SUMMARY OF DEVIANT BEHAVIOR: Crime, Conflict, and Interest Groups

(C. McCaghy, T. Capron, et.al.) and OTHER MATTERS for DISCUSSION (LECTURE #1)

DISCLAIMER: NOT FOR SALE, FOR CLASS DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY.

I. THE CONCEPT OF DEVIANT BEHAVIOR (p.1-30)

PURPOSE OF STUDYING DEVIANCY:

To examine the fact that deviance as a concept is subject to many changes that are dependent on time,
place, and the influence of those who may impose a label of deviance.

-Deviance is not a fixed concept

-Deviant behavior is a rational, learned response to social, economic, and political conditions.

–deviant responses are supported by learned traditions, rewards, and motives.

A. PERSPECTIVES ON DEVIANTS

1) CLASSICAL SCHOOL

-DEVIANCE IS A CHOICE MADE BY A RATIONAL INDIVIDUAL

2) POSITIVIST SCHOOL

-emphasis on determinism on factors beyond the control of the individual

(Ex. economic determinism, social structural theories, subcultural explanations, control theory)_

Question #1: CAN HUMAN BEHAVIORS BE PREDICTED?

-there are assumptions and expectations upon which to act

-But there are people who behave in both unexpected and unacceptable ways.

QUESITON #2 What constitutes unexpected and unacceptable behavior?

-may seem to be rather personal and individual judgments.

-Group Life would obviously be difficult without considerable agreement among members concerning
the ground rules regulating behavior.
- Regardless of how dedicated they may be to personal gratification; group members must operate
under some constraints if the group is to survive.

-It is difficult to imagine any viable group in which members did whatever they wished regardless of the
feelings and well-being of others.

-If any group is to continue as an operating entity, there must be some agreement among members
about how they shall act toward one another; and, of course, there must be at least tacit consensus
about what constitutes unacceptable behavior. (We aren’t necessarily consistent or logical about it)

-We reasonably assume, generally on the basis of experience, that such relations will be conducted
according to the rules as you understand them.

- People who are seeking to satisfy their own interests and appetites, their behavior is usually
predictable and within acceptable limits

B. SOCIAL CONTROL

-attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behaviors in ways that limit, or punish deviance

-Negative Sanctions – are Negative social reactions to deviance

Vs.

-Positive Sanctions- Affirmative reactions, usually in the form of conformity

C. NORMS

-“an ideal standard of behavior to which people conform to a greater or lesser extent.”

- rules governing human relations within social groups

OXFORD:

rules or expectations that are socially enforced. Norms may be prescriptive (encouraging positive
behavior; for example, “be honest”) or proscriptive (discouraging negative behavior; for example, “do
not cheat”). The term is also sometimes used to refer to patterns of behavior and internalized values.
Norms are important for their contribution to social order. Governments (and other hierarchies) and
markets are argued to contribute to order, as are individual prosocial motivations. But the norms
enforced through groups and networks also play an important role. Norms have long been used to
explain behavior, but in recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on explaining norms
themselves—in particular, their emergence and enforcement.

CAMBRIDGE:

an accepted standard or a way of behaving or doing things that most people agree with
DEVIANT (NEGATIVE)-

CAMBRIDGE:

a person or behavior that is not usual and is generally considered to be unacceptable

MERRIAM-WEBSTER:

-someone or something that deviates from a norm

-a person who differs markedly (as in social adjustment or behavior) from what is considered normal or
acceptable

-FOLKWAYS- Informal Norms, though will most likely to result to negative sanctions

v.

Formal Sanctioning of Deviance- when norms are codified into laws and violation almost always results
to NEGATIVE SANCTIONS from authority

WHO IS DEVIANT?

Deviant behavior really should not surprise us. It is common. The real surprise would be finding people
who had never done anything wrong.

HOW DO WE DEFINE DEVIANCE:

-Deviance means “differing from a norm or from accepted standards of society.”

