Social Control

Social Control

1. What is social control? The Criminal Justice System is the most powerful institution of social control. But police, prisons and courts are not the only forms of social control. Formal: institutions, for example education, health, media and religion. Informal= friends, family, colleagues and peers, even strangers. The state may clearly define what is acceptable/ desirable behaviour but friends, family colleagues etc. may encourage different types of behaviour.

   • e.g. example of Cardiff's night time economy, 3 groups, professionals, students locals, all have different views on acceptable ways to act etc. labelled other groups as well as each other. Different expectations on type, quantity and frequency of consumption.

2. the expansion of social control: radical analysis of punishment; 'moral panics' and social construction of crime problems; the state; crime, politics and human rights.

   • Social control was introduced to sociological discourse by the American sociologist Edward Ross. He used th term to refer to 'all processes which induce individuals to behave in conformity with the norms and values of society, as well as the criminal law, police, courts and prisons' so this conceptualisation encompasses both the production of normal behaviour as well as the suppression of deviance. Many general theories of crime similarly highlight a lack of control and implicit is the belief normal citizens in modern societies are controlled individuals, so the study of disorder, crime and deviance/ delinquency has been centred on identifying the conditions which are conducive to the absence of control, and the discovery of remedies which might re-establish control. We know that labelling theory challenged this notion of 'lack of control leads to crime' and indeed reversed this accepted causal order by stating the reverse: actually control mechanisms lead to crime.
     • in other words, responses to crime by police, courts etc. actually cause deviance and crime and not the other way around. This groundbreaking notion generated a body of work on 'social control agents' as they were suddenly seen as responsible themselves for producing at least some of the crime and deviance they were claiming to deter, prevent or control.

3. Stan Cohen's Vision of Social Control (1985)

   • The " organised ways in which society responds to behaviour and people it regards as deviant, problematic, worrying, threatening, troublesome or undesirable in some way or another". ; Analysis of the various ways in which the state has evolved as it deals with the control of deviant behaviour and people; Cohen's focus on the use of social control allows a look at the way the state uses "soft line" ,methods to control.
   • Cohen believed society needs new penalties in addition to, rather than instead of, imprisonment. He argued that imprisonment continues to grow, and we need new kinds of social control outside of the prison, the dispersal of discipline (links to Foucault), new controls are more invasive and intense; the repressive power of the state to control us is extended and intensified.
   • Cohen's 'nets' of social control (wider, denser, deeper and new nets).. Net widening is the idea that more people are subject to control. The net is wider so it is scooping up more fish, more and more people are being drawn into systems of control- e.g. the criminal justice system. Denser or stronger nets is the idea of 'net strengthening' or sanctions having added requirements, i.e. more intensive/ intrusive interventions. New nets refer to newly designed sanctions and remedies in the social control apparatus, so we can see an expanded repertoire of activities and tactics ( nets). Deeper nets refers to the less visible, informal, non-state mechanisms that are being subsumed into the social control apparatus.
     • Wider nets: expanded definitions of deviance, new kinds of crime, scooping up more fish, the crim justice system as a gigantic suction machine, net widening. Many more types of violence are now considered to be criminal behaviour. Net widening can be beneficial and in some cases it is argued is important, however there are problems associated, such as the labelling of young offenders or the way that drug addiction has been criminalised.
     • Denser nets, e.g. intensive surveillance, run by probation service, but also involves families, employers and schools. Intrusive interventions: psycho social methods e.g. CBT. This means that alongside the sentence that a criminal gets, they are likely to also be given other sanctions such as statutory controls over sexual and violent offenders on completion of custodial sentences have also been tightened significantly. Once released they are increasingly subject to risk assessment and risk management by multi agency panels, e.g. sex offenders must be placed on SO register and obliged to notify police of their whereabouts for at least 5 years
     • New Nets: e.g. community service, probation orders, day training centres, mental health laws. New places/ new nets are being used to control people in ways that have not previously been observed, e.g. day centres etc. Together with wider and deeper nets, the result, as Stan Cohen puts it, goes completely against what we might expect from those who accept the premise of labelling- e.g. that social control causes deviance.
     • Deeper nets: " the awful secret of community control". Blurring between penal system and society, involvement of family, schools, workplaces; private policing, neighbourhood watch, visibility and accountability. "The system penetrates the space of the family, the school and the neighbourhood; it tries to buttress their existing control processes by exporting the modes of discipline and control which characterise its own spaces". Deeper nets refers to the notion that social control becomes so deep, so fundamental and so pervasive in society that it becomes internalised- that the penal system as the locus of control is no longer accurate as maybe it once was- because now individuals take on responsibility for their own safety, terms like state and social have been replaced by individual and community.

4. New forms of social control: 'subtle forms' e.g. targeted advertising , cookies and personal data collection, latest government proposals to increase surveillance capabilities- draft communications/ data bill; social control is not a one directional process, there is always resistance.

   • e.g. internet surveillance. Foucault: Disciplinary society- model of control developed in prison expanded into wider society e.g. schools, hospitals, military. Deleuze: control society, society has progressed from disciplinary society, control society characterised by reliance on computers, networks of control.