cultural deviance theory essay

Cultural Deviance Theory – Definition, Examples, Pros & Cons

Kamalpreet Gill Singh (PhD)

This article was co-authored by Kamalpreet Gill Singh, PhD. Dr. Gill has a PhD in Sociology and has published academic articles in reputed international peer-reviewed journals. He holds a Master’s degree in Politics and International Relations and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science.

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Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

Cultural Deviance Theory states that crime is correlated strongly to the cultural values and norms prevalent in a society.

In other words, individuals may turn to crime not on account of any innate character traits, but because they are influenced by:

The place they live in,
The people they are surrounded by, and
The socio-economic conditions of their micro-environment

Those three elements come together to form a unique subculture influencing the individual and their chances to turn to crime.

Usually, the theory is used to critique immigrant and working-class cultures, making it a highly controversial theory in the 21st Century!

Origins of Cultural Deviance Theory

The theory was born out of the work of University of Chicago sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay in the 1930s. Shaw and McKay were part of a larger theoretical project to understand social deviance and crime in the rapidly burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago during this period.

The theory Shaw and McKay proposed came to be called the Social Disorganization Theory as it attributed delinquency to a disorganization or rupture of traditional societal norms by forces such as immigration and poverty.

The criminologist Walter B. Miller (1958) made significant additions to the work of Shaw, McKay and others. He added his own thesis that certain cultural values in lower-class societies (which were absent among the middle-classes) played a major role in contributing to social deviance or delinquent behavior.

Miller’s thesis came to be known as the cultural deviance theory.

Here are some scholarly definitions of the cultural deviance theory that have been paraphrased and can be used as such:

Shaw and McKay (1969) proposed that the transmission of cultural norms that result in criminal or delinquent behavior is a cause of delinquent or criminal behavior.
Miller (1958) suggested that delinquent behavior arose as a result of “focal concerns” or a set of issues that the subjects feel highly emotionally involved with, of “lower class culture”.

Related Theory: The Theory of Cultural Capital

Six Focal Concerns of Cultural Deviance Theory

Miller (1958) further identified six cornerstones of lower-class subculture that he called “focal concerns”.

According to Miller, a fixation of lower-class youths with these “focal concerns” led to increased delinquency. These six focal concerns were:

1. Trouble – According to Miller, “getting in trouble” and “staying out of trouble” were major concerns of lower-class youth (with trouble here defined as encounters with the law). This pointed towards a key feature of lower-class subculture in which respect for the law came not out of a sense of morality but from a fear of punishment.

2. Toughness – In lower class cultures, toughness, defined by a disregard for consequences, a contempt for literary, artistic, and scholarly pursuits including education, a pride in displays of unsentimentality, and an objectification of women, becomes a highly valued and desired attribute. Juveniles aspire to be “tough” in the sense described above to gain respect among their peers.

3. Smartness – Smartness, defined as being manipulative and possessing cunning, was said to be another prized attribute among juveniles in a lower-class culture. A “smart guy” is one who gets others to do his bidding without the direct use of violence. Think of the various depictions of “smart guys”, “wise guys”, and “smooth operators” in gangster movies who are always flirting with the law.

4. Excitement – Juveniles in lower-class cultures seem to be chasing the next thrill to overcome the monotony of lower-class culture. This often leads them to activities such joining gangs or doing drugs.

5. Fate – Feeling disempowered, members of the lower-classes may place a greater reliance on fate or luck than those of the middle classes. This may lead to an attitude of recklessness, as actions and their consequences may come to be seen as preordained, and thus beyond the pale of morality. In other words, if what is to be, shall be, then why worry about consequences? For the proponents of the cultural deviance theory, such an attitude can act as an enabler for delinquency.

6. Autonomy – According to Miller, lower classes may display a contempt towards authority, seeing institutions of the state as exerting undue control over their lives. They may seek to resist such control and assert their autonomy. Delinquency or crime can result as a direct result of this attempt to assert their autonomy against the system, manifesting itself through acts of vandalism or petty crime.

Good to Know Information

The cultural deviance theory is often viewed as a part of a larger theory called the social disorganization theory. Social disorganization theory links crime and delinquency to cultural norms of particular locations or residential areas such as those of low-income groups or those with a heavy concentration of poor immigrants.

However, a key difference between the two is that the cultural deviance theory fleshes out in much greater detail the processes that lead to the formation of a unique delinquent subculture and how this may in turn influence youth towards delinquency.

The social disorganization theory on the other hand stresses on ruptures within systems or breakdown of traditional societal bonds as the reason for delinquency.

Another theory viewed within the same grouping is Sutherland’s (1947) differential association theory . All such theories are further classified together under the broad label of Ecological or Socio-ecological theories that give primacy to the role of the social environment upon human behavioral patterns .

List of Real-Life Examples

1. Ethnic Gangs

Much of the fieldwork that resulted in the formulation of the cultural divergence theory occurred among immigrant street corner gangs in Chicago and Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. Many tenets of the cultural deviance theory are applicable to gangs even in the twenty-first century.