-not a matter of number

-Deviance as “any behavior or physical appearance that is socially challenged and condemned because it
departs from the norms and expectations of a group.”

-What are the accepted standards and social expectations?”

QUESTION #3: LIST 10 THINGS OR TYPES/CHARACTERISTICS OF PEOPLE YOU REGARD AS DEVIANT

-THUS STANDARDS AND EXPECTATIONS CONCERNING BEHAVIOR DEPEND LESS ON UNIVERSAL NORMS
OR CONSENSUS
-standards and expectations concerning behavior depend less on universal norms or consensus about
norms than on a particular, and perhaps temporary, point of view.

-A given individual’s standards may fluctuate significantly with the events and stresses of daily life. As
our moods and our concerns change, so does our capacity for tolerance.

-Some types of deviance are definitely more relative than others.

-agreement concerning the deviant character of actions applies primarily when those actions are
directed against the interests of one’s own group. Similar acts against the interests of those who are
defined as “enemies,” “strangers,” or “not our kind” do not readily qualify for the same interpretation.
Thus, it is not enough to say that people are “against” stealing. It depends on who is being robbed

-Definitions of who and what are deviant revolve around the protections of interests.

CRIMINAL LAWS

the criminal law concerns the well-being of all and reflects the conscience of the total society, regardless
of the diverse interests of various individuals or groups.

-thus, the deviant is a criminal—a person whose behaviors are formally forbidden by legislation and
punishable by the state.

*Some theorists seek the explanation of such behavior within the deviants

- they assume that deviant behavior is symptomatic of personal characteristics distinguishing criminal
from normal actors.

-to them, to understand deviance is to understand the forces motivating some individuals to act in ways
that most others avoid

THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL

Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794)

-“On Crimes and Punishments” - a plea for the reform of the judicial and penal systems of the time,
which were characterized by secret accusations, extensive use of torture, harsh penalties for trivial
offenses, the application of law to implement political policy, and extreme arbitrariness by judges in
levying punishments

-Beccaria favored the application of law to all persons in an absolutely equal manner, with no variations
for the circumstances of convicted criminals.
-the law should assume that all humans are fundamentally rational and hedonistic;

-humans possess free will and make deliberate decisions to behave based on a calculation of the pain
and pleasure involved.

-it is from these characteristics that society emerges. To avoid continual chaos resulting from total
individual freedom, humans essentially enter a contract in which they submit to a civil authority in
exchange for security under the laws of a state. Humans are basically self-serving, however. Given the
opportunity, they will enhance their own positions at the expense of other humans. Thus, the role of the
state is to prevent crime

-Beccaria argued that the law should be clear and simple and directed against only those behaviors that
obviously endanger society and individuals in it.

-Compliance with the law should be rewarded, and it is necessary to convince individuals that
punishment for violations will be unavoidable, prompt, and only in slight excess of the pleasure derived
from the illegal act.

-Beccaria believed it necessary to treat humans as equal, self-determining individuals whose freedom
and responsibility were preeminent and unaffected by personal characteristics, extenuating
circumstances, and experiences.

Neoclassical school- recognized that not all persons are equally rational, particularly the young, the
mentally disturbed, and those confronted with other unusual circumstances that decrease
responsibility. As a result, judges were allowed some discretion in sentencing to account for extenuating
circumstances

CRITICISM:

It greatly undermined how society can adversely affect behavior.

THE POSITIVIST SCHOOL

- philosophical approach founded by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), which replaced speculation with
scientific inquiry as the source of knowledge about social life

-doctrine formulated by Comte which asserts that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge, i.e.,
knowledge which describes and explains the coexistence and succession of observable phenomena,
including both physical and social phenomena.

-Positivism does not concern itself with the abstract and unprovable but rather with the tangible and
quantifiable. It involves investigating the world by objective data that can be counted or measured

DETERMINISM - doctrine which claims that all objects or events are determined, that is to say must be
as they are and as they will be by virtue of some laws or forces which necessitate their being so
e.g. Economic determinism tends to mean the doctrine that economic factors determine others,
Sociological determinism is likely to mean the assertion that social facts are determined, and that they
are determined by social factors.

