Unit 11 Lecture Notes.docx

Unit 11 Lecture Notes Defining Deviance and Social Control Welcome to Unit 11 in which we will talk about social control, deviance and then also crime. Before we begin this unit, I just want to alert you to the fact that the University of Manitoba has a full criminology department as part of its soc...

Unit 11 Lecture Notes Defining Deviance and Social Control Welcome to Unit 11 in which we will talk about social control, deviance and then also crime. Before we begin this unit, I just want to alert you to the fact that the University of Manitoba has a full criminology department as part of its sociology programming. So, for any of you who are especially interested in this kind of teaser of what might be at least in part contained in a degree like that, pay attention to see if this is something that interests you. Going to start by talking through some definitions. And we're going to start with social control, because deviance means you've deviated from something and the thing that you've deviated from is social control. This is not a new concept in the course we started at the very beginning at the micro-level, talking about social scripts. And social control is just a continuation of that conversation on an increasingly from micro, meso, and then to macro. So social control is attempts by society to regulate people's thoughts and behaviors, the ways in which human behavior is regulated in a society or by a group. This is a process, not an institution, though institutions often facilitate the process, but it's not an institution in and of itself. But these are the kinds of procedures that are housed inside institutions that ensure people conform to expected and approved behavior of social control. And it makes behavior quite predictable. It is most evident, probably physically. All we must do is step outside our front door. I remember our conversation about sidewalks earlier in the course, how sidewalks are in some ways a form of social control because they guide your behaviors where you will walk and where you won't walk. If you get inside a vehicle and you head out onto the highway. There's lots of forms of social control that happen on the highway. I like this image sitting here in the corner which says stay in your lane caution because it's metaphorical for this entire conversation. Social control is about teaching us what our lane is, who belongs in what lane, and that we should stay in that lane and not deviate from it. That's what social control is. So, the image is representative of the entire idea. There are agents and institutions that house the process of social control in all sorts of ways. And this is everything from parents, employers, teachers to religious leaders. It can be exercised inside in social institutions like mental hospitals, judicial systems, or the military. These are all institutions and agents of social control. I worked with a colleague who went to Ukraine in 1994, and that was about five years after communism fell in Ukraine. And while he was there, he asked his Ukrainian host, where are all the soldiers? And the Ukrainian host said, they're all inside here. We don't need them out on the streets because they just control us inside our heads. That's the ultimate form of social control when you're regulating thoughts that then ultimately regulate behaviors. In 2003, I spent two weeks in Ukraine teaching a marriage and family class through a translator, and I got to know several of the students and two of them took me out for lunch and I had a chance to ask them about their experience pre communism versus post communism. And one of the things they said was that during the communist era, approximately one in every five people was a KGB agent intended to report on anyone who in any way disagreed with the government or the government's ideas or the government's policies or complained in any way. And when someone did that and was reported, they were at risk of being arrested and who knows what else. And so, think about that for a minute. If you think about your own reference groups and we've already talked about reference groups and you've got lots of them, right? Your friend group, your family, your employment, community, your band, your choir, your team, wherever you're reference groups. If one in every five of that whole collection of people was a KGB agent, that could report on you and land you in prison. How would that change the nature of your life? Quite significantly. So, these women talked about the fact that you don't know if one of your children, adult children, is a KGB agent or whether your life partner, your husband, your wife, your parent, is a KGB agent. And they said that even though they were now 14 years past communism, that kind of control was still at work in their heads. That's the power of social control, that they still lived in fear of that because that's what they lived with their entire lives. That's a profound form of social control. Social control is usually, but not always successful. So, we tend to follow the rules even when we could get away with breaking them because they're in our heads. So, we typically don't speed. I trust for the most part, even when we don't see any police cars anywhere around, we don't typically drive through stop signs. Even when we can see that there's no one there that would catch us if we did. So, we do tend to follow the rules. We are socialized, we've internalized those values, and sometimes that's a very good thing. I don't want people driving through stop signs because people could get hurt if we did that. But people also violate social norms, and that's what we mean by it's usually but not always successful. I'm going to guess that it's not uncommon for anyone listening to this, including myself, to have at some point in your life told a lie or to have broken the law. Are any of us above having broken the speed limit at some point? So even though we know the norms and for the most part we follow them, we don't follow them entirely. We have just come through a phenomenal experience of social control during the COVID pandemic in which the degree of social control was so high that it kept people from being with people they loved who were dying. It kept family members apart. That's a really, high level of social control that is now a part of the Canadian experience. And in many cases, part of the global experience. So that social control and that's the backdrop from which we can talk about deviance because deviance must break that social control in some way. Deviance is engaging in activity that is abnormal in some way, is not following the social scripts, and that elicits a societal reaction. So, if we look at this little picture here with all the red ladybugs, and there's one yellow ladybug, okay, that's "abnormal." But whether that yellow ladybug being yellow is deviant would depend on how all the other ladybugs respond to that. If nobody notices and nobody cares, then that's not a deviance. But of all these other ladybugs, start gossiping and talking about the yellow ladybug leaving her out of things, then that is a societal reaction. And both of those must be present for it to be sociologically defined as deviance. That's what makes it deviant. And deviance is more than non-conformity. It is a negative social reaction to something. If you don't have a negative social reaction, then it does not qualify as deviance. Deviance usually also includes a concerted public effort to change the behavior of that person and in some way to punish that person if they do not conform and stop their deviant behavior. So, deviance is pejorative. It's not mere nonconformity. So, we might think of someone who's just got a very eclectic, strange fashion style to be deviant, but unless that has negative implications for that person, that's not deviance, That's just non-conformity. Deviance requires a negative societal reaction. The deviant is someone who is different, perhaps disreputable, BUT not necessarily degenerate or perverse in any