For instance, Indo-Canadian gangs in the Vancouver region of Canada composed of Punjabi Sikh migrants from India draw on cultural values of honour, violence, and revenge coupled with poverty to lure many young boys into joining these gangs. Frederick Thrasher, an early contributor to the cultural deviance theory wrote that “an immigrant colony…is itself an isolated social world…the gang boy moves only in his own universe and other regions are clothed in nebulous mystery…he knows little of the outside world.” (Thrasher 1927)

2. The Chicago Area Project

In 1934, Clifford Shaw, one of the early proponents of the cultural deviance theory, set up the Chicago Area Project in the Russell Square Park neighborhood of South Chicago. This neighborhood was then inhabited by newly arrived immigrants from rural Poland who worked in steel factories and clung tenaciously to their traditional way of life while struggling to cope up with life in an industrialized society.

The Russell Square Park neighborhood had a very high rate of petty crime such as theft and vandalism committed by juveniles who had organized themselves into a number of gangs.

Conventional “top-down” approaches to control delinquency such as punitive policing did not seem to work. So Shaw suggested a “bottom-up” approach based on his theory that the cause of the delinquency was cultural norms that were being adopted and transmitted by the gangs in an environment of deprivation, poverty, and isolation.

Shaw suggested a three-pronged approach to tackle the problems of crime, theft, and vandalism. This included:

Organizing the community, and
Providing services to the neighborhood through volunteers.

With these three approaches, Shaw attempted to alter the culture of the gangs and change the perception of gang members about which cultural values were to sought and pursued. The idea was to promote productive values (e.g. getting a job, being a law-abiding citizen), and make others undesirable (e.g. committing acts of vandalism).

3. Honor Killings

Honor killings among immigrants from South Asia and West Asia are a form of violence in which a female, usually a sister or a daughter, is murdered by men of her own family for the perceived act of bringing dishonor to her family. It usually occurs when she is accused of associating with a man outside of her community. Such killings in the West have been documented mostly among newly arrived immigrants working blue collar jobs .

The motivation for such crimes is cultural notions of honor, masculinity, and ethnic/tribal pride coupled with a lack of access to education. Additionally, perpetrators of such acts see their own cultural code as being above the law of the land.

Further, as in Walter Miller’s classic formulation of the cultural deviance theory, notions of toughness in some cultures result in an objectification of women, and in turn, violence against them.

Miller (1958) argued that these supposed cultural traits of the working classes represented the formulation of a unique working-class subculture. This was due primarily to an absence of strong male figures during childhood, and was the cause of high rates of delinquency among lower class youth.

Advantages of Cultural Deviance Theory

1. It’s Comprehensive

The cultural deviance theory combines elements of the social disorganization theory of Shaw and McKay and the strain theory of Robert Merton (1938) to present one of the most comprehensive analyses of delinquency.

While the social disorganization theory focused only on the breakdown of institutions, the strain theory posited a strain or conflict between an individual’s desires and their means as the reasons for crime. While the first misses one crucial step in explaining how disorganization leads to crime, the second focuses too much on individual reasons. The cultural deviance theory combines both.

2. It’s Portable

Although designed initially to examine delinquency in American cities, the cultural deviance theory, with a few tweaks, can be applied to many other cultural settings. The “focal concerns” identified by Miller were specific to the setting of his research but can be adapted to other cultures.

3. It’s Solution-Oriented

Like the routine activities theory of crime , the cultural deviance theory not only claims to explain the causes of delinquency, it also provides a blueprint for solving the problem. Many theoretical models of deviance (such as the conflict theory of deviance ) often remain limited to merely explaining a problem, without providing any actionable insights.

With the cultural deviance theory however, once the “focal concerns” of a culture have been identified, a solution can be devised based on reorienting the cultural norms of delinquents through community intervention, providing services, and community organization.

Criticisms and Disadvantages of Cultural Deviance Theory

1. Stereotyping and Stigmatizing of Lower-class Culture

The classic definition of the cultural deviance theory rests on the delineation of certain “focal concerns” such as toughness, smartness, trouble, etc. that it attributes to a “lower class culture”.

However there is no definitive evidence to support that such attributes are limited only to lower (or working) class cultures. Middle-classes too might identify with such “focal concerns” without having to face the scrutiny of academics and governments trying to ‘fix’ them.

2. Overemphasizing the Impact of Culture

Cultural Deviance Theory relies a little too heavily on the impact of culture on the individual, without accounting for the individual’s own agency in negotiating their way through the structural forces in their lives.

3. Applicable only to Explanations of Certain Kinds of Crimes

The cultural deviance theory can only be used to explain certain classes of crimes such as theft, vandalism, etc. that have a higher rate of prevalence among the working classes. It does not apply to white collar crimes such as fraud, money-laundering etc that are carried out by highly educated individuals or groups of people from the middle or the upper-middle classes who may not belong to working-class and immigrant communities.

Similarly it does not apply to acts of sexual violence that cross class and ethnic barriers. The cultural deviation theory’s assumptions such as a fear of punitive action rather than a sense of morality being the driver of the lower classes fail to hold in such cases as white-collar criminals too show little regard for precepts of morality.

