When is deviant behavior considered a crime

Stigma attaches to Terry because of her limp, overpowering the ways in which Terry might be social normative—perhaps she is a white, Protestant, or a heterosexual female with a limp. The limp marks Terry, despite her other traits. Stigma plays a primary role in sociological theory. Erving Goffman, an American sociologist, is responsible for bringing the term and theory of stigma into the main social theoretical fold. Goffman identified three main types of stigma: 1 stigma associated with mental illness; 2 stigma associated with physical deformation; and 3 stigma attached to identification with a particular race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, etc.

While Goffman is responsible for the seminal texts in stigma theory, stigmatization is still a popular theme in contemporary sociological research. Ultimately, stigma is about social control. A corollary to this is that stigma is necessarily a social phenomenon. Without a society, one cannot have stigma. To have stigma, one must have a stigmatizer and someone who is stigmatized.

As such, this is a dynamic and social relationship. Given that stigmas arise from social relationships, the theory places emphasis, not on the existence of deviant traits, but on the perception and marking of certain traits as deviant by a second party. Stigma depends on a another individual perceiving and knowing about the stigmatized trait. As stigma is necessarily a social relation, it is necessarily imbued with relations of power. Stigma works to control deviant members of the population and encourage conformity.

The Stigmatization of Homeless People : Homeless people are regularly stigmatized by society for being unemployed while living in the streets. As technology has opened up a new space for cyberculture, new forms of deviance and social control have appeared. Some individuals use technology as a means of deviating from more traditional cultural norms. For example, in the United States, employees in offices are encouraged to remain productive and efficient, letting their minds wander off-task as little as possible.

In the past decade, most companies have installed high-speed internet access as a means of improving efficiency. However, employees often reappropriate the internet access to avoid work by using social networking sites. In addition to new forms of deviance in traditional cultural mores, new forms of deviance have arisen within cyberculture. New technologies result in new standards of how to engage with them. The behaviors of deviant employees ultimately have a negative impact on the overall productivity of an organization.

For this reason, all of these behaviors are considered production deviance. More serious cases of deviant behavior involve property deviance. This type of deviance typically involves theft but may include sabotage, intentional errors in work, and the misuse of expense accounts. Just as new forms of deviance have come about as a result of technological advances, so too have new means of controlling deviant populations.

These methods include installing proxy servers to prevent programs from accessing resources like Internet Relay Chat, AOL Instant Messenger, or online gambling services. Other practices include strict disciplinary measures for employees found cyberloafing, and carrot-and-stick measures, such as providing free or subsidized Internet access for employees outside of working hours.

Technology is used in policing to monitor formal deviants and encourage conformity to the law and social norms. Slacking and Snacking at Work : Misusing company resources to conduct personal business, such as online shopping.

Deviance provides society the boundaries to determine acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in society. What function does the notion of deviance play in society? Sociologists who identify with the tradition of structural- functionalism ask this type of question.

Structural functionalism has its roots embedded in the very origins of sociological thought and the development of sociology as a discipline. A structural functionalist approach emphasizes social solidarity and stability in social structures.

Structural functionalists ask: How does any given social phenomenon contribute to social stability? This cannot be answered without addressing this question of deviance. For the structural functionalist, deviance serves two primary roles in creating social stability. First, systems of deviance create norms and tell members of a given society how to behave by laying out patterns of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In order to know how not to unsettle society, one must be aware of what behaviors are marked as deviant.

Second, these social parameters create boundaries between populations and enable an us-versus-them mentality within various groups. Deviance allows for group majorities to unite around their worldview, at the expense of those marked as deviant. Conversely, being marked as deviant can actually bolster solidarity within the marked community as members take pride and ownership in their stigmatized identity, creating cohesive units of their own.

From a structural-functionalist perspective, then, how does society change, particularly in regards to establishing norms and deviant behaviors? Deviance provides the key to understanding the disruption and recalibration of society that occurs over time.

Some traits will be stigmatized and can potentially cause social disruption. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

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Google Scholar. Select Format Select format. The current economic recession in the United States is the ultimate result of a financial collapse triggered by corporate crime. An often-debated third type of crime is victimless crime.

These are called victimless because the perpetrator is not explicitly harming another person. As opposed to battery or theft, which clearly has a victim, a crime like drinking a beer at age 17 or selling a sexual act do not result in injury to anyone other than the individual who engages in them, although they are illegal.

While some claim acts like these are victimless, others argue that they actually do harm society. Prostitution may foster abuse toward women by clients or pimps. Drug use may increase the likelihood of employee absences. Such debates highlight how the deviant and criminal nature of actions develops through ongoing public discussion. In the early morning of January 4, , a year-old Sikh caretaker in Surrey, B. The skinheads were part of a group that called itself White Power.

