SOC 101 Chapter 7

Conflict Theories of Deviance and Crime

1. Social Control Theory 2. Feminist perspectives

Three Measurements of Crime

1. UCR 2. NCVS 3. self-report studies

Herbert Gans

He stated that deviance creates jobs for the segments of society--police, prison guards, criminology professors, etc.-- whose main focus is to deal with deviants in some manner.

Attachment

How much we feel loyal to these institutions and care about the opinion of people in them, such as our parents and teachers. The more attached we are to our families and schools, the less likely we are to be deviant.

_________ has the highest homicide rate.

Louisiana

National Crime Victimization Survey

People were asked whether they or their residence has been the victim of several different types of crimes in the past half year.

Conflict Perspective

People with power pass laws and otherwise use the legal system to secure their position at the top of society and to keep the powerless on the bottom. The poor and minorities are more likely because of their poverty ad race to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

Corporate Crimes

Price fixing, work related deaths due to illnesses and injuries that could have been prevented, making deadly products (asbestos), damaging the environment (BP oil spill), etc.

Involvement

The amount of time we spend in conventional activities. The more time we spend, the less opportunity we have to be deviant.

Conventional Crime

The violent and property offenses of the part I offenses that worry average citizens more than any other type of crime.

Social Control Theory

Travis Hirschi wrote that delinquency results from weak bonds to conventional social institutions such as families and schools. These bonds include attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. -Their bond to social institutions such as the family and the school keep them from violating social norms.

Relativity of Deviance

Whether a behavior is considered deviant depends on the circumstances in which the behavior occurs and not on the behavior itself.

Most crimes are ___________, where the offender and victim are usually of the same ____. 84% of all single offender-single victim homicides in 2009 involved persons who were ither both _____ or both _____.

intraracial, race, white, black

Strong social norms reduce deviance such as _______.

suicide

The IRS estimates that ___ _______ costs the government $300 billion annually.

tax evasion

Hirschi's Four Types of Bonds to Conventional Social Institutions

1. Attachment 2. Commitment 3. Involvement 4. Belief

Symbolic Interactionism Explanations

1. Differential Association Theory 2. Labeling Theory

Functionalist Theories of Deviance and Crime

1. Durkheim's views 2. Social ecology 3. Strain theory 4. Deviant Subcultures 5. Social Control Theory

Reasons for High Level of White-Collar Crime

1. Greed from our society's emphasis on economic success. 2. The absence of strong regulations governing corporate conduct and a severe lack of funding for the federal and state regulatory agencies that police such conduct. 3. Weak punishment of corporate criminals when their crimes are detected.

Limitations of Merton's Anomie Theory

1. It overlooks deviance such as fraud by the middle and upper classes and also fails to explain murder, rape, and other crimes that usually are not done for economic reasons.

Sociological Strategies for Reducing Conventional Crime

1. Make good paying jobs for the poor in urban areas. 2. Create youth recreation programs and strengthen social interaction in urban neighborhoods. 3. Improve living conditions in urban neighborhoods. 4. Change male socialization practices. 5. Establish early childhood intervention programs to help high-risk families raise their children. 6. Improve the nation's schools by establishing small classes, etc. 7. Provide alternative corrections for nondangerous prisoners in order to reduce prison crowding and costs and to lessen the chances of repeat offending. 8. Provide better educational and vocational services and better services for treating and preventing drug and alcohol abuse of ex-offenders.

Limitations of the UCR

1. Underreporting of crimes 2. They omit crime by corporations 3. police practices affect the UCR -police do not record every report they hear from a citizen as a crime for many reasons. If they do not record the report, the FBI doesn't count it as a crime. 4. if crime victims become more likely to report their crimes to the police, the official crime rate will change, even if the actual number of crimes has not changed.

In 2008, almost ___ million violent crimes and ___ million property crimes occurred, for a total of almost ____ million serious crimes, or 3,667 for every 100,000 Americans.

