week1 db -- new course

CJ 240 Deviance and Social Control

On the Sociology of Deviance

Kai T Erikson

Overview

• When society punishes or fails to punish deviant acts – it continually redraws the social boundaries of acceptability

• Norms are subjective to shifts and evolution • Often times the institutions who are supposed

to manage deviance, end up reinforcing it, gathering offenders together, socializing them to their deviance and alienating them from mainstream society

• Difficulty in studying deviance – it is defined differently at each level (family, neighborhood, city, state, country, world) – What is unseemly in one, is perfect acceptable in

another

• We learn to deal with deviance separately at each level

• Different criteria to determine if bx exceeds tolerable limits

• In a community – ppl spend most of their lives in close contact with each other – share a common sphere experience – Belong to a special kind and a special place

• Communities are boundary maintaining: – Specific territory in the world (could be physical or a niche)

• Sets the community apart as a special place and an important reference for its members

• Given pattern of consistency and stability • Maintains a voluntary restriction on itself

How do we know the boundaries of a community??

• Only method for marking boundaries is the bx of its members

• Deviant = person who steps outside the margins of the group – When the community calls him on it, they are marking the

nature and placement of their boundaries – It is declaring how much diversity can be tolerated before

the group begins to lose its distinctive shape

• Members inform one another about the boundaries by participating in the confrontations – criminal trials, excommunication hearings, courts-martial,

psych hold

How easy it is to convey this info?

• Not easily conveyed via straightforward language

• Ex. Theft – Most ppl have not seen a published statute that

defines theft, yet they do know what it is

– Our knowledge has been drawn from publicized instances in which the law was applied

– (law = collection of past decisions and cases)

• Confrontations bt agents of social control and deviants – always attracted attention

• Trials/ punishment used to be staged in the public marketplace – Crowd could participate indirectly

• Change came about with advent of newspapers – Provide same entertainment as public hangings

• Considerable portion of news = reports on deviant bx and its consequences – Morality and immorality meet at the public scaffold

Does deviance actually preserve stability??

• Boundaries are never fixed – Shift as the community does

• Deviant bx is not just something that occurs when society is not working well – It is an imp condition for preserving the stability of

social life

• By marking the boundaries, deviance gives the inner structure its special character and supplies the framework from which the group develops their own cultural identity

How do social control agents actually perpetuate deviance?

• Prisons, hospitals • gather marginal ppl into tightly segregated groups • Give one another the skills and attitudes of a deviant

career

• Even provoke them into using these skills by reinforcing their sense of alienation from the rest of society

• As social control agents process deviants, we do not expect them to change very much (ex??) – In fact we are reluctant to devote much time to

rehabilitation

Rites of Censure/ Commitment Ceremonies

• Deviant sanctions are not simple acts of censure – they are intricate rites

• They move the individual out of his ordinary place and transfer him into a special deviant position

• Supply a formal stage on which the deviant and the community members can confront one another – (Criminal trial)

• Make an announcement about the nature of his deviancy – (verdict or diagnosis)

• Place him in a role thought to neutralize the effects of his misconduct – (prisoner/ patient)

• These commitment ceremonies are of wide public interest and highly dramatic

Nearly irreversible

• These commitment ceremonies are nearly irreversible

• Retired from the status with scarcely any public notice

• Deviant returns home with no proper license to resume a normal life

• Nothing has happened to cancel out the stigmas • The community is apt to greet the returning deviant

with a considerable degree of apprehension and distrust – not at all sure of who he is

Self fulfilling prophecy

• Everyday exp seems to show that our suspicions of known deviants are reasonable – Most ex-cons return to crime and most mental pts need

further treatment

• Common feeling that deviants never really change – may derive from a faulty premise

• But this feeling is expressed so freely and with such conviction that it eventually creates the facts which later prove it to be true

• This prophecy is found in official policies – Ex. Police – could not operate with any real effectiveness if

they did not regard ex-cons as a ready pool of suspects to be tapped into