Introduction to

Sociology
Lecturer: Muniza Javed
 Deviance and Social control:
• Deviance is the recognized violation of cultural norms. Norms guide almost
all human activities, so the concept of deviance is quite broad.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Most familiar examples of nonconformity are negative instances of rule
breaking, such as stealing from a campus bookstore, assaulting a fellow
student, or driving a car while intoxicated. But we also define especially
righteous people—students who speak up too much in class or people who
are overly enthusiastic about new computer technology—as deviant, even if
we give them a measure of respect.
• What deviant actions or attitudes, whether negative or positive, have in
common is some element of difference that causes us to think of another
person as an “outsider”
 Deviance and Social control:
• The Biological Context
• explained that a century ago, most people assumed—incorrectly, as it turns out—
that human behavior was the result of biological instincts. Early interest in
criminality therefore focused on biological causes.
• an Italian physician who worked in prisons, theorized that criminals stand out
physically, with low foreheads, prominent jaws and cheekbones, hairiness, and
unusually long arms. In other words, Lombroso claimed that criminals look like our
apelike ancestors. We know that no physical traits distinguish criminals from non
criminals.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Personality Factors
• Like biological theories, psychological explanations of deviance focus on
abnormality in the individual personality. Some personality traits are
inherited, but most psychologists think that personality is shaped primarily by
social experience. Deviance, then, is viewed as the result of “unsuccessful”
socialization
 Deviance and Social control:
• Social Control:
• All of us are subject to social control, attempts by society to regulate people’s
thoughts and behavior. Often this process is informal, as when parents praise
or scold their children or when friends make fun of our choice of music or
style of dress.
• Cases of serious deviance, however, may involve the criminal justice
system, the organizations—police, courts, and prison officials—that
respond to alleged violations of the law.
 Deviance and Social control:
• How societies set norms and how they define rule breaking both
involve social power: The law, declared Karl Marx, is the means by which
powerful people protect their interests. A homeless person who stands on a
street corner speaking out against the government risks arrest for disturbing
the peace; a mayoral candidate during an election campaign who does exactly
the same thing gets police protection. In short, norms and how we apply
them reflect social inequality.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Primary and Secondary Deviance
• Edwin Lemert (1951, 1972) observed that some norm violations—say, skipping
school or underage drinking—provoke slight reaction from others and have little
effect on a person’s self-concept. Lemert calls such passing episodes primary
deviance.
• But what happens if people take notice of someone’s deviance and really make
something of it? After an audience has defined some action as primary deviance,
the individual may begin to change, taking on a deviant identity by talking, acting, or
dressing in a different way, rejecting the people who are critical, and repeatedly
breaking the rules.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Lemert (1951:77) calls this change of self-concept secondary deviance. He
explains that “when a person begins to employ . . . deviant behavior as a
means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the . . . Problems created by
societal reaction,” deviance becomes secondary. For example, say that people
have begun describing a young man as an “alcohol abuser,” which establishes
primary deviance.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Stigma
• Secondary deviance marks the start of what Erving Goffman (1963) calls a deviant
career. As people develop a stronger commitment to deviant behavior, they typically
acquire a stigma, a powerfully negative label that greatly changes a person’s self-
concept and social identity.
• A stigma operates as a master status overpowering other aspects of social identity so
that a person is discredited in the minds of others and becomes socially isolated.
Often a person gains a stigma informally as others begin to see the individual in
deviant terms.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Sometimes, however, an entire community formally stigmatizes an individual
through what Harold Garfinkel (1956) calls a degradation ceremony. A
criminal trial is one example, operating much like a high school graduation
ceremony in reverse: A person stands before the community and is labeled in
negative rather than positive terms.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Retrospective and Projective Labeling:
• Once people stigmatize an individual, they may engage in retrospective
labeling, interpreting someone’s past in light of some present deviance
(Scheff, 1984). For example, after discovering that a priest has sexually
molested a child, others rethink his past, perhaps musing, “He always did
want to be around young children.”
 Deviance and Social control:
• Retrospective labeling, which distorts a person’s biography by being highly
selective, typically deepens a deviant identity.
• Similarly, people may engage in projective labeling of a stigmatized person,
using the person’s deviant identity to predict future actions. Regarding the
priest, people might say,“He’s going to keep at it until he gets caught.” The
more people in someone’s social world think such things, the more these
definitions affect the individual’s selfconcept, increasing the chance that they
will come true.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Criminal Justice System:
• Due Process:
• Due process is a simple but very important idea: The criminal justice system must
operate according to law.
