9 Deviance
Learning Objectives
9.1. Deviance, Crime and Control
- Define deviance and categorize different types of deviant behaviour.
- Determine why certain behaviours are defined as deviant while others are not.
- Differentiate between different methods of social control.
- Understand social control as forms of government including penal social control, discipline, and risk management.
- Identify and differentiate between different types of crimes.
- Differentiate the different sources of crime statistics, and examine the falling rate of crime in Canada.
- Examine the overrepresentation of different minorities in the corrections system in Canada.
- Examine alternatives to prison.
Introduction to Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Psychopaths and sociopaths are favourite “deviants” in pop culture: American Psycho, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter. Dangerous individuals provide fascinating fictional characters. Psychopathy and sociopathy both refer to personality disorders involving anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy and lack of inhibitions. These categories should be distinguished from psychosis, which is a condition involving a debilitating break with reality.
Psychopaths and sociopaths are often able to pass as “normal” citizens, although their manipulation and cruelty can have devastating consequences. The term psychopathy is often used to emphasize that the source of the disorder is internal, based on psychological, biological, or genetic factors. Sociopathy is used to emphasize predominant social factors in the disorder: social or familial roots and the inability to be social or abide by societal rules (Hare, 1999). In this sense, sociopathy would be a sociological disease. It involves an incapacity for companionship, although many accounts of sociopaths describe them as acting charming, attractively confident, and outgoing (Hare, 1999).
In a society with mostly secondary rather than primary relationships, the pop culture sociopath or psychopath functions as an example of social unease. In many ways, the sociopath represents our anxieties about the loss of community and living among people we do not know. In this sense, the sociopath is a very modern sort of deviant.
In sociology, however, deviance has a much broader meaning.
9.1. Deviance, Crime and Control
What is deviance? What is the relationship between deviance and crime? According to sociologist William Graham Sumner, deviance is a violation of cultural or social norms or codified law (1906). Codified laws are norms that are written in formal codes enforced by government bodies. A crime an act of deviance that breaks not only a norm, but a law. Deviance can be as minor as nose picking in public or as major as murder.
John Hagen classifies deviant acts in terms of their perceived harmfulness and the severity of the response to them (1994). The most serious acts of deviance are consensus crimes. There is near-unanimous public agreement about consensus crimes.
Conflict crimes are acts