Social Control

• Social control are acts by society to regulate people’s acts and

behavior
• Social control can be informal and formal.
• Informal social control can be through group pressures whereas
formal social control is through the criminal justice system such as the
police, the courts, prison officials all of which respond to the alleged
violations of the law.
 Hirschi’s Control Theory
• The sociologist Travis Hirschi developed control theory in which he
postulated that social control depends upon people anticipating the
consequences of their behavior.
• Once in while, everyone finds the idea of deviance tempting, but the
notion of a ruined career and the mere imagination of the reaction of
one’s primary groups such as family and friends is enough to stop
most people from deviant acts by braking the rules.
• On the other hand, people who feel they have little to lose by
deviance are more likely to become rule breakers and commit acts of
deviance.
• Hirschi links conformity to 4 different types of social control which
are:
• Strong social attachments
• Having legitimate social opportunities
• Involvement in legitimate activities
• And having strong beliefs in conventional morality and respect for authority.
 Formal and Informal Sanctions
• Social control is regulated through formal and informal sanctions – i.e.
through formal and informal punishments.
• Informal punishments can be through moral persuasion and gossip.
• Formal punishments can be through retribution, deterrence,
rehabilitation and societal protection.
• Retribution is any act of moral vengeance by which society makes the
offender suffer as much as the suffering caused by the crime. Mob
justice can be an example of retribution.
• Deterrence is the attempt to punish criminality through the use of
punishments, by using milder forms of punishment such as
imprisonments rather than executing or physically mutilating the
criminal.
• Specific deterrence is used to convince an individual offender that
crime doesn’t pay whereas general deterrence is used to serve one
person's punishment as an example.
• Rehabilitation is a program for reforming the offender to prevent later
offences.
• Societal protection is the act of rendering an offender incapable of
further offences temporarily through imprisonment or permanently
by execution.
• However, despite punishments, criminal recidivism still occurs which
can be defined as the later offences by people previously convicted of
crimes.
• The death penalty is the most controversial punishment. Critics
consider its limited value as a crime deterrent, it also carries the risk
of unjustly sentencing someone to death, the sentence of life
imprisonment is better suited to put away criminal forever, and
because of the high cost of prosecuting capital cases.
• Some community bases corrections such as probation and parole
better handle to rehabilitate previous offenders.