-In dealing with deviance scientifically, the positivist approach shifts attention away from the rational
deviant seeking happiness to one whose behavior is determined by forces beyond her or his control.

- positivists do not advise punishment as a remedy because deviant behavior is not a matter of choice. --
-the recommended procedure for halting deviant behavior depends on the brand of determinism
favored. (if the presumed cause is located in the body, the body must be “treated”; if it is located in
social factors, anything from the family, the neighborhood, or the entire economic system may need
renovation.)

QUESTION: Why some ignore or disobey others’ concepts of righteous behavior.

-deviant behavior invariably can be traced to a pathology.

- Deviation in behavior can be interpreted as a departure from normality, and the positivists’ research
consistently indicates a presupposition that a “normal” organism in a “normal” environment would not
so act.

-Thus positivism can be viewed as a combination of scientific method, a search for pathology, and the
application of treatment based on scientific findings.

George B. Vold and Thomas J. Bernard

-positivism easily fit into the patterns of totalitarian government

-It is centered on the core idea of the superior knowledge and wisdom of the scientific expert who, on
the basis of scientific knowledge, decides what kind of human beings commit crimes, and prescribes
treatment without concern for public opinion and without consent from the person so diagnosed (i.e.,
the criminal). There is an obvious similarity between the control of power in society advocated in
positivism and the political reality of centralized control of the life of the citizen by a government
bureaucracy indifferent to public opinion

CRITICISM: The potential abuses inherent in positivism are often masked by the good will and good
intentions of the scientific researchers and the staffs of institutions where citizens are committed. But
the facts are unavoidable. Untold numbers of people have been incarcerated on the basis of erroneous
or at best tentative theories of deviance. They have had their minds and bodies tampered with by
“treatments” of no proven benefit (if they have been dignified by such attention at all).

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

-possible relationship between anatomical attributes and behavior

-possible connection between a biological characteristic and human behavior.

-biological organism doing the acting and that such an organism is far easier to measure and examine
than other possible variables.

PHRENOLOGY

-All of us make judgments about people based solely on their appearances

-TThe most systematic and logically constructed approach) phrenology —the determination of mental
facilities and character traits from the shape of the skull
-human head divided into segments, each representing particular “powers” or “propensities.”

Phrenologists believed that brain tissue also expanded with vigorous use and that the skull would form
accordingly

Franz Gall

1) The brain was the center of thought.

2) Specific brain areas controlled behavioral activities.
3) Brain areas … of greater importance were greater in size and area.
4) The skull precisely and accurately covered the cranial cortex, so that [areas] of disproportionate
importance (and disproportionate growth and size) produce concomitant protuberances on the
skull.

-Gall measured skulls as a practical means of measuring the brains they held.-

-The notion that there may be a link between protuberances on the head and criminal behavior

Charles Caldwell (1772–1853)

divided the brain into 34 areas, 3 of which were related to criminal behavior—“philoprogenitiveness
[love for offspring], destructiveness, and covetiveness

-Philoprogenitiveness it was noted that of twenty-nine females who had been guilty of infanticide the
development of this organ was defective in twenty-seven.

-Destructiveness- when not properly balanced and regulated by superior faculties it led to murder

-Covetiveness- Caldwell remarked that unless restrained and properly directed it led to great selfishness
and even to theft

-A more serious obstacle to the development of phrenology was that the intellectual community was
unwilling to accept the fatalism that a biologically based theory implied.

- The major works by Gall and Caldwell were done when humans were seen by most social thinkers as
directing their own lives, not being manipulated by accidents of biology.

Cesare Lombroso (1838–1909)

the founder of the positivist school of criminology because he sought the explanation of criminal
behavior by using scientific methods.

- concept of “born criminal”

- criminals are born and not made

- Lombroso’s most important book was L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), first published in Italy
in 1876.