way. Imagine a woman with many piercings, that's clearly different. You don't see that. I have never actually seen anyone with that number of piercings. Does that mean she's disreputable? We don't know anything about her. What we do know is that this is different. Does that make her degenerate or perverse in some way? No. No, it doesn't. But she is different. And whether this would qualify as deviance depends on whether she's getting negative social reactions because of her choice to have so many piercings. And my guess would be that many folks would have negative reactions and it would change her social world in significant ways that are not positive because she's done this. But perhaps there are groups of people for whom they don't care. It doesn't make any difference. And then it wouldn't be deviance. How much disfavor is attached to someone's deviance depends on how harmful or dangerous it is. You know if you decide to run across a busy highway, that's a deviance that has some danger to it. Whether or not that's intended also makes a difference because this person is doing this just for the challenge of trying to make it across the highway without being hit. That's intended because that increases our disapproval of that activity. Is that person dash across the highway because their child ran across the highway and they're chasing after them. Then that reduces our sense that that was deviant behavior. It also deepens our sense of condemnation if a person who is deviant persists in being deviant. So, this person who's run across the highway once intentionally and then does it every day a couple of times rather than just one single time, deepens our sense that this person is quite deviant. If they're going out there every day and doing that. The competence of the person also plays into whether we define that as deviant. This is someone who may be neurodiverse in some way and may experience some developmental delay and reduced executive functioning. We may say well that person was not in a position to know to do that differently. And so, their deviance doesn't really count as deviance, it must be highly intentional. And then the degree to which the group agrees that's a violation of a norm, the more strongly a group agrees, the higher the level of disapproval for the deviant behavior. And I hope you're learning by now how much deviance is entirely relative. It is a social construction. And what is deviant in one context may not be deviant in another context. There is a frame of reference which determines what is and is not deviant. And so, it is relative. You look at these two pictures here. So, in 1985, when Afghanistan is fighting the Soviet invasion, we don't label that as negative or deviant or they did not. That's a freedom fighter. The very same behavior in 2015 when Afghan is fighting off a U.S. invasion. Now we are labeling that as deviants. Now we're using the word terrorist instead of freedom fighter. And it's all about context. I know it's too common politically on any of this. I'm simply pointing out to you the relative nature of deviance, that it's whether it is or isn't deviant is entirely determined by the context that surrounds it and the disapproval or lack of disapproval. And here we have the same behavior, but very different labeling going on. Human behavior is not inherently deviant. Deviance is not intrinsic to the act. Deviance is defined as such by the social context that surrounds it. It is relative to the norms of any particular people group, society, culture. You can't be a rule breaker if there are no rules to break, and rules are different from one context to in the next. So, deviance in the sociological sense is ethically neutral in the sense that deviance may serve a useful purpose. And we'll talk about that more when we examine it from a structural, functionalist perspective in the next video. People may deviate from the rules if they are oppressive or harmful. Look at these deviants. Here we have Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Harriet Tubman, and our own Manitoban, Nellie McClung. These are all people who were deviants, clearly, and were disapproved of by many, but also slowly approved of increasingly by many others because they challenged what they understood to be oppressive systems of some sort. So, deviance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s the collective perception of the crowd observing the behavior that determines whether it’s considered deviant, based on their societal norms and values. And so, sociology, it's less interested in what is being defined as deviance and is more interested in the how, the why and the what consequence of deviance. So, pay attention to those blue words there. How did it come to be defined as deviance? Why was it defined as deviance? And what was the consequence for everyone involved? Those doing the defining and those being defined as deviant. That's what sociology is interested in. Structural-Functionalism and Deviance In this video, we're going to talk about the structural functionalist perspective on deviance. Now, if you recall from our theories lecture, structural functionalism is a theoretical perspective and sociology that understands society sort of like the human body. Everyone plays their part to make things work. Even things that we might think are negative, like deviance might also play a part in a structural, functionalist perspective. So that's what I'm going to do now. We're going to look at how structural functionalism would look at the concept of deviance. And again, structural functionalism starts with the structure of social control, which of course is all our societal values and all the norms that roll out of those values. So, you know, things like Canadians value equality, achievement, and self-fulfillment, which means that in the do's and don'ts, right. Which is how the values roll out into norms, the do's and don'ts would mean things like you do not discriminate when you're hiring. You do not steal from your employer, etc. Now, we do know there's discrimination in hiring in Canada, but for the most part, the social norm and the social pressure is there not to do so because that's what's in place. And so of course we internalize all those values and norms and that means in effect, that we get conformity from most people because of the various kinds of social control. We get the individual to make societal values and norms their own, so that they carry society around in our heads, like we've already discussed in the first video in this unit. So that would mean things like in other societies or cultures, something like child labor would be considered entirely normal because of their values and norms. Whereas in our culture we’re quite horrified by that thought. And I'm not commenting on the right or wrong of that right now. I'm simply using it as an example of difference in terms of social control and then ultimately deviance. If we look at ourselves, this picture you see here, Winnipeg has a homeless problem in among the coldest of Canadian cities and we are completely conditioned to simply walking by someone like this who clearly is lacking resources, would appear they do not have a home, that their situation is dire or difficult and we for the most part walk by them. Other cultures look at this with significant horror that we would do such a thing. If we look at the way our culture manages the elderly as they age, we put them in separate housing and we go visit them there and we hire other people to take care of them. That is something that other cultures would also react to with considerable horror. Some other cultures for whom honor the elderly means keeping them within family units and caring for them inside of the family. In as much as it's possible. And they have very strong feelings about what we are doing, some which I think would border on disgust because of the way that we do it. So again, the societal values and the norms and the dos and don’ts that roll out of it. So structural functionalism