Cesare Beccaria: Criminology and the Enlightenment

Cesare Beccaria (1738 - 1794)

• Beccaria was an Italian philosopher, criminologist, and jurist.
• As the founder of classical criminology, he offered a central approach to understanding crime and punishment.
• He was influential in shaping Jeremy Bentham’s “pleasure-pain principle”.
• Beccaria was a member of Milan’s Literary “Academy of Fists”.
• He opposed the death penalty, torture, excessive punishment, and tyranny.
• He drew on the enlightenment movement.
• The liberal tradition states individual actors behave with reason prioritizing their self-interest.
• The radical tradition indicates individual actors behave with reason, developing interests, passions, and morals based on societal arrangement.
• According to Beccaria, preventing all disorders amid conflicting human passions is impossible, disorders increase relative to population size and the intersection of particular interests, making it difficult to direct towards public unity.

Passions and Interests: The Roots of Classical Criminology

• Beccaria's insights provided the groundwork for classical criminology.
• Individuals rationally act based on self-interest by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
• Individuals rationally calculate when deciding whether to commit a crime.
• Reason connects actions to certain outcomes.

Beccaria on Law and Punishment

• "Let laws, therefore, be inexorable, and inexorable their executors in particular cases, but let the legislator be tender, indulgent, and humane.”
• Laws and measured punishment can create an inevitable system that rationally disincentivizes criminal acts.
• Laws and punishment are not effective when "spirit" trumps the "letter" of the law, when laws are obscure or difficult to understand, when punishment is delayed or overly severe, or when leniency/clemency is applied.

Beccaria: In Sum

• Deviance and crime are an objective reality derived rationally.
• Complex modern society yields conflicting interests.
• Unbridled individual passions get controlled through reasonable, clearly defined, and articulated legal institutions that enforce appropriate punishment.
• Reason affects deviance and crime through law and punishment.

Kai Erikson (1931-)

• Erikson is an Austrian-born sociologist and criminologist.
• He is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
• His historical study on wayward Puritans informed his theories of deviance.
• He questioned if “deviance” could serve a predictive role in a social group or society.

Notes on the Sociology of Deviance

• Deviance lacks inherent properties.
• It relies on a social audience rather than an individual one.
• Social audiences develop “screens” to determine the relative deviance of acts.
• These take numerous subjective factors into account and are not strictly tied to deviant acts themselves.
• The central contribution delineates the relationship between deviance and punishment, incorporating additional social forces into the process.
• Punishment is not simply censure or rehabilitation of deviant subjects.
• Punishment is a ceremony that changes a subject’s status through confrontation between the deviant and their community, judgement that diagnoses and identifies the deviant act, and placement that assigns a new role like prisoner/inmate/patient.
• Additional insights include understanding the permanence of being marked as deviant, the role of media in providing a normative outline of society, and considering inconsistent evaluation of deviant acts as an issue to study.

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962)

• He was central to the emergence of a uniquely US-school of Sociology.
• Mills wrote from a distinct perspective from US structural functionalists of his time.

The Sociological Imagination as a Way of Thinking

• Sociologists must grapple with personal troubles of milieu (biography) and public issues of social structure (history).
• Using sociological imagination involves moving between individual and structural perspectives to develop explanation on a given issue, like challenges obtaining housing.

Edwin Sutherland (1883-1950)

• He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1913.
• Sutherland was a dean of criminology.
• He researched unhoused people, petty crimes, deviance, and white collar crime.
• Sutherland was an early thinker who considered how habitual action and interaction shaped behavior.

A Theory of Differential Association

• Criminal behavior: Individuals do not "invent" criminal behavior, rather it is learned through interaction and intimate bonds.
• Learning involves techniques and direction, including motives, drives, rationalization, and attitudes.
• Motives are shaped by learning groups' relation to laws, whether positive or negative.
• Deviance results from exposure to definitions that are positive regarding criminal activity, and a lack of definitions that are negative regarding non-criminal activity.
• Differential associations that produce crime vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity, based on when they are encountered.
• Learning criminal behavior is like other forms that happen through a group.
• Criminal behavior is associated with needs and values, but is not fully explained by them.
• Social ties can lead to, away from, or make someone indifferent about criminal activity.
• The theory focuses on ties and not structural conditions that produce crime.
• Criminal behavior is not the result of neighborhood disorganization, instead ties between groups may signal significant organization geared toward criminal activity.