1.4, 9.8, 11.2

Today more than ___ million Americans are incarcerated in jail at any one time, compared to only about a ______ that number 30 years ago.

2.3, fourth

More than __ million violent and property victimizations occurred in the United States in 2009.

20

Conventional crime is disproportionately committed by people __ and under.

30

Although blacks are about 13% of the US populaiton, they accounted for about ___ of all arrests for violent crime in 2009 and ___ of all arrests for property crime.

30%, 39%

People ages 10-24 are about 22% of the population but account for about ___ of all arrests.

45%

___ of women are afraid to walk alone at night, compared to ___ of men.

46%, 17%

Differential Association Theory

Edwin Sutherland argued that criminal behavior is learned by interacting with close friends and family members who teach us how to commit various crimes and also about the values, motives, and rationalizations we need to adopt in order to justify breaking the law.

Part I Offenses

Eight felonies that the FBI considers the most serious. 1. homicide 2. rape 3. aggravated assault 4. robbery 5. burglary 6. larceny (shoplifting, pickpocketing, etc) 7. vehicle theft 8. arson

_____ ________ considered deviance a normal part of every healthy society.

Emile Durkheim

_________ theft involves some $20 billion annually.

Employee

Walter Miller

He said that poor boys become delinquent because they live amid a lower-class subculture that includes several focal concerns, or values, that help lead to delinquency: a taste for trouble, toughness, cleverness, and excitement. If boys grow up in a subculture with these values they are more likely to break the law. Their deviance is a result of their socialization.

Commitment

How much we value our participation in conventional activities such as getting a good education. The more committed we are to these activities and the more time and energy we have invested in them, the less deviant we will be.

Feminist Perspectives

Inequality against women and antiquated views about relations between the sexes underlie rape, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and other crimes against women. Sexual abuse prompts many girls and women to turn to drugs and alcohol use and other antisocial behavior. Gender socialization is a key reason for large gender differences in crime rates.

Deviant Subcultures

Poverty and other community conditions give rise to certain subcultures through which adolescents acquire values that promote deviant behavior. Albert Cohen wrote that lack of success in school leads lower-class boys to join gangs whose value system promotes and rewards delinquency. Walter Miller wrote that delinquency stems from focal concerns, a taste for trouble, toughness, cleverness, and excitement. Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti argued that a subculture of violence in inner-city areas promotes a violent response to insults and other problems.

Willem Bonger

Said capitalism is an economic system that involves competition for profit. It helps create street crime by the poor. This competition leads to an emphasis in a capitalist society's culture on egoism, or self-seeking behavior, and greed. People in a capitalist society are more likely than those in noncapitalist ones to break the law for profit and other gains, even if their behavior hurts others.

Robert Agnew

Said that adolescents experience various kinds of strain in addition to the economic type: breakups, family member dying, bullying at school, etc. Repeated strain-inducing incidents produce anger, frustration, etc. and they prompt delinquency and drug use.

Limitations of Social Control Theory

There is a question of causal order: chicken and egg question: Is it the bad relationships that prompt the youths to be delinquent or is it because the youths' delinquency worsens their relationship with their parents?

Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld

They expanded Merton's view by arguing that crime in the US arises from our most important values: an overemphasis on economic success, individualism, and competition. These values produce crime by making many Americans, rich or poor, feel they never have have enough money and by prompting them to help themselves ever at other people's expense. Crime in the US arises ironically from the country's most basic values.

Get-Tough Approach

US harsher law enforcement causing increased arrests and a surge in incarceration, which has quintupled since the 1970s.

The government's primary source of crime data is the _______ _____ _______, published annually by the FBI. It is reported in a volume called Crime in the United States for that year.

Uniform Crime Reports

Deviance Relative in Time

When a behavior in a given society may be considered deviant in one time period but acceptable many years later; or vice versa.

Deviance Relative in Space

When a given behavior may be considered deviant in one society but acceptable in another society.