perceives it that way. What we do is we use positive and negative sanctions to achieve social control. And this would be a perspective that structural function tests would take. That's how we get people to internalize, to conform and to self-regulate, to prevent deviance from happening. It's sometimes called mechanisms of social control. So, sanction can be positive, it can be negative. And it's a reaction of other people to someone's behavior. So, this can be well, I think that's awesome. I think that's great. That's a positive sanction to someone's behavior and choices. My goodness, that's ridiculous. How can that person do that? That's so awful. That's a negative sanction. So positive sanctions are rewards for compliant behavior. For example, you complete all your courses successfully, you finish up all your coursework, you take all the right courses, and in the end, you are given a B.A. by the University of Manitoba. If in that process you achieve very high grades while you were doing that, then you might also be given a positive reference or maybe a scholarship, and that's a further positive sanction, positive reward for your compliant behavior. You did this the way we wanted you to do it. Negative sanctions are coercive methods that force compliance. So, both, whether they were positive or negative, both are aimed at getting compliant behavior. Then in one case, we use positive reward and in the other case, we use negative ways of making you do what we want you to do. And that can be anything from disapproval. All the way to actual punishment. But let's continue with our example. Let's say you don't hand in your work; you don't show up for all your tests and you fail quite a few of your courses as a result. Well, the negative sanction for that will be that you will not be given a BA and the further negative sanction for that is when you're in the job market competing, someone who did complete their B.A. is more likely to get the job than you are. Further negative is both formal and informal as ways of creating social control. Okay, so make sure you keep that in mind. Sanctions are one of the ways that we achieve social control. So formal sanctions are codified. They're scheduled, organized, regulated, and they're given by officially designated persons. So, if you look at the picture over here, this is a police officer arresting someone that's a very formal negative sanction for whatever it is that this person has done who is wearing these handcuffs. In previous eras of history, we’ve had much more crude forms of formal negative sanctions. So, this one's being this person's being publicly humiliated by being secured in that wooden block. They're with their hands hanging out for all community members to come by and laugh at them and throw things at them. And who knows how long that person might have to be there. And in our world, historically, we've had much more severe and gruesome forms of formal social control. Take the guillotine of the French Revolution. That's a formal and very severe negative form of social control as a way of getting other people to listen. So, these formal sanctions are designed to prevent deviance. So, if we see that this is what happens when a person is deviant and then we assume that that person would not do that same thing again, that it will prevent them from deviating again. It will also deter deviants like I don't want that to happen to me, so I'm not going to do that thing that person did because I don't want one of those things to happen to me and they may be designed to reform or re-socialize the deviant. We also have informal sanctions or forms of social control. This is unwritten, casual, unorganized, and it's spontaneous given by everyone to each other. And that sounds very vague. So, give me just a second. When a group of your friends admires you for something you've done or a skill you have, or a way that you've contributed to something that's an informal and very positive sanction, it makes you feel good. It makes you want to do that sort of thing again. That's what I mean. Good grades or athletic performance. That's very good. That's praised, you know, informally. Is that so? There's formal and there's informal. Now, I'm going to take us through a bit of a typology of sanctions just so we can get a better handle on how they work. So, you can see here there's two there's a total of four quads here. So, we'll start with this top one. So, excuse me, everything below formal here is a formal form of sanction. Some are positive and some are negative. A formal form of positive control would be privilege. So, in the in-person classes I teach, when someone is hired as a TA because they're a good student, they're reliable, they show up on time, they do their tasks well, that's a positive, informal form of sanction, and it's privilege that to me, in the end lined up with some other role in the university that has even greater responsibility, and that's a promotion. We may receive some kind of payment for something that we've done. That, too, is positive, informal or a ceremonial award of someone who has not actually studied to get a doctorate but is an awarded a doctorate by university. Let's say Bono was awarded a doctorate by the University of England. That's a ceremonial honor, that's formal and it's positive. You could also be considered a public award on the negative end of formal sanctions would be things like satire. So, satire is using humor to expose or make fun of something. So, someone takes a political figure. Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, someone well-known and imitates them in a way that makes that individual look silly. That's satire, that's formal, it's public, and it's negative or formal and negative might be a fine. That speeding ticket that you get that's formal and a negative sanction disapproving of what you did, you may get demoted or fired if you don't follow all the rules, if you deviate too much in a job context and these get more severe imprisonment and execution, those are formal and they're negative. Now, if we move out to the informal column, informally positive sanctions would be things like one, when people say thank you to you, that feels good and you think, yeah, people really appreciated that. I'll probably try to do more of that. Or when we're praised for something, we're done. That's also a very powerful and informal sanction. When we're given gifts as a way of appreciating who we are or what we've done. Again, positive, and informal, any kind of casual honor. You know, when you're in a work environment and everybody stands up and claps for you because of something you've done that happens spontaneously, that's informal and that's positive or even private admiration between two colleagues. You know, I think that what you did there was awesome. And this just said between you two people, that's informal, that's positive. Informal sanctions that are negative can be things like office gossip, gossip between a friend group making fun of someone behind their back for something they did or said that's informal. That's clearly negative. Scolding, like notes, calling someone, you know, lacing into somebody and telling them what you think about them. That's informal and that's negative. Ostracism is when we leave people out. That's how they pay for their deviance, that's informal, very informal, and very negative. And then, of course, the more severe, which would be beatings or murder. So, you can see here there's a whole range of the ways in which sanctions are rolled out or played out to achieve conformity/social control from all of us inside of any society or culture. And every culture has these categories, the examples that I've given come from our Canadian context. There would be different examples in a different culture or a different society. But my point is these categories exist in every context. Sorry, I'm going to come back here for just a minute. We also can have a situation where perhaps there will be both formal and informal sanctions. So, if