Troublesome Ties: According to Sutherland (A Theory of Differential Association)

• Criminal behavior: Individuals do not "invent" criminal behavior, rather it is learned through interaction and intimate bonds.
• Learning involves techniques and direction, including motives, drives, rationalization, and attitudes.
• Motives are shaped by learning groups' relation to laws, whether positive or negative.
• Deviance results from exposure to definitions that are positive regarding criminal activity, and a lack of definitions that are negative regarding non-criminal activity.
• Differential associations that produce crime vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity, based on when they are encountered.
• Learning criminal behavior is like other forms that happen through a group.
• Criminal behavior is associated with needs and values, but is not fully explained by them.

Interactive Theory of Learning: “Becoming a Marihuana Smoker”

• Howard S. Becker (1928-2023) was a member of the new Chicago school of sociology.
• Becker considered the deviance of cannabis, though he didn't find the act necessarily deviant.
• Becker refuted trait-based theories of deviance.
• He explored how deviance was socially constructed.
• Explored how meaning-laden interactions shape behaviors deemed deviant.
• Smoking cannabis must be learned socially.
• Conditions for learning to smoke: learn through interactions to smoke in a way that gets you high, recognize the effects connected to smoking cannabis, and be able to enjoy the sensation of recognized effects.
• Smoking requires social learning instead of traits that make one more prone to smoke, because no one continues smoking without feeling any effects, and unpleasant experiences halt use.
• In the life course of a "toker," weed use and frequency change according to positive/negative experiences.

Sutherland’s Differential Association v. Becker’s Social Learning

• Similarities: Technical competence is necessary to learn deviance or smoking cannabis, meaningful deviance includes the motivation or perceived benefit necessary to build differential ties/socially learn, and both are agnostic when describing "deviance" of acts because deviant acts are learned with similar non-deviant acts.
• Differences: The approach to the topic (theoretical vs. empirical), the role of intimate associations vs. meaningful/pleasurable feelings derived from interactions, and the differences in generalized ability to the approach, with Becker and weed-smoking being unique.

Orcutts Aim

• A key difference between Sutherland and Becker: Sutherland aimed to create broad, general theory while Becker focused on cannabis use.
• Orcutts aimed to apply Sutherland's theoretical contribution to Becker's empirical case.
• Goal: develop a causal demonstration about people becoming users via differential association, a question raised by Becker.

Orcutt Brudgung Sutherland ti Becker

• Orcutt claims contingencies lie at the core of casual structure, as techniques and motivations are central to Becker's account of cannabis.
• Sutherland stated learning involves techniques and direction.

Orcutt’s Model

• Orcutt attempts to transcend meaning-laden interaction (Beckers qualitative data) to test the differential association hypothesis.
• He tests the direction (through the use of motives, drives, rationalizations and attitudes) variable using negative, neutral, and positive “definitions” survey options.
• Orcutt tests the association with individuals who know the techniques (number of friends who smoke).

Orcutts Empirical Demonstration of Differential Association

• The number of ties can shape the frequency of when one partakes in the substance.

Durkheim’s Influence: Structural Functionalism

• Structural functionalism considers society's function.
• It proposes that individuals have roles that make up a larger structure.
• For society to function, individuals should internalize norms creating a society based on institutions and social norms.
• Social differences and stratification operate to maintain equilibrium.
• Critiques include tautology and upholding the status quo.

Structural Functionalism Contribution to the Study of Deviance: From Function to Dysfunction (Anomie and Strain Theory)

• It explores economic structures and cultural notions of success.
• Questions the mechanisms that produce states of normlessness, deviance, and delinquency, and explores channels replace conventional channels.