Personally, I find cultural deviance theory creates a ‘deficit’ mindset toward the working-classes and ignores the enormous damage to society caused by the capitalist class. Similarly, it fails to see the positive aspects of the working-classes (such as resilience and their remarkable storytelling traditions).

Nevertheless, this is a sober reflection on the relationship between culture and crime. It remains a worthwhile theoretical lens to examine social problems. But for me, it’s also a learning opportunity to learn how to look critically at a theory and examine its blindspots and biases, of which Cultural Deviance Theory has many.

Reference List

Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie . American Sociological Review 3(5), pp. 672-682. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2084686

Miller, W. B. (1958) Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang culture. Journal of Social Issues 14(3), pp. 5-19. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1958.tb01413.x

Shaw, C. R. and McKay, H.D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sutherland, E. (1947) Principles of criminolog y Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins.

Thrasher, F. (1927) The gang: A study of 1313 gangs in Chicago Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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University Essays

7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Sociologists have tried to understand why people engage in deviance or crime by developing theories to help explain this behavior. It is important to note that these theories focus primarily on why people engage in crime, why some behaviors are defined as criminal while others aren’t, and how people learn criminal behavior rather than on deviance more broadly. The focus of these theories reflects that society is much more concerned about crime than people who break other kinds of social or cultural norms.

7.3.1 Historical Theories of Deviance

Inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species , early scholars trying to explain crime turned to the concept of evolution to understand differences among humans by claiming physical features were identifying markers of criminals. Several characteristics were said to indicate criminality, including skull shape, size, body type, and facial features. For example, Cesare Lombroso (1911), the father of positivist criminology, claimed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks. He claimed that criminals can be identified by their abnormal apelike facial and physical features. A visual depiction of these features can be seen below in figure 7.4 .This school of thought is closely associated with the eugenics movement, discussed more in-depth in Chapter 11 . These theories were quickly disproven and have received harsh critiques for their blatantly racist foundation.

7.3.1.1 Durkheim and Functionalism

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence challenged people’s ideas about racial inequality in the United States. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1960[1893]). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Durkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the collective conscience, which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. In large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.

Modern theories have a few significant critiques of Durkheim’s perspective on crime. Sociologists have critiqued Durkheim’s argument that deviance is functional for not being generalizable to all crimes. For instance, it can be hard to argue that murder is functional for society solely because it reaffirms currently held social norms. Moreover, the idea that law is an expression of collective consciousness has also been critiqued. Conflict theorists argue that the bourgeois or elite have significant influence over political and legal institutions, allowing them to pass laws that benefit their interests and avoid harsh punishments when they commit crimes. This challenges the idea that the law reflects what society thinks is just or right.

7.3.1.2 Social Disorganization Theory

Some research supports this theory. Even today, crimes like theft or murder are more likely to occur in low-income neighborhoods with many social problems. Still, a critique of this research is that many of these studies rely on official crime rates, much of which reflect police surveillance rather than actual crime rates. For this reason, social disorganization theory does not adequately explain white collar crimes committed by individuals living in wealthy neighborhoods, such as financial fraud or insider trading. Similarly, research from a social disorganization theory often uses circular logic: an area with a high crime rate is assumed to signal a disorganized neighborhood, leading to a high crime rate (Bursik 1988).

7.3.1.3 Cultural Deviance Theory

This theory has many similar critiques to social disorganization theory, as they were developed around the same time and strongly emphasize the role of the environment on crime and deviance. One other critique of cultural deviance theory is that while it attributes crime to lower class cultures and values, there is no substantial evidence that these attitudes are limited to people in this class.

7.3.2 Modern Theories of Deviance

In response to the historical theories of deviance, new theories emerged that critiqued or expanded upon them to address shortfalls in their explanations. At the end of this section, figure 7.6 summarizes these key theories.

7.3.2.1 Robert Merton’s Strain Theory: Rethinking Durkheim

Example: “I may not be able to afford to buy a house in my lifetime, but I have a working car, a loving partner, and a cute dog. I’m content with the lot I’ve been given in life.”

Example: “I grew up in a neighborhood that didn’t have good schools, and I never had an opportunity to get ahead. I want a house, nice car, and to take care of my family, but the only way I can see myself doing that is by continuing to sell cocaine and counterfeit goods.”

Example: “I’m never going to be able to afford a nice home and car, but I don’t need those things anyways! I like the apartment I rent, and my cat’s only other form of life I want to be responsible for. Why not just love the things that I do have?”

Example: “ Why would I even participate in society at all? The deck is stacked against me. I know I’m only 20, but (illegally) hopping on trains and travelling around the country with my friends is where it’s at! ”

Example: “I’m gonna overthrow the government, that’s what I’m going to do! The system is unjust and it’s not one that’s designed for how humans really are!”

7.3.2.2 William Julius Wilson: Rethinking the Role of Neighborhoods

William Julius Wilson refined ideas in social disorganization theory to explain why people in poverty, particularly those living in black and immigrant communities, are more likely to live in high-crime neighborhoods. Rather than focusing on the role of cultural factors like previous theorists, Wilson (1987) focused on how economic changes have contributed to these groups being more likely to live in high-crime neighborhoods.