Since the 1970s the US has used a _________ approach to fight crime; using mandatory sentencing and long prison terms with a huge increase in the number of people in prison and jail.

get-tough

More than ____ of all crime victims do not report their crimes to the police.

half

Laws against victimless crimes do more ____ than good____. The laws are ineffective but cost billions to enforce, and lead to police and political corruption, with greater profits for organized crime.

harm, good

Blacks have ______ rates of arrest than whites for conventional crime.

higher

The US has the highest _____________ rate by far in the world.

incarceration

Crime __________ would be more successful than our crime punishment approach.

prevention

Criminogenic characteristics contribute to ______ _______________, or weakened social bonds and social institutions, that make it difficult to socialize children properly and to monitor suspicious behavior.

social disorganization

We fear _________ much more than people we know, but in cases of assault, rape, or robbery, 58% of offenses are committed by someone the victim knows.

strangers

___ of women are attacked by someone they know (usually a man), compared to only ___ of male victims.

68%, 45%

Improving neighborhood conditions helps ______ crime rates.

reduce

The Sentencing Project

A national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing law and practice, and alternatives to incarceration.

Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

A study where 6,000 children ranging from birth to 18, and their parents/caretakers were studied over a 7 year period. They measured the social and physical characteristics of the dozens of neighborhoods to assess these characteristics' effects on the probability of delinquency. They found that delinquency is higher in neighborhoods with lower levels of "collective efficacy", aka lower levels of community supervision of adolescent behavior.

Formal Social Control

A type of social control that is used to control behavior that violates formal norms. It typically involves the legal system (police, judges and prosecutors, corrections officials) and for business, the many local, state, and federal regulatory agencies that constitute the regulatory system.

Informal Social Control

A type of social control that is used to control behavior that violates informal norms. They are the negative reactions of other people. -anger, disappointment, ostracism, and ridicule

Differential Opportunity Theory

According to Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, differential access to illegitimate means affects the type of deviance in which individuals experiencing strain engage. -Example: some live in veighborhoods where organized crime is dominant and will get involved in such crime; others live in neighborhoods rampant with drug use and will start using drugs themselves.

Strain Theory

According to Robert Merton, deviance among the poor results from a gap between the cultural emphasis on economic success and inability to achieve such success through the legitimate means of working. This gap leads to frustration, so some poor people resort to deviance, depending on whether they accept or reject the goal of economic success and the means of working.

Merton's Anomie Theory

Adaptations: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion. 1. Conformity: accepts goal of economic success and accepts means of working. 2. Innovation: accepts goal of economic success and rejects means of working -rob banks, commit fraud, illegal means of acquiring money or property 3. Ritualism: rejects goal of economic success and accepts means of working. -not much hope of greatly improving their life, so they go to work daily as a habit.: a logica response to the strain poor people experience. 4. Retreatism: rejects goal of economic success and rejects means of working -become hobos or vagrants, or by becoming addicted to alcohol, heroin, etc. 5. Rebellion: rejects goal of economic success and means of working and goes to work for a new society. -radicals and revolutionaries of their time

Self-Report Survey

Adolescents are given an anonymous questionnaire and asked to indicate whether and how often they committed various offenses in a specific time period, usually the past year. They also answer questions about their family relationships, school performance, and background. -Underscores how much crime is committed that does not come to the attention of the police.

Status Frustration Theory

Albert Cohen stated that lower-class boys do poorly in school because schools emphasize middle-class values. School failure reduces their status and self esteem, which boys try to counter by joining juvenile gangs. In these groups a different value system prevails, and boys can regain status and self esteem by engaging in delinquency.

Deviance

Behavior that violates social norms and arouses negative social reactions.

Crime

Behavior that violates written laws that ban specific acts of deviance.

______ are more afraid than whites of walking near their homes alone at night. This reflects the difference that they are more likely than whites to live in large cities with high crime rates and live in higher crime neighborhoods.

Blacks

Social Ecology

Certain social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods contribute to high crime rates. These criminogenic characteristics include poverty, dilapidated housing, residential mobility, single-parent households, population density, and population turnover.