you or someone you know or any individual drives drunk and causes harm either to property or to humans, to human physical well-being or human life, well, if you just pause and think about that for a moment, there clearly are going to be formal negative sanctions for that fines or prosecutions and convictions, maybe even a prison term, depending on the severity of the act. Those are formal, those are negative, but informally that deviant will also pay beyond all the formal responses will be the way people talk about them and the way that their public reputation is damaged because of the choices that they made. They may be gossiped about, scolded, ostracized. So, something can be both formal and informal in terms of sanctions. Sometimes negative and positive sanctions can be combined. So, you do something in high school that your friends think is very cool. So that's positive and informal. There's praise for you there. However, your parents don't like what you did. So, while there's positive, informal for you from your friends, there is negative informal scolding from your parents. And as I've already said, these things vary from one culture to the next in terms of what would be an example in each of these categories. Structural, functionalist would also note that there are positive functions of deviance. One of them is the cutting of red tape. When you don't follow all the details of the procedure, that facilitates better productivity. So, for example, you have an administrative assistant who's got a whole bunch of paperwork that needs to be sent out on behalf of their employer, their boss, and the bosses and around. So, with the permission of their boss, they forge signatures of the boss, and that keeps things moving. Everything is very efficient. But that's deviance. You're not supposed to forge a signature, but you do. And that cuts through some of the red tape and keeps things moving. Sometimes deviance acts as a safety valve, a little bit of deviance that's condemned but not firmly repressed might take the strain off something. So, take, for example, you're in a work environment that has very strict rules. It's not a relaxed place to work. And one of their strict rules is you can only have a 15-minute coffee break and that's they're very serious about that, not 60 minutes 15. And you must take your coffee, break along. Well, that doesn't create a very happy work environment for you or anyone else working there. So, when your supervisor is not there, there's this unspoken agreement among you that you will go and take coffee two by two. And, you know, it might be 15, 20, 25 minutes before you come back from your coffee break. And everybody else who is working with you is totally good with that because they're going to do the same. So instead of the work environment getting more and more pressurized because people resent the strictness of the environment, being a little bit deviant takes some of the steam off the situation. And that's the sense in which it works as a safety valve. Sometimes deviance clarifies the rules. Stepping over the bounds reveals whether there's going to be a consequence. So, your parents have said to you, this is your curfew and its midnight. So does midnight mean, you know, 12, 12:15, 12:30, or does midnight mean 12? And anything past 12 is a breaking of the curfew. And then you might have the negative informal sanction of being grounded. While the only way you can find that out is by deviating from the curfew and finding out what happens. And that will clarify for you whether your parents have any fluidity around that curfew being around 12:00 or exactly 12:00. Deviance can also function to unite a group. It creates increased social solidarity. Sometimes it happens because the group together opposes the deviant. Let's say you have someone inside of your group who does something that harms the group. And so, the group doesn't like that, and so they band together to oppose that deviant inside their group. And what happens is greater social cohesion among the group itself. Another function is trying to convert the deviant, saying, okay, this would this person, let's say this person's suddenly starting to drink and drive and you're very concerned. And so, you all gather around and start plotting and planning. How are you going to help this person to make better decisions so you're working together toward what you understand to be a common good outcome that can also create greater cohesion and unite your group more because you're working together on something you all care about. Or perhaps you have someone inside of your group who is deviant in some way in ways that the group appreciates. So, you've got a group of coworkers and one of them has defied administration or the boss and done something that you all really wanted to do but didn't. But you like it that they did that. And so, the group circles around that deviant and protects them and supports them in that deviant act. And that also creates greater cohesion and unites the group in some way. One of the other positive functions of deviance is that it reinforces conformity, which is a bit oxymoronic because by criticizing the deviant group members praise and reward each other for their superior merit. Right. Soon as you criticize that person over there, you infer that I didn't make those choices. That person did, but I did not. So, I am not a deviant. I'm a good conformer. And so that's a positive function of deviance that functions to turn us all into better conformers. It deepens the degree of social control that we're willing to allow on ourselves. Sometimes deviance can act as a warning signal that something's wrong with the system if you think about the suffragettes of the early 1900s. So, this is a time in Canadian history, and we'll hear more about this in the gender inequality lecture when women were not recognized as persons under the law, they could not own property, their husbands could take their children away from them legally, could legally beat them if they wanted to, etc. And so, the suffragettes began to push back on those sorts of things, wanted a vote in parliament to change things and wanted to be recognized as legal persons under the law. And so, they started hosting protests and gatherings and drawing public attention to what they're doing. And that became a warning signal that something was wrong with the system and was going to have to change or the heat was going to continue to build something that needed to happen. These are all forms of civil disobedience. And here again is a reminder, this one right here, Nellie McClung. It was one of our suffragettes who did exactly the work I'm describing right now. These are all folks who, in one way or another, alerted us with warning signals that there was something wrong with the system. And so, again, these are the positive functions of deviance. Conflict Theory and Deviance I want to talk about conflict perspectives on deviance. I'd like to start with this very profound, very brief poem by Pascal. Blaise Pascal. Justice without strength is helpless. Strength without justice is tyrannical. So, when we're unable to make what is just strong and we have made what is strong just. This is a beautiful piece of poetry that reflects much of the perspective of conflict theory. So, remember, we talked about, you know, different theories, different ways of seeing things, putting on glasses and looking at the world through a different lens. So, conflict perspective or conflict theory is worried about social control itself as being the problem because it's those with power, disproportionate power, unfair amounts of power who control will be labeled as deviant. So, in other words, anyone that gets in the way of what you want, I'll just label them as deviant, and you can get them out of the way, and they become disreputable and disrespected in their community contexts. And they're not your problem anymore. So, things like why are it illegal for one person to rob another person? So, you're out on the