Wilson (1997) argued that before the decline of industrial and manufacturing jobs, these groups could be economically successful despite having low levels of education given their access to high paying factory jobs. After manufacturing jobs left these cities, black people and recent immigrants became trapped in low-income high-crime areas with few jobs or low-wage, service sector jobs. According to Wilson’s (1997) theory, crime emerges because policy leads to little economic opportunity and traps disadvantaged groups in poor, high-crime areas where turning to crime is one of the few opportunities for advancement.

7.3.2.3 Karl Marx’s Unequal System Theory

Karl Marx believed that the bourgeoisie centralized their power and influence through government and law. Though Marx spoke little of deviance, his ideas created the foundation for other theorists who study the intersection of deviance and crime with wealth and power. Later Marxists, such as Richard Quinney (1974), expanded upon these ideas. He believed that the bourgeoisie set up laws to maintain their class rankings rather than to reduce crime. Similarly, he argued that the legal system is uninterested in addressing the root causes of crime. Instead, the legal system is preoccupied with controlling the lower class.

7.3.2.4 C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite Theory

Power Elite theory differs from unequal system theory in that it further refines the ideas of unequal system theory. It more clearly specifies which actors influence laws, rather than broadly characterizing the bourgeois as having this power. Still, many similarities exist between the two theories in that they both look at how the groups in power exploit their influence for their benefit at the expense of marginalized populations.

7.3.2.5 Michele Foucault: Discipline and Punishment Theory

The panopticon, as seen below in figure 7.5, is a late eighteenth century circular prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the panopticon prison design, guards could continuously monitor prisoners without the prisoners knowing if guards were watching. Since prisoners would not know when guards were watching them, they would constantly surveil their behavior to avoid punishment. French philosopher Michele Foucault (1977) drew parallels between Jeremy Benthan’s panopticon and how modern institutions control the population. He argued that punishment currently occurs through discipline and surveillance by institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals, schools, and workplaces. These institutions produce compliant citizens without the threat of violence.

Ultimately, Foucault (1977) argued that surveillance created an effect where individuals conformed to society since they never knew if they were being watched. His ideas have gained new importance with the rise of surveillance technologies, which make it harder to engage in deviance without getting caught. Examples of this phenomenon are federal mass surveillance policies and the rise of police departments using technologies to scour social media networks for information about criminal activities. Broadly, Foucault (1977) proposed that social control and punishment are not just formal sanctions, like a prison sentence or ticket, but also something more mundane and built into social institutions.

7.3.2.6 Lemert’s Labeling Theory

Rooted in symbolic interactionism, labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. What is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures.

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory and identified two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance . In secondary deviance a person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. In many ways, secondary deviance is captured by the phrase, “If you tell a child enough that they’re a bad kid, they’ll eventually believe that they’re a bad kid.” This perspective hits on how negative social labels, especially of juveniles, have the power to create more deviant or criminal behavior.

7.3.2.7 Sykes and Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization

How do people deal with the labels they are given? This was the subject of a study done by Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957). They studied teenage boys who had been labeled as juvenile delinquents to see how they either embraced or denied these labels. They argued that criminals don’t have vastly different cultural values but rather adopt attitudes to justify criminal behavior at times. Sykes and Matza developed five techniques of neutralization to capture how people justify engaging in criminal acts. Individuals may not necessarily internalize labels if they have developed strategies to reject associating their actions with these labels.

Let’s apply each of these techniques by pretending to be a teenager justifying shoplifting at a major retail chain department store. From this example, we can see how individuals can justify engaging in an act that may be illegal and violates social norms through these kinds of cognitive strategies

Example: “I don’t want to steal from this store, but I’ve applied to so many jobs and no one seems to want to hire a teenager these days.”

Example: “It’s not like anyone is being hurt by me stealing.”

Example: “Who am I hurting anyways? This is a big corporation! They expect some level of theft.”

Example: “This corporation is way more corrupt considering the fact most of their goods come from sweatshops where there is child labor.

Example: “I’m only stealing because I really don’t have enough money to get my sister a nice birthday present and she matters way more to me than any stupid corporation does. I’m a modern day Robin Hood.”

7.3.2.8 Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. He argues that people learn all aspects of criminal behavior through interacting with others and being part of intimate personal groups. Sutherland’s theory captures not only how people learn criminal behavior, but also how people learn motives, rationalizations, and attitudes towards crime. Differential association theory also demystifies crime, conceptualizing it as a behavior just like any other: a radical departure from early theories of crime that viewed criminals as inherently biologically different or all individuals as naturally pleasure seeking, selfish, and prone to crime. In Sutherland’s theory, anyone has the potential to engage in crime if they learn how to commit crime and embrace favorable definitions of crime. This theory also helps explain why not all children who grow up in poverty end up engaging in criminal activity—as historical theories such as cultural deviance theory suggest—because they encounter different situations that shape their definitions towards violating the law.

