Sociology 101 Chapter 6

Who goes to prison?

-Prisons are filled with those who got caught are who are falsely accused -Only a small portion of those who commit crimes are in prison Figure 6.5 on pg. 215

MODULE 6.5 -Sociological perspective on crime

-Sociologists are interested in the process by which behaviors are defined as crimes -Social contexts can offer opportunities to commit crimes.

Categories of deviants

A rule breaker is not deviant unless someone notices the violation and decides to take corrective action. For every rule a social group creates, four categories of people exist: -Conformists -Pure deviants -Secret deviants -Falsely accused

Culture of spectacle

A social arrangement in which punishment for crimes, torture, disfigurement, dismemberment ad execution is delivered in public settings for all to see.

Patterns of mixed contact

A stigma can come to dominate interactions in many ways. -Anticipation of contact causes stigmatized and normals to avoid one another. -Normals and stigmatized are unsure how the other views them or will act toward them. -Normals define accomplishments of the stigmatized as remarkable and noteworthy -Normals attribute any failing of the stigmatized to the stigma

Rebellion

Also involves the rejection of both the valued goals and the legitimate means of attaining them. Whereas retreatists simply give up, rebels seek a new set of goals and means of obtaining them. If enough people rebel, a great potential for revolution exists.

Obedience to authority

An authority figure's firm command to behave in ways that can even conflict with conscience (Milgram's experience). -Stanley Milgram's experience of the commands of recognized authority figures as a mechanism of social control. He wanted to learn why people obey an authority's command to behave in ways that are conflicting with their conscience. -Holocaust and Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Structural strain defined

An imbalance between the culturally valued goals and the legitimate means of achieving those goals. Structural strain exists when: -People are unsure whether following the legitimate means will lead to success -Opportunities for reaching the valued goals are limited or closed off to a significant portion of the population. -The sole focus is on achieving valued goals by any means necessary.

Durkheim cont.

Durkheim drew an analogy to those who consider themselves "upright and perfect" but judge their smallest failings with a severity that others reserve for the most serious offenses.

MODULE 6.4 Stigma

Erving goffman says that a stigma is an attribute that is deeply discrediting. Goffman identified three broad categories: -Stigmas of the body, that audience defines as imperfect, a deformity or disability. -Stigmas related to behavior, like addiction, sexual orientation or a criminal record. -Stigmas that an audience has defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national.

Who defines what is deviant?

How do certain groups, appearances or behaviors come to be defined as problematic? -Claims makers

Crimes of opportunity

Illegitimate opportunity structures: social settings and arrangements that offer people the opportunity to commit particular types of crime such as: -white collar crime -corporate crime

Retreatism

Involves the rejection of both culturally valued goals and the legitimate means of achieving them. It is the response of those who have internalized the culturally valued goals, but the legitimate means promising success have failed them. According to merten, retreatists face a mental conflict in that it is against their moral principles to use illegitimate means, yet the legitimate means no longer apply.

The panopticon

Jeremy Bentham "a period of history which a whole set of techniques and instituations emerged for measuring, supervising and correcting those considered abnormal including criminals. -He used it as effort to create the most efficient and rational prison, the perfect prison. -Foucault used it as a metaphor for the mentality driving 19th century society.

MODULE 6.3 Labeling Theory

Labeling theorists define deviance as behavior that has been noticed and labeled as such.

Surveillance

Monitoring movements, conversations, and associations with the intent of catching people in the act of doing something wrong.

MODULE 6.6 Structural Strain Theory

Robert Merten's theory. An imbalance between the culturally valued goals and the legitimate means of obtaining those goals can lead to deviant behavior

Terry Williams research:

Shows how teenagers can make contact with a deviant subculture. Minors selling cocaine is an example, because they can't be caught and they don't have hope.

MODULE 6.2 Mechanisms of social control:

Society's referees employ what sociologists call this, which are strategies people use to encourage, often force, others to comply with social norms. Police officers, school principals and others act as referees. When conformity cannot be achieved voluntarily, mechanisms of social control are employed. : -Positive and negative Sanctions -Censorship -Surveillance -The order of authority -Group pressure

Informal sanctions

Spontaneous, unofficial expressions of approval or disapproval

Conformity

The acceptance of cultural goals and the pursuit of those goals through legitimate means. the category includes those who play by the book. They use legitimate means such as earning a college education and working hard to achieve success.

Innovation

The acceptance of cultural goals but the rejection of legitimate means to achieve them. For the innovator, success is equated with winning the game rather than with playing by the rules; that is, the innovator seeks to achieve valued goals of financial success but uses means considered illegitimate, such as evading taxes, selling drugs, identity theft or embezzlement.

Consequences to deviance

Varies according to whether an audience 1) knows it exists 2) accepts it as just 3) enforces it uniformly, 4) thinks it important to follow, and 5) backs it up with the force of law.

Censorship:

action taken to prevent information believed to be sensitive, unsuitable, or threatening from reaching an audience

Corporate crime

Committed by a corporation in the way that it does business as it completes with other companies for market share and profits. -Easier to escape punishment from corporate and white collar crime.

White collar crime

Committed by a person of "high social status in the course of their occupation"

Labeling Theory

Guided by two assumptions: -Rules are socially constructed -Rules are not enforced uniformly or consistently Labeling theorists maintain that whether an act is deviant depends on whether people notice it and, if they do notice, whether they label it as a violation of a rule and then proceed to apply sanctions.

Carceral Culture

Foucault defined it as a social arrangement under which the society largely abandons physical and public punishment and replaces it with surveillance as the method of controlling peoples activities and thoughts.