street and somebody grabs your wallet and takes your money and your credit card and goes off and starts spending it? That's illegal, but it is not illegal to declare bankruptcy and not have to pay all kinds of debts that you have accrued. So now you don't have to pay back your personal loans. You don't have to pay your utility bills. You don't have to pay back your payday loans. You don't have to pay back retail stores where you've accumulated charges. So, goods that you have purchased and legitimately used you don't have to pay for. And that's not illegal. Now, why is that? Whose interest does that kind of legislation protect? So that's what conflict perspective is worried about that folks with power can label as deviant that which they don't like and, in the process, not label their own deviants if it gets them something they want because they have the power to deny the label of being a deviant in a negative way. So winning groups can advance their own interests and gain access to resources and authority and establish what is deviance. This is not that much different than saying, you know, history is written by the winners. Deviance is defined by the winners. That's what conflict theory sees. So, this is a very different perspective than the previous video that's looking at it through a structural, functionalist perspective. And again, all theories are useful. They just show us a different angle of something. And it's best to keep all those tools and gather as much information as we can from the different types of theories. So, conflict theory would talk about selective application of norms and labels. So why is it that a peer group in the north end of Winnipeg that's breaking minor laws with damaging property is going to be labeled as a gang, but a group of youth in one of the suburbs at the south end of the city, who's also doing the same thing that's going to be labeled as a clique because those are middle, upper-class youth. That's a selective application of norms and labels. We label that differently, the same kind of behavior, and we treat it differently and its consequences are different. So, a person who we would label as lower class who shoplifts or drinks excessively, that's a derelict and a lowlife. Let's just say that's a label that others are giving them. But let's say an upper-class woman who's very rich, who drinks too much and steals things from department stores, well, we would label her as a kleptomaniac and an alcoholic. Listen to the difference in the labels because she's in a different socioeconomic status. We gave her a different label. In many cases, we give medical labels to that kind of behavior, and that's called the medicalization of deviance. We do have different attitudes about shoplifting and kleptomania. And the medicalization of deviance is the transformation of moral and legal issues into medical matters. So, someone who has an excessive drinking problem is now an alcoholic who has an addiction and who needs medical help and therapeutic help. That's the new label that we've given. It's someone who compulsively steals is a kleptomaniac. That's a that's a medical term. That's a medical condition. The impulse to take things even when you don't need them, even when you have the money to buy them, that's kleptomania. And whether it's defined as medicalization of deviance determines how that deviance is characterized. So, if we're saying that the person who is drunk and does harmful things is just a derelict, then that's how it's characterized versus this is a medical problem. So, in the case of the derelict, I've master statused that person. I think back to those categories we talked about in an earlier video that I'm now characterizing that whole person as being that whereas if I medicalized the deviance and I say, no, this is kleptomania or alcoholism and this is an addiction I have left to the humanity of that person intact and identified a significant problem and challenge. But they haven't master statused them because I've medicalized the condition. The view of the deviance competence plays into this. So, this is an individual who, let's say, has FSD fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. Well, that changes what I'm going to do with this, doesn't it? Because that is also a medicalization and a very appropriate one. And so, the label changes and it changes who responds? If this person is the derelict, we're going to call in the priest, you know, to tell them that they're they need to change their ways and that they're a sinner or whatever that is going to be said, versus we're going to call on the doctor and the therapist and the AA support group to respond. Who responds is very different depending on the label that we roll out. Now, medicalization of deviance can work in positive directions, and many of the examples I've given you here are positive directions. It can also work in a negative direction. If you don't like someone's idea and you're the one with the power to decide to determine the deviance. And so, you say, well, that person's got a bit of a personality disorder. You pull out a medical bill and you say, and so their ideas are kind of whacked out and can't be trusted because they're all over the map with things. So, let's not listen to that person. Okay? That's a negative medicalization of deviance being employed in that case to control an outcome. Here's just a little bit of humor if indeed you find this humorous, because when are we taking the notion of medicalization of deviance too far? So here you have this individual standing on top of the car with the bat ready to express the road rage, saying road rage is such a crass term, I prefer intermittent explosive disorder. That's the medicalization of deviance. It's not road rage. It's an intermittent explosive disorder. Clearly, this is being cheeky and saying, okay, we can't just label every bad behavior with something medical either. So where is that sweet spot when the medicalization of deviance is the appropriate thing to do and when it's not, when it's serving the interests of those with greater power? I will leave that question open for you to wrestle with. Selective enforcement of the law. Stephen Carter has said it's not enough to know the rules. You must know the rules about the rules. So just because that's the law, in what directions does that get enforced? In what selective directions does that get enforced? And I'll just use two examples that I expect you would be familiar with. So here I have the Black Lives Matter movement. And what we see there is a very selective enforcement of the law. Why is it that disproportionately black men in America are being shot by police officers, police enforcement authorities? What's going on there? What kind of selective enforcement of law is it that defines their behavior as somehow more deviant than others? In Canada, disproportionately indigenous women are murdered and go missing. And yet we do not employ our and law enforcement to protect them or to track down and find out what's happened to them and prosecute the harm doer in these situations. And that, too, is a selective enforcement of law. If I, as a white woman with status in the sense that I have a Ph.D., were to go missing, it's a pretty good chance, you know. So, I go missing on my way home from work one day and no one knows where I am. I just disappeared. It's a good chance that that would get me attention. That would get law enforcement attention. But if an indigenous woman from the north end of Winnipeg were to go missing and suddenly no one sees her, no one knows where she is, it's less likely that she would get that same kind of attention. That is a profoundly selective enforcement of law that is serving whose purposes? There's lots of questions to be asked about that. And there's lots of harm being done in that type of selective enforcement of law. A Theory of Social Control What I'm going to do here is explain a theoretical perspective on social control. It's much smaller and more contained than the large