Giddens, chapter 21. Crime and Deviance, p. 935-956 & 974-983.
Lecture, Monday March15th 2010
Lecturer; Johnni Oln
P. 937. Formerly: Biological approaches. Criminals were born. Could be detected by their appearance, anatomical features, traits held over from earlier stages of human evolution.
P. 938. Perhaps psychological is more successful?
Searching for explanations within the individual, not in society. Concentrate on personality types. “feeble-mindedness”, karaktersvage, “moral degeneracy”, moralsk degenereret. Abnormal mental states are inherited. ; the can either predispo an individual to crime or create problems during the process of socialization.
Psychological theories of criminality can at best explain only some aspects of crime.
The many types of crime makes it implausible to suppo that tho who commit crimes share the same psychological characteristics.
Both biological and psychological approaches to criminality presume that deviance is a sign of something “wring” with the individual, rather than with society.
P. 939. They e crime as caud by factors outside the individual’s control, embedded either in the body or in the mind.
Sociological: crime actually depends on the social institutions of society.
Stressing the social and cultural context in which crime takes place.
The basic concepts
Deviance
DEF: Non-conformity to a given t of norms that are accepted by a significant number of people in a community or society.
All social norms are accompanied by sanctions promoting conformity and protecting against nonconformity.
A sanction is any reaction from others to the behaviour of an individual or group that is meant to ensure compliance with a given norm. Sanctions may be positive (offering rewards for conformity) or negative (punishing behaviour that does not conform).
Sanctions could be formal or informal.
Deviance and crime is not synonymous, although in many cas they overlap. The concept of deviance is much broader.
P. 940. Hare Krisna as a deviant culture. Dancing and singing in the streets.
Other deviant cultures: Permanently homeless, people who live on the streets by day. Most of the permanently homeless eke out a precarious existence on the fringes of society.
Explaining crime and deviance: sociological theories.
Many theoretical perspectives remain relevant and uful:
Four sociological approaches that have been most influential within the sociology of deviance. Functionalist theories.
interactionist theories
conflict theories
动漫主题曲control theories.
P. 941.
Functionalist: See crime and deviance resulting from structural tensions and a lack of moral regulations within society. If the aspirations held by individuals and groups do not coincide with society’s available rewards, the disparity between desires and their fulfilment will be en in the deviant motivations of some of its members.
P. 942. Subcultural explanations
Following Merton’s work, Albert Cohen also saw the contradictions within American society as the main cau of crime.
While Merton emphasized individual deviant respons, Cohen saw such adaptive respons as occurring collectively through the formation of subcultures.
Boys in the lower working class who are frustrated with their positions in life often join together in delinquent subcultures, such as gangs. The subcultures reject middle-class values and replace them with norm that celebrate defiance (trods, udfordring) such as delinquency (kriminalitet) and other acts of non-conformity.
Subcultural explanations
Cloward & Ohlin: The boys most at risk are tho who have internalized middle-class values and been encouraged, on the basis of ability, to aspire towards a middle-class future.
When chances of success are relatively small delinquent gangs ari. Such as among deprived ethnic minorities in inner city areas.
Defining deviance
Durkheim: the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time.
表妹和我Kai Erikson (1966). A community’s capacity for handling deviance can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells and hospital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics. The
agencies of control often em to define their job as that of keeping deviance within bounds rather than to obliterating it altogether. Societies need their quotas of deviance and that they function in such a way as to keep them intact.
What if the amount of deviant behaviour gets too high?
P. 945. Redefining deviance so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatid and raising the “normal” level, so that behaviour en as abnormal by earlier standard is no longer considered to be so.
Mental health patients in the 1950s. Were treated with tranquillizers and then relead. The number of psychiatric patients dropped from 93.000 in 1955 to just 11.000 by 1992.
Homelessness
The “normal” acceptable level of crime has rin
Underreporting of crime. Street robberies in Copenhagen 2010.
We are getting ud to a lot of behaviour that is not good for us.
Evaluation
Middle class values have not been accepted throughout society.
Others have aspirations and opportunitiesn, not confined to less privileged groups. Stein Bagger. P. 945. Interactionist theory
Labelling (stempling) theories. Interpret deviance not as a t of characteristics of individuals or groups, but as a process of interaction between deviants and non-deviants.