They had been to an all-night drinking party when they decided they were going to vandalize some cars in the temple parking lot. They encountered the caretaker Nirmal Singh Gill and took turns attacking him. In trial it came out that the eldest of the skinheads had recently been released from the military because of his racist beliefs.

Another had a large Nazi flag pinned to the wall of his apartment. Miloszewski The category of hate crimes grew out of the provisions in the Criminal Code that prohibit hate propaganda sections and including advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, or the willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group.

In , section However, police reported hate crimes totalled only 1, incidents in About one-third of the General Social Survey respondents said they reported the hate-motivated incidents to the police. In police-reported hate crimes had dropped to 1, incidents.

The majority of these were racially or ethnically motivated, but many were based on religious especially anti-Semitic prejudice or sexual orientation. A significant portion of the hate-motivated crimes 50 percent involved mischief vandalism, graffiti, and other destruction of property.

This figure increased to 75 percent for religious-motivated hate crimes. Violent hate crimes constituted 39 percent of all hate crimes 22 percent accounted for by violent assault specifically. Sexual-orientation-motivated hate crimes were the most likely to be violent 65 percent Allen and Boyce What crimes are people in Canada most likely to commit, and who is most likely to commit them?

To understand criminal statistics, you must first understand how these statistics are collected. These annual publications contain data from all the police agencies in Canada. The accuracy of the data collected by the UCR also varies greatly.

Because police and other authorities decide which criminal acts they are going to focus on, the data reflects the priorities of the police rather than actual levels of crime per se. For example, if police decide to focus on gun-related crimes chances are that more gun-related crimes will be discovered and counted. Similarly, changes in legislation that introduce new crimes or change the categories under which crimes are recorded will also alter the statistics.

The GSS is a self-report study. A self-report study is a collection of data acquired using voluntary response methods, based on telephone interviews. In , for example, survey data were gathered from 79, households across Canada on the frequency and type of crime they experience in their daily lives. The surveys are thorough, providing a wider scope of information than was previously available.

This allows researchers to examine crime from more detailed perspectives and to analyze the data based on factors such as the relationship between victims and offenders, the consequences of the crimes, and substance abuse involved in the crimes.

Demographics are also analyzed, such as age, ethnicity, gender, location, and income level. In the GSS on Victimization , only 31 percent of criminal incidents experienced by respondents were reported to police Perreault and Brennan Though the GSS is a critical source of statistical information, disadvantages exist.

Inability to contact important demographics, such as those who do not have access to phones or who frequently relocate, also skews the data. For those who participate, memory issues can be problematic for the data sets. While neither of these publications can take into account all of the crimes committed in the country, some general trends may be noted. Crime rates were on the rise after , but following an all-time high in the s and s, rates of violent and nonviolent crimes started to decline.

In they reached their lowest level since Perreault In , approximately 2 million crimes occurred in Canada. Of those, , were classified as violent crimes, the majority being assault and robbery. The rate of violent crime reached its lowest level since , led by decreases in sexual assault, common assault, and robbery.

The homicide rate fell to its lowest level since An estimated 1. The major contribution to the declining crime rate has been decreases in nonviolent crime, especially decreases in mischief, break-ins, disturbing the peace, theft of a motor vehicle, and possession of stolen property.

As noted above however, only 31 percent of violent and nonviolent crimes were reported to the police. What accounts for the decreases in the crime rate?

Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Canadians believe that crime rates, especially violent crime rates, are rising Edmiston , even though the statistics show a steady decline since Where is the disconnect?

There are three primary reasons for the decline in the crime rate. Firstly, it reflects the demographic changes to the Canadian population. Most crime is committed by people aged 15 to This age cohort has declined in size since Secondly, male unemployment is highly correlated with the crime rate. Following the recession of —, better economic conditions improved male unemployment.

Thirdly, police methods have arguably improved since , including having a more targeted approach to particular sites and types of crime. Whereas reporting on spectacular crime has not diminished, the underlying social and policing conditions have. It is very difficult to get a feel for statistical realities when you are sitting in front of a TV screen that shows a daily litany of violent and frightening crime.

The corrections system , more commonly known as the prison system, is tasked with supervising individuals who have been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for a criminal offence. At the end of , approximately 38, adults were in prison in Canada, while another , were under community supervision or probation Dauvergne By way of contrast, seven million Americans were behind bars in Bureau of Justice Statistics In the United States in , the incarceration rate was approximately 1, per , population.

More than 1 in U. As we noted in Chapter 1, from to , aboriginal Canadians were 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than the non-aboriginal population.

While aboriginal people accounted for about 4 percent of the Canadian population, in , they made up Aboriginal women made up This problem of overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the corrections system continues to grow appreciably despite a Supreme Court ruling in that the social history of aboriginal offenders should be considered in sentencing.