perspectives I've just described, which are structural functionalism and conflict theory. Okay, this is sort of a mini theory, but it's a useful one. And in this case, the starting point for this theory is these questions, not why did they do it, but why don't they do it? Why aren't there more people who deviate, given the short-term rewards of deviance given that it′s satisfying to do that thing that I'm not supposed to do. Why is it that more people don't do that? And of course, this links in with the much broader fascination of sociology, which is fascinating, not the person who deviates more generally with how is it that we get so many people and mass to behave in basically the same ways? Because if life is this sort of vast cafeteria of temptations of things that we know we shouldn't do, then why don't more people do them? Why do most people adhere to social control and not do them when deviance can be so appealing? We are not tempted to do the right thing. We talk ourselves into doing the right thing and thank goodness that we do for the most part. But, you know, we don't experience showing up on time at work as a temptation that we decide to give in to. You are so tempted to get to work early, get a few extra things done. So, tempted. I finally gave in to the temptation and I went, we would say I wanted to be a good employee. I wanted to be reliable. And so, I decided to go. That's probably the language we would frame that in. So, the challenge that this theoretical framework starts with is to observe that the challenge for society is to make conformity more rewarding than deviance. How do we do that? We obviously do it. We're obviously very successful because most people do not deviate. So, what's going on? This is this theory's exploration of that question and response to that question. What are the causes of conformity? So, this theory would say social bonds. That's why social control works so well because it's nested inside of and creates all kinds of social bonds. And here are the four main ones that this theory talks about: -Attachments: are stable patterns of interactions between people, whether that's our family or some other significant group or the people we work with. We care about those people and what they think about us. We're much more likely to break norms that we know we won't get caught up in or when we're alone. And a very oversimplified example. You might be willing to pick your nose or burp in private, but you wouldn't do that in front of someone because of attachments, because of how people would think about you. On a more significant and more consequential note, you might sexually be unfaithful on a business trip where no one will catch you. But you're not going to do that in your everyday world where there's a much greater chance that someone might find out that you're doing that. So, our social bonds are strong motivators, our attachments to our significant groups. Now, some people are without significant attachments, so there is less risk for them if they are more alone in the world, generally, they might as well deviate. They don't have the rewards of social attachments and I hope you can hear the pain and isolation that would inform those forms of deviance if that were indeed the case. This also explains why deviance tends to decline with age because we have more and more attachments that we've had for longer and longer periods of time. We're less willing to risk them. -Secondly are investments, costs that we've already expended in building up what hopefully is a satisfactory life for us. We can lose those investments, most of which are social investments. If we were to deviate in significant ways, that would have negative outcomes. The person who's already unemployed and being supported in some way by our government and thank goodness that's a possibility for folks who are struggling. But that person has way less to lose if they rob a store than the person who's well-established socially who's already built a good life. Why would they do that and compromise the life that they have? Why would they risk such a thing? Well, they're not very likely to, are they? -The more involvements one has in life, the busier one is, the more connected one is, the more attachments there are, the more investments there are because of your involvements. You just flat out don't have the time and energy to be deviant. You're too busy conforming in all sorts of ways so, you don't have the time and energy, even in a context where you think the normal thing to do because you think it would be a positive function of deviance to be deviant, to stand up for something when you think injustice is happening, takes enormous amounts of energy. And if you're already very busy and very involved, it makes it more difficult to find the energy and motivation to be deviant in a way that you think would be honorable or noble even when you think deviance might have a positive function. -And then finally, our beliefs are deeply held beliefs about the way that we think the world ought to work. And so, we submit our own desires, which might take us in a divine direction to that set of beliefs, that that would be the wrong thing to do. As much as I would really like to have all that money, and all would take as a quick transfer and maybe nobody would even notice it. You know, in your workplace or somewhere, we don't because we hold to a conviction that that would be wrong, morally wrong. Remember our folkways, mores, and laws. So, beyond the fact that it's illegal, we have moral issues with choosing to behave in that kind of a deviant way. And so, we don't. Just a little mini theory, but it's a useful one because it helps us to understand why it is that most people choose not to deviate. Types of Crime In this video, when we're finally actually going to get around to talking specifically about crime types, crime is defined very simply as a violation of a law. Laws obviously are different from one country, society, culture to the next. But whatever those laws are, crime is a violation of that law. When we want to try to understand crime rates, we often think, that's the number of offenses that have been recorded by the police. But before we talk about different types, I just want us to understand that that's a little bit more complicated. If you look at this funnel here in front of you, let's say that there's a thousand crimes. And of those thousand crimes, maybe 500 of them get reported. Now, these are not stats. This is a hypothetical example, but it is based on typical patterns. So only about half of crimes might get reported. And of those that get reported, only 100 of them are responded to by the police in a way that will result in an arrest. So, this is rates, reports, arrests. So, let's say there have been a hundred arrests, but only about 50 of them seem to have enough clear evidence to charge that person. Of those 50 who got charged, 45 simply plead guilty. Another five go to trial. Of those five that go to trial, two of them are acquitted because the court or the judge has decided there isn't enough evidence. 