Labels create categories of deviance thus express the power structure of society.
Once labelled a delinquent, he or she is stigmatized.
Howard Becker.
P. 946. A person’s dress, manner of speaking or country of origin could be key factors that determine whether or not a deviant label is applied.
我的教师Becoming a marijuana smoker depended on one’s acceptance into the culture, clo association with experienced urs and one’s attitude towards non-urs.
Lemert. The initial act of transgression primary deviance. Remain marginal to the person’s lf-identity and a process occurs through which the deviant act is “normalized”. Otherwi the person is labelled a criminal or delinquent. In the condary deviance individuals come to accept the label and e themlves as deviant. It can become central to the person’s lf-identity.
William Chambliss (1973). Upper-middle-class and lower class boys.
P. 947. Evaluation我有一个愿望
The labelling of certain activities as deviant is not completely arbitrary.
It does not explain the effect of increasing deviant conduct. Mayby interaction or learning from other delinquents.
左耳鸣P. 949. Conflict theories and the “new criminology”
Elements from Marxist theories.
Deviance is deliberately chon and often political in nature. In respon to inequalities of the capitalist system.
Challenged the social order.
New criminology, analysis framed in terms of the structure of society and the protection of the power of the ruling class.
Laws are tools to be ud by the powerful to maintain their own privileged situation.
公交车英语P. 950. Left Realism
Distanced itlf from so-called “left idealists”.
Rates of crime and victimization were concentrated in marginalized neighbourhoods and that deprived groups in society were at a much greater risk of crime than others.
In inner cities, criminal subcultures develop. Such subcultures do not derive form poverty as such, but from political marginalization and relative deprivation – people’s experience of being deprived of things they and everyone el is entitled to.
In recent times, the ideas have been increasingly discusd using the concept of social exclusion – the process that operate to effectively deny some social groups full citizenship within society.
P. 951. Propod “minimal policing”.
Reprents a more pragmatic and policy-oriented approach than many of the criminological perspectives which preceded it.
P. 951. Control theories课题研究的意义
Crime occurs as a result of imbalance between impuls towards criminal activity and the social or physical controls that deter it.
Less interested in individuals’ motivations for carrying out crimes, assuming that people act rationally so that, given the opportunities, everyone would engage in deviant acts.
Many types of crime are a result of “situational decisions” – a person es an opportunity and is motivated to act to take advantage of it.
Hirschi: Humans are fundamentally lfish beings who make calculated decisions about whether or not to commit crime by weighing the potential benefits against the risk of doing so.
Law-abiding behaviour comes from:
Attachment, commitment, involvement and belief.
P. 952. Delinquents are often individuals who low levels of lf-control are a result of enadequate socialization at home or in school.
Right realism: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the late-1970.
“Law-and-order” approaches. Remains influential today.
Escalation of crime.
Moral degeneracy, the incline of individual responsibility due to dependence on the welfare state and liberal education (tea parties), the collap of the nuclear family and communities and the wider erosion of traditional values. Crisis of violence and lawlessness threaten society.
Deviance is portrayed as an individual pathology, a t of destructive lawless behaviours, actively chon and perpetrated by individual lfishness and a lack of lf-control and morality.
Conrvative governments in the UK and USA began to intensify law-enforcement activities. Police powers were extended, funding for the criminal justice system expanded and long prison ntences were increasingly relied on as the most effective deterrent against crime.
The “three strike laws” were introduced by state governments in USA in the 1990s to tackle “habitual” offenders.
Critics: such measures does not engage with the underlying caus of crime – such as social inequalities, unemployment and poverty – their greatest success lies in protecting certain gments of the population against crime and displacing delinquency into other areas.
New York, zero tolerance. Hashish, rubbish.
Security zones. Police monitoring, surveillance systems
解毒降脂片P. 953. What role does policing really play in society?
CCTV, Clo Circuit Television.
P. 955. Target hardening. Make other targets objects.
Broken windows theory. If you meet a broken window, it will encourage more rious crime to flourish. Minor acts of deviance can lead to a spiral of crime and social decay.