Theory	Associated Theorist	Contribution to the Study of Deviance and Crime
Differential Association Theory	Edwin Sutherland	Argues that deviance arises from learning and modeling deviant behavior seen in other people close to the individual
Discipline and Punishment Theory	Michel Foucault	Highlights how social control mechanisms are not just formal sanctions, but also built into modern institutions
Labeling Theory	Edwin Lemert	Argues that deviance arises from the reactions of others, particularly those in power who are able to determine labels
Power Elite Theory	C. Wright Mills	Argues that deviance arises from the ability of those in power to define deviance in ways that maintain the status quo
Revised Social Disorganization Theory	William Julius Wilson	Argues that crime emerges because policy leads to little economic opportunity and traps disadvantaged groups in poor, high crime areas where turning to crime is one of the few opportunities for advancement
Strain Theory	Robert Merton	Argues that deviance arises from a lack of ways to reach socially accepted goals by accepted methods
Techniques of Neutralization	Gresham Sykes and David Matza	Developed five techniques of neutralization to capture how people justify engaging in criminal acts
Unequal System Theory	Karl Marx	Argues that deviance arises from inequalities in wealth and power that arise from the economic system

Figure 7.6. Modern Theories of Deviance and Crime

7.3.3 Licenses and Attributions for Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

“Durkheim and Functionalism” paragraphs 1 and 2 edited for clarity and brevity are from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Social Disorganization Theory” paragraph 1 edited for clarity and brevity is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Cultural Deviance Theory” paragraph 1 is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance” by Heather Griffiths and Nathan Keirns in Openstax Sociology 2e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-2e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance

“Robert Merton’s Strain Theory: Rethinking Durkheim” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Karl Marx’s Unequal System Theory” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite Theory” paragraph two edited for clarity and brevity from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Lemert’s Labeling Theory” paragraphs 1 and 2, and sentences 1 and 2 in paragraph 3 edited for clarity and brevity from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

“Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory” modified from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime

Figure 7.4. Plate 6 of L’Homme Criminel by Cesar Lombroso, Public domain , via the Wellcome Collection .

Figure 7.5. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon Prison Design, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Figure 7.6 is from “7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/7-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance-and-crime . Substantial modifications and additions have been made.

All other content in this section is original content by Alexandra Olsen and licensed under CC BY 4.0 .

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Chapter 7. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Learning objectives.

7.1. Deviance and Control

Define deviance and categorize different types of deviant behaviour
Determine why certain behaviours are defined as deviant while others are not
Differentiate between methods of social control
Describe the characteristics of disciplinary social control and their relationship to normalizing societies

7.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance

Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society and compare Durkheim’s views with social disorganization theory, control theory, and strain theory
Explain how critical sociology understands deviance and crime in society
Understand feminist theory’s unique contributions to the critical perspective on crime and deviance
Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labelling and other theories

7.3. Crime and the Law

Identify and differentiate between different types of crimes
Evaluate Canadian crime statistics
Understand the nature of the corrections system in Canada

Introduction to Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Psychopaths and sociopaths are some of the favourite “deviants” in contemporary popular culture. From Patrick Bateman in American Psycho , to Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs , to Dexter Morgan in Dexter , to Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock and Elementary , the figure of the dangerous individual who lives among us provides a fascinating fictional figure. Psychopathy and sociopathy both refer to personality disorders that involve anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions. In clinical analysis, these analytical categories should be distinguished from psychosis , which is a condition involving a debilitating break with reality.

Psychopaths and sociopaths are often able to manage their condition and pass as “normal” citizens, although their capacity for manipulation and cruelty can have devastating consequences for people around them. The term psychopathy is often used to emphasize that the source of the disorder is internal, based on psychological, biological, or genetic factors, whereas sociopathy is used to emphasize predominant social factors in the disorder: the social or familial sources of its development and the inability to be social or abide by societal rules (Hare 1999). In this sense sociopathy would be the sociological disease par excellence. It entails an incapacity for companionship ( socius ), yet many accounts of sociopaths describe them as being charming, attractively confident, and outgoing (Hare 1999).

In a modern society characterized by the predominance of secondary rather than primary relationships, the sociopath or psychopath functions, in popular culture at least, as a prime index of contemporary social unease. The sociopath is like the nice neighbour next door who one day “goes off” or is revealed to have had a sinister second life. In many ways the sociopath is a cypher for many of the anxieties we have about the loss of community and living among people we do not know. In this sense, the sociopath is a very modern sort of deviant. Contemporary approaches to psychopathy and sociopathy have focused on biological and genetic causes. This is a tradition that goes back to 19th century positivist approaches to deviance, which attempted to find a biological cause for criminality and other types of deviant behaviour.

The Italian professor of legal psychiatry Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was a key figure in positivist criminology who thought he had isolated specific physiological characteristics of “degeneracy” that could distinguish “born criminals” from normal individuals (Rimke 2011). In a much more sophisticated way, this was also the premise of Dr. James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California. His research involved analyzing brain scans of serial killers. He found that areas of the frontal and temporal lobes associated with empathy, morality, and self-control are “shut off” in serial killers. In turn, this lack of brain activity has been linked with specific genetic markers suggesting that psychopathy or sociopathy was passed down genetically. Fallon’s premise was that psychopathy is genetically determined. An individual’s genes determine whether they are psychopathic or not (Fallon 2013).