From Function to Dysfunction (Anomie and Strain Theory)

• Anomie Theory focuses on explaining why some societies have higher crime rates, while societies that fail to adequately regulate goal-seeking behavior are characterized by "anomie" or normlessness.
• Classic Strain Theory focuses on why individuals engage in crime.
• Argues those pressured into crime are frustrated with their place in society.

Merton (Meyer Robert Schkolnick): Sources of Strain

• Social and cultural structures include aspirational referents and acceptable modes.
• Aspirational referents refer to culturally defined goals or legitimate objectives such as being rich and successful.
• Acceptable modes include institutional means which limit the choice for achieving cultural goals such as trying to obtain goals through hard work, otherwise the choice of expediency is sought to achieve the cultural goal.

Agnew: Revising Strain Theory

• The theory is about the blockage of pain-avoidance behavior, including infliction of pain/stimuli deprivation and conditioned aversive recognition.
• This leads to illegal escapes or anger-based delinquency.
• One feature of adolescence is lacking the power to remove themselves from adverse situations.
• Adolescents engage in illegal behavior to escape aversive environments, fight sources of pain, or steal.

Walter Reckless

• External containment structures an individual's life by defining limits, responsibilities, opportunity, cohesion, belonging with group reinforcement, and meaningful satisfaction, such as a structured life for the individual, limits and responsibilities.
• Internal containment is the positive self-image, goal-oriented direction, high tolerance, internalized norms, and developed ego and superego.
• Push factors are conditions that impede individual success like poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity, minority group membership, family conflicts, or pervasive inequality.
• Pull factors are elements that lure an individual into committing crimes such as delinquent peers/subcultures or glorification of crimes.

The Chicago School of Urbanism (Urban Ecology)

• The Chicago School of Urbanism modeled how groups settled in an industrial city.
• Concentric zone model diagrams are the Park and Burgess model.
• The Burgess Model places high rise business and tenement buildings in the inner circle, Loop, and transition zones with different migrant groups.

Reading Shaw and McKay

• Delinquency rates are highest in zones one and two.
• Delinquency diminishes when going to the outer levels.
• Dwellers settling into the city settle in cheaper areas and find their way out.
• Zone one has the highest percentage of individuals receiving relief.
• Factors tested but ruled out: Population increase, Economic ups and downs and ethical/racial makeup as delinquency persisted despite movement of groups to outer zones, spatial concentration, and stability.
• Delinquency depends more on the economic swings and the ethnic/racial makeup of the area.

Shaw and Mckay: Social Disorganization Theory

• Notable Zone 1 and 2 characteristics: dilapidated housing, high turnover, industry encroachment, and low-income residents.
• Argued predictors of neighborhood delinquency: low economic status due to having fewer resources and social cohesion making it difficult to collectively control behavior, residential instability because rates create disrupt social networks and weaken the sense of community, and ethnic and racial heterogeneity challenging the lack of shared norms.
• The factors for producing disorganization and delinquency: Constant departure(residential mobility) leads to heterogeneity of groups, competing and less salient norms, emergence of “alternative” institutions like gangs, and cultural transmission which helps youth learn criminal organization techniques by developing similar norms over weaker social control.

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

• Goffman was interested in the relationship between the self and social institutions and also conducted a dramaturgical analysis of common social interactions to consider how these interactions consisted of a kind of theatrical performance.
• Goffman also researched “Asylums” and the relationship between “totalizing” forces and developed the self.
• Stigma is the performance and management of a "spoiled" identity.
• Stigma is the process a person develops and negotiates to have a sense of self.
• Goffman was obsessed with breaching social norms through the everyday and social.

Stigma

• Stigma defined: a trait that inhibits a normal person from being identified as such.
• Goffman suggests that there is transcendent meaning derived from the original sources of stigma such as a criminal getting labeled as mentally ill, physically ill, or racial/gender non-conforming when these were not part of the original crime.
• Stigma has discredited qualities, such as having a spoiled identity or being discreditable , where qualities in some contexts can result in identity spoiling.
• "Normals" are any group that exist in contrast to stigmatized groups.
• Two central concerns exist for normals to manage "mixed" relationships and to shape a stigmatized person's sense of self in their everyday life.