Disciplinary society

Foucault's metaphor for panopticon, it is a social arrangement that normalizes surveillance, making it expected and routine.

The structure of strain cont.

Theory of structural strain takes into consideration two elements of social structure: -The goals a society defines as valuable (upward mobility) -The culturally legitimate means to achieve those valued goals.

Prison-industrial complex

-America has a high rate of repeat offenders because system places no emphasis on rehabilitating offenders. -This complex, defined as the corporations and agencies with an economic stake in building and supplying correctional facilities and in providing services, fuels an ongoing "need" for prisoners so that companies can maintain or increase profit margins.

MODULE 6.1 Deviance

-Any behavior or physical appearance that is socially challenged and/or condemned because it departs from the norms and expectations of some group -Deviance involves violation of norms, rules, or shared expectations for the way people should behave ,feel, and appear in the presence of a particular group or in a particular social situation.

Emile Durkheim argument:

-Argued that while ideas about what is deviant vary, deviance is present in all societies. he defined deviance as those acts that offend collective sentiments. The fact that there are some acts that offend always and everywhere led him to conclude that there is no such thing as a society without deviance. -According to Durkehim, deviance will be present even in a "community of saints".

Witch Hunts

-Campaigns to identify, investigate and correct behavior that has been defined as dangerous to the larger society. -In reality, they never accomplish this because the real cause of a problem is often complex.

The Sociological Perspective cont.

-Deviance exists in every community, even in a "community of saints," because it is the act of offending collective norms and expectations.

Claims makers

-Those who articulate and promote claims and who benefit in some way if their claims are accepted as true. -Parents, children, government officials, advertisers, scientists and professors. -Sociologists pay attention to any labels that claims makers apply because labels tend to evoke a specific cause, consequence, and/or solution to a problem.

The Sociological Perspective

-What make something deviant is the presence of a social audience that regards a behavior or appearance as deviant and takes some kind of action to discourage it -Deviance is not inherent in any act, appearance or behavior. -Almost any behavior or appearance can qualify as deviant under the right circumstances.

Formal sanctions

Backed by laws, rules, or policies

Crime

Behavior that has been defined by those with the power to make and enforce laws as disruptive to some "desired" social order

Differential association

Edwin Sutherland and Donald Cressy coined the term. -Focuses on exposure to criminal patterns and isolation from noncriminal influences as factors that put people at risk of becoming criminals.

Responses to structural strain:

Merten identified 5 ways that people respond to structural strain. The responses involve some combo of acceptance and rejection of the valued goals and means. -Conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.

Prison reform

From Foucault's point of view, prison reforms and by extension reforms related to punishment, were connected to the need to establish discipline and order not to achieve some moral objective.

Mixed contacts

Goffman was very interested in this, where interactions between stigmatized persons and so-called normals. -Goffman didn't use the word normal as "well-adjusted or healthy". Instead, he means people who possess no stigma.

Group pressure

Group think: A phenomenon that occurs when a group under great pressure to take action achieves the illusion of consensus by putting pressure on its members to suppress expression of doubt and ignore the moral consequences of their actions. -Janis's research on the group dynamics underlying the making of foreign policies with disastrous consequences and comparing them with the group dynamics underlying the making of foreign policies with successful outcomes. -South korea and north korea war because of US command.

Anomie

Merten argues that structural strain induces a state of cultural chas or anomie. -Under such conditions, people are susceptible to abandoning the legitimate means to achieve culturally valued goals and are even susceptible to abandoning those goals.

Sanctions

Reactions of approval (positive sanctions) or disapproval (negative sanctions) to behavior that conforms or departs from group norms. There are formal and informal.

Michel Foucault:

Sought to identify the turning points that make the society we live in today fundamentally different in structure from the society that preceded it. In this regard Foucault identified a historical shift or turning point in the way society punishes people from what he called a culture of spectacle to a carceral culture.

Howard becker states:

That the central thesis of labeling theory: All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. That person is regarded as an outsider.

Ritualism

The rejection of the cultural goals but a rigid adherence to the legitimate means society has in place to achieve them. Opposite of innovation, the game is played according to the rules despite defeat. Merten maintains that this response can be a reaction to the status anxiety that accompanies the ceaseless competitive struggle to stay on top or to get ahead. The culturally valued goal, even though valued, is defined as being beyond their reach. This response applies to those who work full time jobs that do not pay a living wage. They work hard but do not achieve financial success.

Durkheim argument cont.

The ritual of identifying and exposing a wrongdoing, determining a punishment, and/or carrying it out is an emotional experience that binds together the members of a group and establishes a sense of order and community. Durkheim maintained that group that went too long without noticing deviance or doing something about it would lose its identity as a group.

Responses to stigmatization

The stigmatized respond by: -eliminating the visible markers that act as barriers to success and belonging -devoting a great deal of time and effort to overcoming stereotypes, trying to be a perfectionist -using their subordinate status for secondary gain -viewing discrimination as a blessing in disguise -condemning all normals

Falsely accused

Those who have broken no rules but are treated as if they have (e.g., caught and punished).

Pure deviants:

Those who have broken the rules and are caught and punished

Secret deviants

Those who have broken the rules but are not caught and/or punished.

Categories of deviants: Conformists

Those who have not broken the rules and are treated accordingly.

Falsely accused

Those who have not committed crimes but are treated as if they have. -Michael Radelet and colleagues reviewed more than 400 cases of innocent people convicted of capital crimes and found that 56 had made false confessions.