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Theories of Deviance
The Structural Perspective
-Durkheim believed that at its root the morals that individuals are taught constrain their behavior
-Social disintegration leads to greater deviance
- He also believed deviance was functional for society
-Each time a deviant act is committed and publicly announced, society is united in indignation against the perpetrator
-What deviance does for society is to define the
-inequality results in crime
-structuralists locate the cause of crime in 2 main factors: the differential opportunity, structure, and prejudice and discrimination towards certain groups
-groups with access to greater power, political, and economic opportunity may use these to define their acts as legitimate and the acts of others as deviant
- Deviant behavior depends on people's access to illegitimate opportunities
The Interactionist Perspective
-Many people are exposed to the same structural conditions and the same cultural conflicts and pressures that have been theorized as accounting for deviance but still resist engaging in deviant behaviors
-Interactionists theories fill this void by looking in a more micro fashion at peoples everyday life behavior to try to understand why some people engage in deviance and become so labeled
-How deviance happens
- Matza suggested that it is rare for people to turn to deviance overnight
-Quitting deviance may be a gradual and difficult process
-Hirschis answer is that social control lies in the extent to which people develop a stake inconformity, a bond to society
- Crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one particular species but in all societies of all types
- Crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly impossible
-Crime consists of an act that offends certain very strong collective sentiments
-Crime is necessary: It is bound up with fundamental conditions of all social life
-Law and morality vary from one social type to the next
- Social Structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in non conforming rather than conforming conduct
Patterns of Cultural Goals and Institutional Norms
-Two important elements of social and cultural structures
1. Culturally defined goals, purposes, and interests
2. Culture structure defines, regulates, and controls the acceptable modes of reaching out for these goals
-No society lacks norms governing conduct
-The technically most effective procedure whether culturally legitimate or not, becomes typically preferred to institutionally prescribed conduct
-Anomie or "normless" working of this process eventuating in anomie can be easily glimpsed in a series of familiar and instructive though perhaps trivial episodes
The Strain Toward Anomie
-The pressure of such a social order is upon outdoing one's competitors
-Process by which a particular person comes to engage in criminal behavior
1. Criminal behavior is learned
2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication
3. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups
4. When criminal behavior is learned the learned includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple (b) the specific directions of motive drives, rationalizations and attitudes
5. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable
6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law
7. Differential associations may vary in frequency duration, priority, and intensity
8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning
Ch.9 Control Theory
-The deviant rationalizes his behavior so that he can at once violate the rule and maintain his belief in it
- Many person do not have an attitude of respect toward the rules of society
-A persons beliefs in the moral validity of norms are for no telological reason weakend
-There is variation in the strength of moral beliefs
Toward Feminist Theory of Delinquency
-All existing theories were developed with no concern about gender stratification
-Gender stratification in patriarchal society is as powerful a system as is class
Mothers liberation causes daughters crime
Criminalizing Girls Survival
-Referred by parents
-Physical and sexual abuse problem for girls
-Girls are more likely to be the victims of child sexual abuse than are boys
-Run away and force further into crime in order to survive
Female Delinquency, Patriarchal Authority, and Family Courts
-Poverty and racism shape girls lives
-Throughout most of the courts history, virtually all female delinquency has been placed within the larger context of girls sexual behavior
- The constructionist approach recognizes that people can only understand the world in terms of words and categories that they create and share with one another
The Emergence of Constructionism
-Conflict theorists charged that labeling theory ignored how elites shaped definitions of deviance and social control policies
The Constructionist Response
-The sociologist ought to redefine social problems as claims that various conditions constituted social problems therefore the constructionist approach involved studying claims and those who made them
-To say that a social problem is socially constructed is not to imply that it does not exist, but rather that it is through social interaction that the problem is assigned particular meanings
