Main Body
Chapter 7. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Learning Objectives
- Define deviance and categorize different types of deviant behaviour
- Determine why certain behaviours are defined as deviant while others are not
- Differentiate between methods of social control
- Describe the characteristics of disciplinary social control and their relationship to normalizing societies
7.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance
- Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society and compare Durkheim’s views with social disorganization theory, control theory, and strain theory
- Explain how critical sociology understands deviance and crime in society
- Understand feminist theory’s unique contributions to the critical perspective on crime and deviance
- Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labelling and other theories
- Identify and differentiate between different types of crimes
- Evaluate Canadian crime statistics
- Understand the nature of the corrections system in Canada
Introduction to Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Psychopaths and sociopaths are some of the favourite “deviants” in contemporary popular culture. From Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, to Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, to Dexter Morgan in Dexter, to Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock and Elementary, the figure of the dangerous individual who lives among us provides a fascinating fictional figure. Psychopathy and sociopathy both refer to personality disorders that involve anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions. In clinical analysis, these analytical categories should be distinguished from psychosis, which is a condition involving a debilitating break with reality.
Psychopaths and sociopaths are often able to manage their condition and pass as “normal” citizens, although their capacity for manipulation and cruelty can have devastating consequences for people around them. The term psychopathy is often used to emphasize that the source of the disorder is internal, based on psychological, biological, or genetic factors, whereas sociopathy is used to emphasize predominant social factors in the disorder: the social or familial sources of its development and the inability to be social or abide by societal rules (Hare 1999). In this sense sociopathy would be the sociological disease par excellence. It entails an incapacity for companionship (socius), yet many accounts of sociopaths describe them as being charming, attractively confident, and outgoing (Hare 1999).
In a modern society characterized by the predominance of secondary rather than primary relationships, the sociopath or psychopath functions, in popular culture at least, as a prime index of contemporary social unease. The sociopath is like the nice neighbour next door who one day “goes off” or is revealed to have had a sinister second life. In many ways the sociopath is a cypher for many of the anxieties we have about the loss of community and living a