Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
8.3. Crime and the Law
What Is Crime?
Although deviance is a violation of social norms, it is not always punishable, and it is not necessarily bad. Crime, on the other hand, is a behaviour that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanctions. Walking to class backwards is a deviant behaviour. Driving with a blood alcohol percentage over the province’s limit is a crime. Like other forms of deviance, however, ambiguity exists concerning what constitutes a crime and whether all crimes are, in fact, “bad” and deserve punishment.
For example, in 1946 Viola Desmond refused to sit in the balcony designated for blacks at a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where she was unable to see the screen. She was dragged from the cinema by two men who injured her knee, and she was then arrested, obliged to stay overnight in the male cell block, tried without counsel, and fined.
The court ruling ended up ignoring the laws concerning racial segregation in Canada, which was the reason why she was removed from the cinema. Instead her crime was determined to be tax evasion because she had not paid the 1 cent difference in tax between a balcony ticket and a main floor ticket. She took her case to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia where she lost. In hindsight, and long after her death, she was posthumously pardoned, because the application of the law was clearly in violation of norms of social equality.
As noted above, all societies have informal and formal ways of maintaining social control. Within these systems of norms, societies have legal codes that maintain formal social control through laws, which are rules adopted and enforced by a political authority. Those who violate these rules incur negative formal sanctions in the form of fines, jail or court ordered retribution. Normally, punishments are relative to the degree of the crime and the importance to society of the value underlying the law. There are, however, other factors that influence criminal sentencing.
Types of Crimes
Not all crimes are given equal weight. Society generally socializes its members to view certain crimes as more severe than others. As discussed earlier, John Hagen distinguished between serious consensus crimes, like murder and sexual assault, about which there is near-unanimous public agreement, and conflict crimes, like prostitution or recreational drugs, which may be illegal but about which there is considerable public disagreement concerning their seriousness. Even within the category of crimes on which there is consensus, there is disagreement about levels of seriousness and punishment. For example, most people would consider murdering someone to be far worse than stealing a wallet and would expect a murderer to be punished more severely than a thief. In modern North American society, crimes are typically classified as one of two types based on their severity. Violent crimes (also known as “crimes against a person”) are ba