Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
8.1. Deviance and Social Control
What, exactly, is deviance? What is the relationship between deviance and crime? According to sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), deviance is a violation of norms. More specifically, it is a violation of established contextual, cultural, or social norms, whether folkways, mores, or codified law (1906). As discussed in Chapter 3. Culture, folkways are norms based on everyday cultural customs concerning practical matters like how to hold a fork, what type of clothes are appropriate for different situations, or how to greet someone politely. Mores are more serious moral injunctions that are broadly recognized in a society, like lying or stealing. Codified laws are norms that are specified in explicit codes and enforced by government bodies. A crime is therefore an act of deviance that breaks not only a norm, but a law. Deviance can be as minor as picking one’s nose in public or as major as committing murder.
John Hagen provides a typology to classify deviant acts in terms of their perceived harmfulness, the degree of consensus concerning the norms violated, and the severity of the response to them (1994). The most serious acts of deviance are consensus crimes about which there is near-unanimous public agreement. Acts like murder and sexual assault are generally regarded as morally intolerable, injurious, and subject to harsh penalties. Conflict crimes are acts like prostitution or eating psychedelic mushrooms, which may be illegal but about which there is considerable public disagreement concerning their seriousness. Social deviations are acts like abusing serving staff or behaviours arising from mental illness or addiction, which are not illegal in themselves but are widely regarded as serious or harmful. People agree that these behaviours call for institutional intervention. Finally there are social diversions like riding skateboards on sidewalks, overly tight leggings, or facial piercings that violate norms in a provocative way but are generally regarded as distasteful, or for some cool, but harmless.
The point is that the question, “What is deviant behaviour?” cannot be answered in a straightforward manner. No act or person is intrinsically deviant. This follows from two key insights of the sociological approach to deviance, which distinguish it from moral and legalistic approaches. Firstly, deviance is defined by its social context. This means that where norms differ — locally, cross-culturally or historically — what constitutes deviance also differs. To understand why some acts are deviant and some are not, it is necessary to understand what the social context is, what the existing rules are, and how these rules came to be established. If the rules change, what counts as deviant also changes. As rules and norms vary across cultures and time, it makes sense that notions of deviance also change.
Fifty years ago, public schools in Canada had strict dress co