However, at the same time that he was conducting research on psychopaths, he was studying the brain scans of Alzheimer’s patients. In the Alzheimer’s study, he discovered a brain scan from a control subject that indicated the symptoms of psychopathy he had seen in the brain scans of serial killers. The scan was taken from a member of his own family. He broke the seal that protected the identity of the subject and discovered it was his own brain scan.

Fallon was a successfully married man, who had raised children and held down a demanding career as a successful scientist and yet the brain scan indicated he was a psychopath. When he researched his own genetic history, he realized that his family tree contained seven alleged murderers including the famous Lizzie Borden, who allegedly killed her father and stepmother in 1892. He began to notice some of his own behaviour patterns as being manipulative, obnoxiously competitive, egocentric, and aggressive, just not in a criminal manner.He decided that he was a “pro-social psychopath”—an individual who lacks true empathy for others but keeps his or her behaviour within acceptable social norms—due to the loving and nurturing family he grew up in. He had to acknowledge that environment, and not just genes, played a significant role in the expression of genetic tendencies (Fallon 2013).

What can we learn from Fallon’s example from a sociological point of view? Firstly, psychopathy and sociopathy are recognized as problematic forms of deviance because of prevalent social anxieties about serial killers as types of criminal who “live next door” or blend in. This is partly because we live in a type of society where we do not know our neighbours well and partly because we are concerned to discover their identifiable traits as these are otherwise concealed. Secondly, Fallon acknowledges that there is no purely biological or genetic explanation for psychopathy and sociopathy.

Many individuals with the biological and genetic markers of psychopathy are not dangers to society—key to pathological expressions of psychopathy are elements of an individual’s social environment and social upbringing (i.e., nurture). Finally, in Fallon’s own account, it is difficult to separate the discovery of the aberrant brain scan and the discovery and acknowledgement of his personal traits of psychopathy. Is it clear which came first? He only recognizes the psychopatholoy in himself after seeing the brain scan. This is the problem of what Ian Hacking (2006) calls the “looping effect” that affects the sociological study of deviance (see discussion below). In summary, what Fallon’s example illustrates is the complexity of the study of social deviance.

7.1. Deviance and Control

What, exactly, is deviance? And what is the relationship between deviance and crime? According to sociologist William Graham Sumner, deviance is a violation of established contextual, cultural, or social norms, whether folkways, mores, or codified law (1906). Folkways are norms based on everyday cultural customs concerning practical matters like how to hold a fork, what type of clothes are appropriate for different situations, or how to greet someone politely. Mores are more serious moral injunctions or taboos that are broadly recognized in a society, like the incest taboo. Codified laws are norms that are specified in explicit codes and enforced by government bodies. A crime is therefore an act of deviance that breaks not only a norm, but a law. Deviance can be as minor as picking one’s nose in public or as major as committing murder.

John Hagen (1994) provides a typology to classify deviant acts in terms of their perceived harmfulness, the degree of consensus concerning the norms violated, and the severity of the response to them. The most serious acts of deviance are consensus crimes about which there is near-unanimous public agreement. Acts like murder and sexual assault are generally regarded as morally intolerable, injurious, and subject to harsh penalties. Conflict crimes are acts like prostitution or smoking marijuana, which may be illegal but about which there is considerable public disagreement concerning their seriousness. Social deviations are acts like abusing serving staff or behaviours arising from mental illness and addiction, which are not illegal in themselves but are widely regarded as serious or harmful. People agree that they call for institutional intervention. Finally there are social diversions like riding skateboards on sidewalks, overly tight leggings, or facial piercings that violate norms in a provocative way but are generally regarded as distasteful but harmless, or for some, cool.

The point is that the question, “What is deviant behaviour?” cannot be answered in a straightforward manner. This follows from two key insights of the sociological approach to deviance (which distinguish it from moral and legalistic approaches). Firstly, deviance is defined by its social context. To understand why some acts are deviant and some are not, it is necessary to understand what the context is, what the existing rules are, and how these rules came to be established. If the rules change, what counts as deviant also changes. As rules and norms vary across cultures and time, it makes sense that notions of deviance also change.

Fifty years ago, public schools in Canada had strict dress codes that, among other stipulations, often banned women from wearing pants to class. Today, it is socially acceptable for women to wear pants, but less so for men to wear skirts. In a time of war, acts usually considered morally reprehensible, such as taking the life of another, may actually be rewarded. Much of the confusion and ambiguity regarding the use of violence in hockey has to do with the different sets of rules that apply inside and outside the arena. Acts that are acceptable and even encouraged on the ice would be punished with jail time if they occurred on the street.

Whether an act is deviant or not depends on society’s definition of that act. Acts are not deviant in themselves. The second sociological insight is that deviance is not an intrinsic (biological or psychological) attribute of individuals, nor of the acts themselves, but a product of social processes . The norms themselves, or the social contexts that determine which acts are deviant or not, are continually defined and redefined through ongoing social processes—political, legal, cultural, etc. One way in which certain activities or people come to be understood and defined as deviant is through the intervention of moral entrepreneurs.