Prison is supposed to be used only as a last resort. Between and , the aboriginal population in prison grew by 44 percent Correctional Investigator Canada Although black Canadians are a smaller minority of the Canadian population than aboriginal people, they experience a similar problem of overrepresentation in the prison system. Blacks represent approximately 2. A survey revealed that blacks in Toronto are subject to racial profiling by the police, which might partially explain their higher incarceration rate Wortley Racial profiling occurs when police single out a particular racial group for extra policing, including a disproportionate use of stop-and-search practices, undercover sting operations, police patrols in racial minority neighbourhoods, and extra attention at border crossings and airports.

Survey respondents revealed that blacks in Toronto were much more likely to be stopped and searched by police than were whites and Asians.

Moreover, in a reverse of the situation for whites, older and more affluent black males were more likely to be stopped and searched than younger, lower-income blacks. There are a number of alternatives to prison sentences used as criminal sanctions in Canada including fines, electronic monitoring, probation, and community service. These alternatives divert offenders from forms of penal social control, largely on the basis of principles drawn from labelling theory. They emphasize to varying degrees compensatory social control, which obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a harm committed; therapeutic social control, which involves the use of therapy to return individuals to a normal state; and conciliatory social control, which reconciles the parties of a dispute to mutually restore harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged.

Many non-custodial sentences involve community-based sentencing , in which offenders serve a conditional sentence in the community, usually by performing some sort of community service. The argument for these types of programs is that rehabilitation is more effective if the offender is in the community rather than prison. A version of community-based sentencing is restorative justice conferencing , which focuses on establishing a direct, face-to-face connection between the offender and the victim.

Part of the process of restorative justice is to bring the offender to a position in which he or she can fully acknowledge responsibility for the offence, express remorse, and make a meaningful apology to the victim Department of Justice In special cases where the parties agree, aboriginal sentencing circles involve victims, the aboriginal community, and aboriginal elders in a process of deliberation with aboriginal offenders to determine the best way to find healing for the harm done to victims and communities.

The emphasis is on forms of traditional aboriginal justice , which centre on healing and building community rather than retribution. It is difficult to find data in Canada on the effectiveness of these types of programs. However, a large meta-analysis study that examined ten studies from Europe, North America, and Australia was able to determine that restorative justice conferencing was effective in reducing rates of recidivism —the likelihood for people to be arrested again after an initial arrest—and in reducing costs to the criminal justice system Strang et al.

The authors suggest that recidivism was reduced between 7 and 45 percent from traditional penal sentences by using restorative justice conferencing. Rehabilitation and recidivism are of course not the only goals of the corrections systems. Many people are skeptical about the capacity of offenders to be rehabilitated and see criminal sanctions more importantly as a means of deterrence to prevent crimes, retribution or revenge to address harms to victims and communities, or incapacitation to remove dangerous individuals from society.

Deviance and Control Deviance is a violation of norms. Society seeks to limit deviance through the use of sanctions that help maintain a system of social control. In modern normalizing societies, disciplinary social control is a primary governmental strategy of social control.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance The three major sociological paradigms offer different explanations for the motivation behind deviance and crime. Functionalists point out that deviance is a social necessity since it reinforces norms by reminding people of the consequences of violating them. Critical sociologists argue that crime stems from a system of inequality that keeps those with power at the top and those without power at the bottom.

Feminist sociologists emphasize that gender inequalities play an important role in determining what types of acts are actually regarded as criminal. Symbolic interactionists focus attention on the socially constructed nature of the labels related to deviance. Crime and deviance are learned from the environment and enforced or discouraged by those around us.

Crime and the Law Crime is established by legal codes and upheld by the criminal justice system. The corrections system is the dominant system of criminal punishment but a number of community-based sentencing models offer alternatives that promise more effective outcomes in terms of recidivism.

Although crime rates increased throughout most of the 20th century, they have been dropping since their peak in Deviance and Control 1. Which of the following best describes how deviance is defined? In , Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to sit in the blacks-only section of the cinema in Nova Scotia.

A student has a habit of texting during class. One day, the professor stops his lecture and asks her to respect the other students in the class by turning off her phone.

School discipline obliges students to sit in rows and listen to lessons quietly in order for them to learn.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance 6. A student wakes up late and realizes her sociology exam starts in five minutes. She jumps into her car and speeds down the road, where she is pulled over by a police officer. The student explains that she is running late, and the officer lets her off with a warning. According to critical sociology, which of the following people is most likely to commit a crime of accommodation?

According to the concept of the power elite, why would a celebrity such as Charlie Sheen commit a crime? A convicted sexual offender is released on parole and arrested two weeks later for repeated sexual crimes. How would labelling theory explain this? Crime and the Law Which of the following is an example of corporate crime? Deviance and Control Although we rarely think of it in this way, deviance can have a positive effect on society.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance The Vancouver safe injection site is a controversial strategy to address the public health concerns associated with intravenous drug use. Read about the perspectives that promote and critique the safe injection site model at the following websites. Can you determine how the positions expressed by the different sides of the issue fit within the different sociological perspectives on deviance?

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