Crime and Deviance #1

Crime and Deviance #1

1. A social Construction of Crime

   • Newburn: Crime is an action which is labelled by society as being wrong, usually breaking societies laws and usually punished with legal action against the person, and is usually controlled by the police and other social controlling forces such as the courts
     • "There is no act which in itself is criminal", this means that there is no crime, but only the perseptions of people towards certain acts, such as stealing is not a criminal act, but it is the view of people towards the act of stealing which makes it criminal and the actions taken against people who do steal.
       • This can be seen in the ever changing laws, such as being Gay before the 1990's could be seen as being criminal in some of the western countries in the world such as America or Britain, but now they are legal and people who are gay are not punished for being Gay

2. A social construction of Deviance

   • Behaviour which goes against the general norms of society and its values, it is what people see as unacceptable behaviour and because of its subjective nature acts of deviance can be given punishments from disapproval, to strong disapproval and even imprisionment
   • Downes and Rock: the act as seen as being deviant depends on the person witnessing the act, the motives of the action, what is known about the person and the social circumstances in which the act takes place
   • Plummer: saw that there was two forms of deviance, societal and situational deviance these were the ideas that deviance could be split into two different sections, Societal deviance was the concept that deviance which broke societies norms and values, such as swearing at a teacher, whereas situational deviance is where the deviance depends on the situation such as wearing no clothes in public is unacceptable and could be considered deviant whereas if the person was wearing no clothes in their own house then it can be considered acceptable and not deviant, but it all depends on the situation the act is in.

3. Can crime not be deviant?

   • Speeding is socially acceptable on a motorway, but it is still criminal but it has become socially acceptable, so this is criminal, but not deviant, the same for teachers photocopying work from textbooks, this is classed as breaking the copyright laws, but it is socially accepted by students and other teachers

4. The Relativity of deviance

   • In the mid to later half of the 1900's being gay was considered deviant and wrong, but times changed and they became not deviant and not wrong, but the Native American Indians accepted Gay people and even held them in higher esteem than non - homosexual Native Indians, this shows that deviance is subjective between cultures so there is no act which can be considered deviant and criminal acts can also be considered subjective and change between cultures so no single act (like what Newburn suggested) can be considered criminal.
     • Native Americans believed that being Gay was a special attribute given to only special people chosen by the spirits, this meant that gay people were believed to be better at hunting as they had the luck of the spirits and they were also chosen most of the time as their leaders, whereas at the time of the 1800's and 1900's gay people in europe and around the other powers of the time were being persecuted for being gay were the gays within Native America were being treated better than non gay people where.

5. Social control, crime and deviance

   • Every society has a form of social control, be it either the police, religion, families or laws. There are two forms of Social control, one is Formal groups such as the police and the government, and informal control groups such as religion, the media or the family
   • Formal Control
     • This is the insitutions set up to goven people such as the governments who create laws and the police who then enforce those laws. The most visable formal social control is physical force, used to control peoples behaviour, and the most obvious group to use these measures are the police.
   • Informal control
     • This is the more subtle way of controlling people, we engage with it every day and is used to gently push us back into conformity, Things such as the family, peer groups, schools and the local community all play a big role in laying a basis for our informal control.
   • Hirschi: asks why 'DON't' people commit crime. According to Hirschi there are four crucial bonds which keep us from committing crime, these are: Attachment, this is the extent in which we care about others opinions such as if people think of you as a criminal more than a person, Commitment, this refers to the personal investments that we make in our lives and what have we got to lose by committing crime. Involvement, meaning are we too busy to commit crime and do we is there time and space for us to commit time, Belief, how strong is a persons belief in the system to make them not commit a crime and the loyalty to society so that they do not break its laws
     • Hirsche argued that by increasing these bonds within society we can lower crime rate as people will want to do crime less.
   • Farrington and West: studied the idea of family and social control and if crime was committed because of a failure by the parents,they studied 411 working class people born in 1953 until they were 30 and they found that less than 6% of the sample committed around 50% of all convictions and that the family attitudes and traits correlated that they were the ones which came from poor parenting, especially from families who their fathers had criminal convictions themselves. This proved that inadequate informal controls lead to crime supporting Hirsche's Crucial bonds theory.