-Doctrine of evolutionary atavism - Criminals were seen as distinct types of humans who could be
distinguished from noncriminals by certain physical traits. These observable “stigmata” did not cause
criminal behavior but rather served to identify persons who were out of step with the evolutionary
scheme.

- Such persons were considered to be closer to apes or to early primitive humans than were most
modern individuals; they were throwbacks (atavists) to an earlier stage in human development.

Lombroso later deemphasized the importance of atavism in explaining the total range of criminality. In
his last publications he conceded that the born criminal probably constituted only a third of all criminals.
By this time he had supplemented his approach with the idea that epilepsy might form an underlying
basis for predisposing individuals to crime

His final classification of criminals included

(1) the born criminal,

(2) the insane criminal,

(3) the epileptic criminal, and

(4) the occasional criminal.

The last group represented those who were apparently unaffected by atavism or epilepsy and whose
criminal behavior was a result of any of a multitude of environmental or situational factors: climate,
structure of government, corruption of police, poverty, and so on. However, even for this group,
Lombroso never totally abandoned his ideas that criminal individuals were different from others and
that they were abnormal to some degree. In short, he never allowed for the possible existence of
“normal” criminals

Enrico Ferri (1856–1929)

Ferri suggested five types:

1) Insane criminals who act from epilepsy, imbecility, paranoia (delusions of being persecuted),
and other forms of mental infirmity
2) Born criminals “whose anti-human conduct is the inevitable effect of an indefinite series of
hereditary influences which accumulate in the course of generations”
3) Habitual criminals who show in an indistinct way the marks of the born criminal and act through
moral weakness as influenced by a corrupt environment
4) Criminals of passion who act under the impulse of uncontrolled emotion on occasion during
otherwise moral lives
5) Occasional criminals who “have not received from nature an active tendency towards crime but
have fallen into it, goaded by the temptation incident to their personal condition or physical and
social environment” (Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology, trans. Joseph I. Kelly and John Lisle
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1917), pp. 138–157.)

OCCASIONAL -lack of foresight and are stimulated by factors such as age, sexuality, poverty, and
the weather.

-THEREFORE, Ferri was advocating a theory of multiple causation involving not only individual
factors but social ones as well.

- he was substituting heredity for atavism in the born criminal; that is, he believed there
existed a criminal type whose behavior was congenital but stemmed from more immediate
generations than implied in the notion of atavism.

Raffaele Garofalo (1852–1934),

-Garofalo disagreed with Ferri on many counts but not on the hereditary basis of crime derived
from recent generations. Garofalo suggested a theory of moral degeneracy. This degeneracy
resulted from “retrogressive selection” and caused the individual to lose the better qualities
which he had acquired by secular evolution, and has led him back to the same degree of
inferiority whence he had slowly risen
- This retrogressive selection is due to the mating of the weakest and most unfit, of those who
have become brutalized by alcohol or abased by extreme misery against which their apathy has
prevented them from struggling. Thus are formed demoralized and outcast families whose
interbreeding in time produces a true race of inferior quality.

Charles Goring (1870–1919),

-there was no evidence confirming the existence of a physical criminal type as described by
Lombroso and his disciples.
- criminal sample was differentiated from the noncriminal samples by shorter height and lesser
weight. Goring speculated that in and of itself this finding did not indicate that criminals were
inferior; instead, it reflected an inbreeding of the “criminal class.” Shorter individuals have more
difficulty in obtaining honest work and are more likely to be apprehended and convicted should
they commit crimes. Thus, by a process of selection the slight-of-stature criminals are separated
from the general community. They have sons who inherit their fathers’ small size and who also
become convicted. In the course of generations this process leads to an inbred physical
differentiation of the “criminal class.”
 -William Sheldon-

relationship between a general body type and criminality

-Men who were more muscular and athletic were more likely to be criminally deviant

Eleonor and Sheldon Glueck

-a simple colleration between body types and criminality could not be taken as causal
evidence
-people expect physically strong boys to be bullies and therefore encourage aggressive
behaviors from said boys (positively sanctioned), resulting to some engaging in aggressive
criminal behaviors

PHYSCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES
-place all explanatory factors in the people’s environment
-does not deny altogether the possibility of inheriting some elements of personality, they
generally see personality as a matter of socialization
-they see deviance as a matter of improper or failed socialization

Walter Reckless and Simon Dinitz

- Study of Good Boys and Bad Boys
- Ability of goodboys to control deviant impulses resulted to fewer conflicts with the police
- Containment Theory- deviance is a matter of impulse control or having a personality that
contains deviance actions

Common Criticisms on BIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

-linked criminal deviance to an individual factor: either a body or a mind

-while leaving out other important factors (peer influence and opportunities)

-it understands deviance as a matter of abnormality

-modern researches show that most people exhibiting deviant behaviors are both psychologically and
biologically normal/ typical

SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH

-sees Deviance in Criminality as how the society is structured

Three major/ foundational ideas:

 1) Deviance varies according to cultural norms
-nothing is inherently deviant, cultural norms vary from culture-to-culture, and over time and
place
2) People are deviant because they are labeled as deviant
-Societies response is what defines our actions as deviant
-same actions maybe deviant or not depending on the context
-labeling people can result to influencing future behavior
3) Defining social norms involved social power
-one of the roles of law is as a means for the powerful elite to protect their interests

II. THEORY & DEVIANCE

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO DEVIANCE

A. 1. STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH (Emile Durkheim)

-Since deviance is found in every society, it must serve some purpose:

1) it helps define cultural values and norms;

-it is a measure of what is not good (and therefore what is GOOD);

2) Society’s response to deviance clarifies moral boundaries-

-when society reacts by sanctioning actions or behaviors which exceeded a certain moral threshold

3) these reactions bring society together;

-it affirms a person’s membership to a certain group/class in the society;

4) it encourages social change

A. 2. STRAIN THEORY (ROBERT MERTON)

-the amount of deviance in a society depends on whether that society has provided sufficient means to
achieve culturally defined goals (e.g. financial success (goal), getting education (means))

-CONFIRMITY-achieving culturally set goals by way of conventionally approved means

-INNOVATION- deviant solutions (illegitimate means) which people find to reach their goals

-RITUALISM- giving up on the goal while remaining devoted to the rules

-RETREATISM- rejection of conventional means and goals (addicts and alcoholics)

REBELLION- a rejection of goals and means, but in the context of a counterculture; one that supports
the pursuit of new goals according to new means

**Stuctural-Functionalist Approaches- see how deviance works on a macro scale; it works on the
assumption that everyone who does deviant things will be treated as deviant

B. SYMBOLIC-INTERACTIONIST

-social status impacts on how deviance is punished

B.1. LABELING THEORY

-the idea that deviance and conformity is not primarily about what you do but how people label it

-primary deviance v. secondary deviance (how these are sanctioned affect one’s self-concept)

STIGMA – a powerfully negative sort of master status that affects a person’s self-concept, social identity,
and interactions with others

EFFECTS: leads to labeling, both retrospective (concerning past behavior/conduct) or prospective

(predicting future behavior based on stigma)

B.2. DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION

-who you associate with makes deviance more or less likely;

B.3. Control Theory

-focuses on the person’s self-control as a way of avoiding deviance, as well as their ability to anticipate
or avoid the consequences of their actions

C. CONFLICT THEORY APPROACH

-links deviance to social power

-deviants are often the powerless in the society

-it posits that norms and laws reflect the interests of the powerful. The powerful defend their power by
labeling as deviant anything that threatens that power.

-because the powerful are able to defend themselves against labels of deviance; their deviant actions
are less likely to lead to deviant labels, and thus reactions to that deviance
-norms have an inherently political nature, but the politics tend to be masked by the general belief that
if something is normative, it must be right and good

(for better understanding of the topic you may want to check these videos posted by Crashcourse:
Sociology in YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IS_X7hWWI&authuser=1;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGq9zW9w3Fw&authuser=1)