Stigma: Interactions

• Stigmatized-Normal “Mixed” Interaction Outcomes include Uncertainty like being unsure what normal people are thinking and responding by acting in exaggerated ways as well as cowering from anguish of experiencing stigma with learning to anticipate new interactions and hostile bravado by showing hostility.

Stigma: Conditions Shaping Sense of Self

• Moral Career is how stigmatized individuals attribute meaning to themselves.
• Through these two phases of socialization: learning and incorporating the standpoint of “normal” and discovering they possess a stigma that has consequences.
• The four pathways of socialization by understanding the inborn norms and how their stigma is exposed:
• (2) Guarded from information of stigma with understanding of the “normal”
• (3) Stigma occurs later making the the post-stigmatized normal
• (4) Community raised isolation leads to finding both normalcy and their prior abnormal life.

Labeling and Toward a Marxian Theory of Deviance

• Questions that matter: "Tell me about yourself" or "Can you tell me about the area you grew up in” with go-to probes and developing these with more questions.
• Take an inverted proposition to rethink sources of deviance and labeling by answering those and focusing on the group to label to react to the controlling and how it imbues normal identity over an unanticipated measure to stopping others.

Becker: Outsiders

• Focus is made on the past criminogenic behavior while explaining Sutherland and Cressy, Merton and Agnew, as well as, Shaw and McKay, while taking their actions a step to make a point against what can be taken and assumed.

Beckers Perspective

• A major finding is social and political deconstruction being more reliable than invariance over their is deviance- and instead it is that a person with a labeled deviancy that led to outside sources to assume their role.

Labeling

• Some minor changes were made to the social and political model where there is variations and enforcements over who is committing the act and who is hurt.
• This is done by showing the effect of labeling as “Deviance” rather than how it acts but is the response others show- (p.14).

Marx Some Definitions

• In Marx view, these classes are embedded in production that’s derived from social events and economics that decide how the population grows.

Marx: Class Conflict

• To resolve, it goes to conflict over production needing an exploitation with extraction for the labor and from a subsisting community.

Willem Bonger: Conflict and Competition

• He explains from the capitalist exchange as the economic weakening and isolating bond.
• The 3 economies were capitalists, proletariats, and subproletariats with inter connected problems of interest in the economy.

Willem Bonger: Egoism and Crime

• As a consequence, there turns a system away from economical to educational and without the arts turns to evil.
• As a result, society turns from morally worse with criminal to inclined.

Willem Bonger: Crime and Economic and Social Arrangements

• With this the results of economics with relations that social with groups over an economic perspective is education.

A Marxian Theory of Deviance

• This is derived from a capitalist society with deviant terms and creation of problem populations.

What Spizer Draws from Marx

• Focus is set heavily on a class struggle with capitalist contradictions, in all effect this helps the ruling ( Bourgeoisie).

Deviance Resulting From Economic Redundancy and Crisis

• Using Bongers term of an army, the natural unemployment of a capitalist is used for wealth
• There are natural means of controlling/or neutralizing, but must be impaired

Capitalism / (Threats to Capitalism) (Deviance)

• The acts of devaluing capitols by the lack in labor, ownership and non productive roles is what is known as deviants

Economic Redundancy

• There are social junks, which is unable to participate in the capitalist role being seemingly harmless(p.645).

Controlling Deviance

• Most junks are not looked at and chronically managed by welfare help from agents or social workers (ex: Housing or medical etc).
• Dynamite results in an fast reaction that helps act through law through city ordinances/ police or judges and district attorneys.
• When a capitalist is lead down a path, their wages and business leads to a bottom race where over production is produced without selling.

Controlling Deviance

• Most of the controls is controlled in capitalism with traditional ways (ex:values).
• This shifts to difficulty with contradictions, but also normalizing those deviants and sweep away/rehabilitating troublemakers with the goal of geographic segregation.