32 of them of those guilty pleas go to community corrections because of the nature. If it's not severe enough, they will end up in a community corrections program. And 16 of those were severe enough that they result in a prison term. So, there's lots of different levels at which crime gets measured. Are you measuring what's reported? Are you measuring what's being prosecuted? Are you measuring actual convictions because the rates change markedly based on the point at which you're taking your measurement? So, crime rates are notoriously inaccurate. And when you hear a report about crime rates, make sure you ask some good questions about how those rates were collected at what point in this funnel process would you locate those rates? Because that's an important question. There are also alternative ways that crime might be measured. We might be able to gather information from non-official agencies. So that might be places like insurance companies who have lots of information about theft because they pay out theft claims or hospitals who have lots of information about personal abuse, drug abuse or accounting firms who have locks in for information or internal theft or fraud. There are other types of organizations that are non-official that might give us some very interesting and accurate rates. There are those who would be conducting anonymous self-report surveys, so that's another way to collect rates about crime. Victimization surveys, where you give a survey to those who've been the victim of a crime and you ask them questions. And then participant observation, obviously quite rare in the world of crime, but that is a possibility as well. So just some things to know as we think about how we collect the rates that we have about crimes. In terms of types of crimes, you're going to be in with street crime. These are the traditional illegal behaviors that we normally think of when we hear the word crime. Violent offenses like homicide or attempted murders or assault, sexual assault, abduction, robbery, or theft. These would fall under the category of street crime. These can be property offenses as well. I've just previously described violent offenses with these can be property offenses as well, which is the intent to gain property without use or threatened use of force. Hate crimes would also fall under street crime. So, these are crimes committed against a person that are motivated by hate in some way, perhaps based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or political perspective. And then we have organized crime. And this is activity that's conducted by members that are inside of a hierarchically arranged group or some sort of structure that's devoted primarily to making money through means that are illegal and you can see here I have an image of the Mafia because this would be a very good example of organized crime. Any type of gang that does illegal work to make money is an organized crime group. Here's just a humorous picture of organized crime. So here we've got the cute little ducks distracting this woman while the mama duck digs her beak into her purse and steal some money. This is a little bit of a cheeky picture, but organized crime nevertheless still makes the point. And then we have corporate crime, sometimes called suite crime, because the deal gets done perhaps in a hotel suite somewhere. That's where that nickname came from. This is violating the law in the interest of maximizing profit, even when it means breaking the law to do so. So, this can be powerful leaders who use their positions of power to bring about actions that they know violate laws and norms. But they're going to gain something from it. Businesses who do backdoor monopolies aren't really competing, but they're slowly raising the price. And it looks to us from the outside like this competition is going on and that they’ve agreed that they're going to keep raising the price so they both benefit and make more money. Administrative coalitions and compromises. You know, backdoor deals, again, that we don't know about where money is being made in ways that break laws. Where there's organizational complexity, transnational corporations are so massive and protected in so many ways by law and then find ways to break laws inside of that. And it's such a massive, complicated structure that it's hard to find out who broke what law and who's responsible for that. That can happen on an administrative level. Failure to provide information or file reports or obtain appropriate permits for some type of work that's about to be done. This can be environmental standards that are not being met. Failure to install controls, pumping toxins into rivers in places where that can't be seen or monitored, which of course does all kinds of harm to the environment. Financial. So that can be things like tax evasion, taxes that they genuinely owe the government because of the massive amounts of money they've made. But they find ways to create tax havens and ways to avoid legally having to pay their taxes. This may happen in the world of labor. They might have discriminatory practices. They might exploit wages and hours, not pay people what they're mandated legally to pay. They may not protect the health and safety properly of their employees. They may practice unfair trade practices. False advertising. Telling you that this product will do something that it doesn't or not, telling you about something dangerous about the product, because then you might not buy it. Price fixing or rigging bids, all kinds of collusion to control markets. And then in the manufacturing itself, using compromised materials, faulty materials, faulty designs that are not transparent, that do not meet market standards and regulations, but that will make more money because it costs less to manufacture something. So, there's lots of different ways in which corporations break laws, and much harder to catch than crime on the street, which we can visually see and recognize and identify as crime. This happens, you know, in back rooms where we can't see it, and it's not easy to find. And often it's the elites committing these kinds of crimes, and they are in a position to protect themselves with further legislation and ways of hiding what they're doing because they already have power. This is also sometimes referred to as white collar crime. Crimes committed by persons of high social position during their occupations. So blue collar crimes, is that street crime, which is so obvious to us, whereas white collar crime, well, we're just, you know, people in suits passing along information. Nothing about that looks particularly criminal, even though it may involve massive amounts of money or harm to significant numbers of people. And then there's cybercrime, which is the violation of the law in which digital devices are the target or means of criminal activity of some sort that can be hacking identity theft viruses, virus scams, fraud, pirated software, extortion, sextortion. You know, those revealing pictures that people send to each other without realizing who might get a hold of those pictures and then contact you and threaten to reveal those pictures in various places or you don't want them revealed like your workplace or your family unless you pay a bunch of money. And yes, this happens quite regularly, and this is happening even among middle school age kids right now. And then government crime. We have a history of criminality among governments, everything from indiscriminate mass bombings to holocausts and concentration camps to genocides. There are many, many ways in which governments can commit crimes. Currently now in 2023, Hamas and the State of Israel both committing horrific crimes against ordinary civilians in both Israel and Palestine. If we look at Canadian history, what the government did to our indigenous populations, the kinds of criminal activity that caused deep and profound generational harm to our indigenous citizens, political corruption. You know, where, let's say dissidents of your government may be incarcerated in mental institutions as a way of getting them out of the way, or maybe imprisoned and tortured or eliminated because they're a counter voice to what you want politically and you're in power right now. So political corruption. Those are extreme examples, but we can have that right here in Canada when we have all kinds of, again, backdoor, backroom deals happening between powerful politicians that may financially benefit them both that are against Canadian law. And then the criminal activity of police, the very people we've given the power to enforce the laws that we have legislated, let's say right now in Canada, who then behave in ways that are criminal according to our own criminal codes and their professional codes of conduct. So, who's going to regulate those regulators? Who's going to guard the guardians of our law? Who's going to control the agents of social control in the world of crime? Those are relevant