• In general terms, the concept of due process means that anyone charged with a
crime must receive (1) fair notice of legal proceedings, (2) the opportunity to
present a defense during a hearing on the charges, which must be conducted
according to law, and (3) a judge or jury that weighs evidence impartially.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Courts:
• After arrest, a court determines a suspect’s guilt or innocence.
• In practice, however, about 97 percent of criminal cases are resolved prior to
court appearance through plea bargaining, a legal negotiation in which a
prosecutor reduces a charge in exchange for a defendant’s guilty plea. For
example, the state may offer a defendant charged with burglary a lesser
charge, perhaps possession of burglary tools, in exchange for a guilty plea.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Police:
• The police generally serve as the primary point of contact between a
society’s population and the criminal justice system. In principle, the police
maintain public order by enforcing the law.
• Punishment: the infliction or imposition of a penalty for an offence
• There are three types of punishments:
 Deviance and Social control:
• Retribution:
• The oldest justification for punishment is to satisfy people’s need for
retribution, an act of moral vengeance by which society makes the offender
suffer as much as the suffering caused by the crime. Retribution rests on a
view of society as a moral balance. When criminality upsets this balance,
punishment in equal measure restores the moral order, as suggested in the
ancient code calling for “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
 Deviance and Social control:
• Deterrence:
• A second justification for punishment is deterrence, the attempt to
discourage criminality through the use of punishment. Deterrence is based
on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment idea that humans, as calculating
and rational creatures, will not break the law if they think that the pain of
punishment will outweigh the pleasure of the crime.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Deterrence emerged as a reform measure in response to the harsh
punishments based on retribution. Why put someone to death for stealing if
theft can be discouraged with a prison sentence? As the concept of
deterrence gained acceptance in industrial nations, the execution and physical
mutilation of criminals in most high-income societies were replaced by
milder forms of punishment such as imprisonment.
• Punishment can deter crime in two ways. Specific deterrence is used to
convince an individual offender that crime does not pay. Through general
deterrence, the punishment of one person serves as an example to others.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Rehabilitation:
• The third justification for punishment is rehabilitation, a program for reforming the
offender to prevent later offenses. Rehabilitation arose along with the social sciences
in the nineteenth century. Since then, sociologists have claimed that crime and other
deviance spring from a social environment marked by poverty or a lack of parental
supervision.
• Logically, then, if offenders learn to be deviant, they can also learn to obey the
rules; the key is controlling their environment. Reformatories or houses of
correction provided controlled settings where people could learn proper behavior.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Like deterrence, rehabilitation motivates the offender to conform.
• In contrast to deterrence and retribution, which simply make the offender
suffer, rehabilitation encourages constructive improvement. Unlike
retribution, which demands that the punishment fit the crime, rehabilitation
tailors treatment to each offender. Thus identical crimes would prompt
similar acts of retribution but different rehabilitation programs.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Societal Protection:
• A final justification for punishment is societal protection, rendering an
offender incapable of further offenses temporarily through imprisonment or
permanently by execution. Like deterrence, societal protection is a rational
approach to punishment intended to protect society from crime.
• The Death Penalty:
 Deviance and Social control:
• Community-Based Corrections:
• One alternative to the traditional prison that has been adopted by cities and states
across the country is community-based corrections, correctional programs operating
within society at large rather than behind prison walls. Community-based
corrections have three main advantages: They reduce costs, reduce overcrowding in
prisons, and allow for supervision of convicts while eliminating the hardships of
prison life and the stigma that accompanies going to jail. In general, the idea of
community-based corrections is not so much to punish as to reform; such programs
are therefore usually offered to individuals who have committed less serious
offenses and appear to be good prospects for avoiding future criminal violations.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Probation:
• One form of community-based corrections is probation, a policy permitting
a convicted offender to remain in the community under conditions imposed
by a court, including regular supervision. Courts may require that a
probationer receive counseling, attend a drug treatment program, hold a job,
avoid associating with “known criminals,” or anything else a judge thinks is
appropriate.
 Deviance and Social control:
• Parole:
• Parole is a policy of releasing inmates from prison to serve the remainder of
their sentences in the local community under the supervision of a parole
officer. Although some sentences specifically deny the possibility of parole,
most inmates become eligible for parole after serving a certain portion of
their sentences behind bars. At that time, a parole board evaluates the risks
and benefits of the inmate’s early release from prison.