Becker (1963) defined moral entrepreneurs as individuals or groups who, in the service of their own interests, publicize and problematize “wrongdoing” and have the power to create and enforce rules to penalize wrongdoing. Judge Emily Murphy, commonly known today as one of the “Famous Five” feminist suffragists who fought to have women legally recognized as “persons” (and thereby qualified to hold a position in the Canadian Senate), was a moral entrepreneur instrumental in changing Canada’s drug laws. In 1922 she wrote The Black Candle , in which she demonized the use of marijuana:

[Marijuana] has the effect of driving the [user] completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug, while under its influence, are immune to pain, and could be severely injured without having any realization of their condition. While in this condition they become raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility…. They are dispossessed of their natural and normal will power, and their mentality is that of idiots. If this drug is indulged in to any great extent, it ends in the untimely death of its addict (Murphy 1922).

One of the tactics used by moral entrepreneurs is to create a moral panic about activities, like marijuana use, that they deem deviant. A moral panic occurs when media-fuelled public fear and overreaction lead authorities to label and repress deviants, which in turn creates a cycle in which more acts of deviance are discovered, more fear is generated, and more suppression enacted. The key insight is that individuals’ deviant status is ascribed to them through social processes. Individuals are not born deviant, but become deviant through their interaction with reference groups, institutions, and authorities.

Through social interaction, individuals are labelled deviant or come to recognize themselves as deviant. For example, in ancient Greece, homosexual relationships between older men and young acolytes were a normal component of the teacher-student relationship. Up until the 19th century, the question of who slept with whom was a matter of indifference to the law or customs, except where it related to family alliances through marriage and the transfer of property through inheritance. However, in the 19th century sexuality became a matter of moral, legal, and psychological concern. The homosexual, or “sexual invert,” was defined by the emerging psychiatric and biological disciplines as a psychological deviant whose instincts were contrary to nature.

Homosexuality was defined as not simply a matter of sexual desire or the act of sex, but as a dangerous quality that defined the entire personality and moral being of an individual (Foucault 1980). From that point until the late 1960s, homosexuality was regarded as a deviant, closeted activity that, if exposed, could result in legal prosecution, moral condemnation, ostracism, violent assault, and loss of career. Since then, the gay rights movement and constitutional protections of civil liberties have reversed many of the attitudes and legal structures that led to the prosecution of gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. The point is that to whatever degree homosexuality has a natural or inborn biological cause, its deviance is the outcome of a social process.

It is not simply a matter of the events that lead authorities to define an activity or category of persons deviant, but of the processes by which individuals come to recognize themselves as deviant. In the process of socialization, there is a “looping effect” (Hacking 2006). Once a category of deviance has been established and applied to a person, that person begins to define himself or herself in terms of this category and behave accordingly. This influence makes it difficult to define criminals as kinds of person in terms of pre-existing, innate predispositions or individual psychopathologies. As we will see later in the chapter, it is a central tenet of symbolic interactionist labelling theory , that individuals become criminalized through contact with the criminal justice system (Becker 1963). When we add to this insight the sociological research into the social characteristics of those who have been arrested or processed by the criminal justice system —variables such as gender, age, race, and class— it is evident that social variables and power structures are key to understanding who chooses a criminal career path.

One of the principle outcomes of these two sociological insights is that a focus on the social construction of different social experiences and problems leads to alternative ways of understanding them and responding to them. In the study of crime and deviance, the sociologist often confronts a legacy of entrenched beliefs concerning either the innate biological disposition or the individual psychopathology of persons considered abnormal: the criminal personality, the sexual or gender “deviant,” the disabled or ill person, the addict, or the mentally unstable individual. However, as Ian Hacking observes, even when these beliefs about kinds of persons are products of objective scientific classification, the institutional context of science and expert knowledge is not independent of societal norms, beliefs, and practices (2006).

The process of classifying kinds of people is a social process that Hacking calls “making up people” and Howard Becker calls “labelling” (1963). Crime and deviance are social constructs that vary according to the definitions of crime, the forms and effectiveness of policing, the social characteristics of criminals, and the relations of power that structure society. Part of the problem of deviance is that the social process of labelling some kinds of persons or activities as abnormal or deviant limits the type of social responses available. The major issue is not that labels are arbitrary or that it is possible not to use labels at all, but that the choice of label has consequences. Who gets labelled by whom and the way social labels are applied have powerful social repercussions.

Making Connections: Careers in Sociology

Why i drive a hearse.