questions, and they don't have easy answers. George Floyd in the United States was slowly choked to death because he was in possession of an allegedly fake $20 bill. The police officer here who murdered him while onlookers watched because he was protected in the moment by that uniform. So, who's going to regulate the regulators? Guard the guardians of our law, control the agents of social control that are criminal task force. These are really pressing and relevant questions. The Criminal Justice System We're going to end this conversation with a discussion about the criminal justice system, which is an institutional or institutionalized response to violations of the law. The components of that are typically the police courts, the prisons, and most criminal justice systems reflect injustices that are already present in the system in that society. And that's no different for us in our Canadian context. In 2016 Nancy MacDonald did an extensive research piece and wrote an article entitled Canada's Prisons are the New Residential Schools because as part of her research, she found that though our indigenous population as of 2016 makes up about 4% of Canada's population, 25% of our adult male population in prison is indigenous. So, what does that tell us about selective law enforcement, about generational trauma? There's lots of things buried in something like that, but clearly there's a problem here that needs to be corrected in some way. Criminal justice systems operate with various rationales for punishment, and I invite you to think about what you know about the Canadian justice system as I describe some of these. But retribution, like a more a punishment penal type of approach, is sometimes the logic for the way a criminal justice system is set up. This is the oldest system in place, the oldest justification. So, it's an act of moral vengeance. In other words, revenge by society that subjects an offender to suffering that is in some way comparable to what they themselves did. This is the eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth type of penalty. And it is this kind of logic that is used when justice systems have the death penalty, which some Canada does not have, but some states of the United States do still have. Historically, some of these have been quite gruesome, chopping up the hand of someone who steals or having someone tortured in public as a form of punishment for what they've done. During the French Revolution, the guillotine chopping someone's head off. These can be and historically have been very severe. Gandhi would say that when we use the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, all that happens is it makes the whole world blind. A second rationale would be deterrence. This is just an attempt to discourage criminality through punishment. So, it's not that the first one isn't also punishment, but this one isn't trying to make it an eye for an eye. This is just that we do need to have some kind of punishment when you break the law as an attempt to discourage criminal behavior. It's based on the assumption that human behavior is rational and calculating, and that if you do something in your punished for it and it's unpleasant, that you won't do that thing again. Now, we know that reoffending rates are high in Canada and what that means, recidivism, is that someone has committed a crime. Let's say armed robbery, serves a term for it is released, will commit that crime again over and over. Not necessarily, but that is a pattern that we see. So, deterrence doesn't seem to be working super well. It can be specific deterrence to scare an individual offender into not doing something again, or it can be more general deterrence, which makes an example of an offender. If this is what you do see everyone looking at, this is what happens to you. Another rationale would be rehabilitation. This is what we do with our youth. We put them into correction programs instead of putting them in prison in hopes that they will rehabilitate. We might give them an education, job training, therapy or help with substance abuse, give them counseling or therapy or behavioral modification of some sort. This focuses on the needs of the offender to develop in such a way that they will not re-offend so that we won't have those recidivism rates that we struggle with. And then the final one here would be incapacitation. And in this case, this is rendering the offender incapable of further offense by incarcerating them, locking them up or in more severe forms like the death penalty, permanently eliminating them through execution. They are incapacitated. They can no longer commit another crime. That's just a very basic overview of the rationale for punishments that various justice systems work with. I do want to introduce you very briefly to concepts of restorative justice. This is a different way of thinking that doesn't use punitive measures. It thinks about crime from the context of not only the individual who experienced the crime against them, but also the community. Rather than thinking about the crime as a crime against the state because it broke state laws, that it's also a crime against that individual and that community, that that individual's nested in. So, when there's an armed robbery two doors down from your house, that has an impact on you as part of that community. And restorative justice takes those sorts of things into account. So, it's looking to foster some kind of interaction or dialogue between the harm doer and the one who harmed the victim, the perpetrator. There are different types of language. It is victim centered, so, it doesn't just roll out a process without being in conversation with the victim about what the victim does and doesn't want to see happen. But it is very focused on what do we need to do to help the person who's had a horrible experience and what can we do to help the person who did the harm so that they do not harm again? Is there a way to restore both the victim and the perpetrator? So, seeking a balance between the rights of the offender and the needs of the victim as a way of rehabilitating? So again, it focuses on crime as it's enacted against the individual, individual and the community rather than a law you broke. That's an offense against the state. So, these are the kinds of questions that a punitive justice system asks. One of the laws broken, who broke that law? Who did it, and what do they deserve as punishment? Now, think about those four categories I gave you. Whereas restorative justice would ask the question, who has been hurt? And that's going to be the victim. The community that surrounds the victim, which is often impacted by the harm done and the offender has harmed themselves by acting in ways that harm the broader human community. So, who has been hurt here? So, there's lots to think about in answering that question. What are their needs? What does the victim need? The person who experienced the armed robbery in their house? And what does the community need? That neighborhood needs to process the fact that an armed robbery happened so close to them. And what kind of conversation can we have with the perpetrator about the harm that that person committed to the victim and the community that surrounds the victim? And whose obligations are those needs? Who needs to be responding? And this is where if this is something the victim wants, they may facilitate with lots of careful preparation, conversation between the victim and the perpetrator. Central to that is the need for the perpetrator to own what they did fully and completely and recognize that they did harm and that they're responsible for it. And sometimes victims as a part of their own healing journey need and want to hear that sometimes they don't. And then the restorative process looks a little different. Now, this is a very cursory explanation of criminal justice, but it is I did think it was important for you to at least have a basic introduction to a different kind of model for how to respond when harm is done.