_____ is an important type of deviance that concerns many Americans.

Crime

White-Collar Crime

Crime committed as part of one's occupation. -fraudulent repairs by auto shops, corruption in the high finance industry, products and workplaces in the largest corporations, employee theft of objects and cash, tax evasion

Durkheim's Views

Deviance has several functions: 1. it clarifies norms and increases conformity 2. it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant. 3. it can help lead to positive social change. -Example: Martin Luther King Jr. was considered one of the worst deviants in his time, and now we honor him for his commitment and sacrifice.

Labeling Theory

Deviance results from being labeled a deviant; nonlegal factors such as appearance, race, and social class affect how often labeling occurs.

Victimless Crime

Illegal behavior where people willingly engage and where there are no unwilling victims. -drug use, prostitution, pornography, and gambling

________ theory assumes that labeling someone deviant increases the chances that the labeled person will continue to commit deviance.

Labeling

Subculture of Violence Thesis

Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti said in some inner city areas a subculture of violence promotes a violent response to insults and other problems, which people in middle class areas would probably ignore. This arises from the need of lower class males to "prove" their masculinity in view of their economic failure. Quantitative research to test their theory has failed to show that the urban poor are more likely than other groups to approve of violence. Qualitative research suggests that large segments of the urban poor do adopt a "code" of toughness and violence to promote respect.

Belief

Our acceptance of society's norms. The more we believe in these norms, the less we deviate.

__________ politics are thought to have led the surge in incarceration that has been the highlight of the get-tough approach.

Racialized

____________ explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social environment.

Sociological

Violent crim is more common in the _____ and ____ than in the ________ or _________.

South, West, Midwest, Northeast

Social Control

The ways a society tries to prevent and sanction behavior that violates norms.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans die every year from the side effects (heart disease, respiratory problems, and cancer) of ___ _________ caused by corporations.

air pollution

Denmark and the Netherlands use ____________ for victimless crimes, including probation, community service, and other community-based correction. Studies show that these methods are as effective as incarceration and in reducing recidivism (repeat offending), but cost much less than incarceration.

atlernatives

Health-care fraud costs about $100 _______ a year.

billion

Both __________ and _____________ explanations assume that deviance stems from problems arising inside the individual.

biological, psychological

______ and other people of _____ are more likely than ______ to be victims of conventional crime, poor people more likely than wealthy people, men more likely than women (except rape and sexual assault), and urban residents more likely than rural residents.

black, color, white

______ are much less likely than ______ to favor the death penalty, because they perceive that the death penalty and criminal justice system are racially discriminatory.

blacks, whites

Some of the worst crime is committed by our major ____________.

corporations -"corporate crime"

White-collar crime is more ______ in terms of personal and financial harm than conventional crime.

costly

Emile Durkheim said that society without ________ is impossible for two reasons. First, the __________ conscience is never strong enough to prevent all rule breaking. Second, because deviance serves several important functions for society, societies "invent" deviance by defining certain behaviors as deviant and the people who commit them as deviants.

deviance, collective

Laws against _____ lead to extra violence.

drugs

Most people arrested for conventional crime have low _________ and low _______.

education, incomes

Gender has a _____ effect on fear of crime.

large

Women and girls are much ____ likely than men and boys to engage in violence and to commit serious property crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft. This is attributed to gender ____________.

less, socialization

Males are ____ likely than females to commit conventional crime because of gender differences in socialization.

more

Women are treated a little ____ harshly then men for minor crimes and a little ____ harshly for serious crimes, but the gender effect in general is weak.

more, less

The disproportionate involvement of black in crime arises largely from their _______ and _____ _________.

poverty, urban residence

The NCVS estimates about _____ as many crimes as the UCR reports to us.

twice

White collar crimes are _____ than conventional crime. Annual deaths from white collar crime are about 110,000 compared to 17,000 from homicide.

worse