteristics of personality
• Emotional instability

Elements of Crime

• Individual : An individual is the most important element of the crime who intends to and is ready for the commission of the crime.
• Mens Rea : It refers to ‘guilty mind’. Criminal intent is present in every crime.
• Actus Reus : It implies ‘guilty act’. Crime is often supported by a criminal act.
• Injury : It is often accompanied by an injury or harm, which can be mental, physical or material.

Key Differences Between Deviance and Crime

The differences between deviance and crime are discussed in the points below:

• Deviance alludes to a behaviour, which does not adhere to the norms and values of the society and if it is discovered, it may result in negative sanctions. On the other hand, crime refers to the intentional commission or omission of an act which is considered as socially harmful or dangerous, and punishable by law.
• The acts covered in deviance are not written or documented anywhere, whereas crimes and its types are well-written or documented in the criminal code.
• When it comes to severity, deviance is less severe in comparison to crime.
• Deviance is often controlled by social organizations and groups. As against, police and judiciary are there to control the crime in society by punishing the wrongdoer.
• Deviance results in negative sanctions, wherein those who do not comply with society’s norms and values are often criticized. In contrast, crime leads to punishment, which can be life imprisonment or penalty or both.
• In the case of deviance, the offender is stigmatized, i.e. condemned by society. On the contrary, in the case of crime, the offender may receive legal sanctions.
• The difference in norms can be found across cultures, and so we can say that if a certain act is regarded as deviant in one culture, it is not necessary that it is deviant in another culture also. In contrast, laws are almost the same in all the countries of the world, however, the penalty for the crime may differ.

To sum up, deviance refers to the breaking of contextual, social and cultural norms and standards, by a person. On the contrary, crime refers to the offence which is against the law.

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Deviant Behavior / Definition Of Crime And Deviance

Definition Of Crime And Deviance

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• Topic: Deviant Behavior , Organized Crime

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