When Neil Young left Canada in 1966 to seek his fortune in California as a musician, he was driving his famous 1953 Pontiac hearse “Mort 2.” He and Bruce Palmer were driving the hearse in Hollywood when they happened to see Stephen Stills and Richie Furray driving the other way, a fortuitous encounter that led to the formation of the band Buffalo Springfield (McDonough 2002). Later Young wrote “Long May You Run” as an elegy to his first hearse “Mort,” which he performed at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Rock musicians are often noted for their eccentricities, but is driving a hearse deviant behaviour? When sociologist Todd Schoepflin ran into his childhood friend Bill who drove a hearse, he wondered what effect driving a hearse had on his friend and what effect it might have on others on the road. Would using such a vehicle for everyday errands be considered deviant by most people? Schoepflin interviewed Bill, curious first to know why he drove such an unconventional car. Bill had simply been on the lookout for a reliable winter car; on a tight budget, he searched used car ads and stumbled on one for the hearse. The car ran well and the price was right, so he bought it. Bill admitted that others’ reactions to the car had been mixed. His parents were appalled and he received odd stares from his coworkers. A mechanic once refused to work on it, stating that it was “a dead person machine.” On the whole, however, Bill received mostly positive reactions. Strangers gave him a thumbs-up on the highway and stopped him in parking lots to chat about his car. His girlfriend loved it, his friends wanted to take it tailgating, and people offered to buy it. Could it be that driving a hearse isn’t really so deviant after all? Schoepflin theorized that, although viewed as outside conventional norms, driving a hearse is such a mild form of deviance that it actually becomes a mark of distinction. Conformists find the choice of vehicle intriguing or appealing, while nonconformists see a fellow oddball to whom they can relate. As one of Bill’s friends remarked, “Every guy wants to own a unique car like this and you can certainly pull it off.” Such anecdotes remind us that although deviance is often viewed as a violation of norms, it’s not always viewed in a negative light (Schoepflin 2011).

Social Control

When a person violates a social norm, what happens? A driver caught speeding can receive a speeding ticket. A student who texts in class gets a warning from a professor. An adult belching loudly is avoided. All societies practise social control , the regulation and enforcement of norms. Social control can be defined broadly as an organized action intended to change people’s behaviour (Innes 2003). The underlying goal of social control is to maintain social order , an arrangement of practices and behaviours on which society’s members base their daily lives. Think of social order as an employee handbook and social control as the incentives and disincentives used to encourage or oblige employees to follow those rules. When a worker violates a workplace guideline, the manager steps in to enforce the rules. One means of enforcing rules are through sanctions . Sanctions can be positive as well as negative. Positive sanctions are rewards given for conforming to norms. A promotion at work is a positive sanction for working hard. Negative sanctions are punishments for violating norms. Being arrested is a punishment for shoplifting. Both types of sanctions play a role in social control.

Sociologists also classify sanctions as formal or informal. Although shoplifting, a form of social deviance, may be illegal, there are no laws dictating the proper way to scratch one’s nose. That doesn’t mean picking your nose in public won’t be punished; instead, you will encounter informal sanctions . Informal sanctions emerge in face-to-face social interactions. For example, wearing flip-flops to an opera or swearing loudly in church may draw disapproving looks or even verbal reprimands, whereas behaviour that is seen as positive—such as helping an old man carry grocery bags across the street—may receive positive informal reactions, such as a smile or pat on the back.

Formal sanctions , on the other hand, are ways to officially recognize and enforce norm violations. If a student plagiarizes the work of others or cheats on an exam, for example, he or she might be expelled. Someone who speaks inappropriately to the boss could be fired. Someone who commits a crime may be arrested or imprisoned. On the positive side, a soldier who saves a life may receive an official commendation, or a CEO might receive a bonus for increasing the profits of his or her corporation. Not all forms of social control are adequately understood through the use of sanctions, however. Black (1976) identifies four key styles of social control, each of which defines deviance and the appropriate response to it in a different manner. Penal social control functions by prohibiting certain social behaviours and responding to violations with punishment. Compensatory social control obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a harm committed. Therapeutic social control involves the use of therapy to return individuals to a normal state. Conciliatory social control aims to reconcile the parties of a dispute and mutually restore harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged. While penal and compensatory social controls emphasize the use of sanctions, therapeutic and conciliatory social controls emphasize processes of restoration and healing.

Social Control as Government and Discipline

Michel Foucault notes that from a period of early modernity onward, European society became increasingly concerned with social control as a practice of government (Foucault 2007). In this sense of the term, government does not simply refer to the activities of the state, but to all the practices by which individuals or organizations seek to govern the behaviour of others or themselves. Government refers to the strategies by which one seeks to direct or guide the conduct of another or others. In the 15th and 16th centuries, numerous treatises were written on how to govern and educate children, how to govern the poor and beggars, how to govern a family or an estate, how to govern an army or a city, how to govern a state and run an economy, and how to govern one’s own conscience and conduct. These treatises described the burgeoning arts of government, which defined the different ways in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed. Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), which offers advice to the prince on how best to conduct his relationship with his subjects, is the most famous of these treatises.

The common theme in the various arts of governing proposed in early modernity was the extension of Christian monastic practices involving the detailed and continuous government and salvation of souls. The principles of monastic government were applied to a variety of non-monastic areas. People needed to be governed in all aspects of their lives. It was not, however, until the 19th century and the invention of modern institutions like the prison, the public school, the modern army, the asylum, the hospital, and the factory, that the means for extending government and social control widely through the population were developed.

Foucault (1979) describes these modern forms of government as disciplinary social control because they each rely on the detailed continuous training, control, and observation of individuals to improve their capabilities: to transform criminals into law abiding citizens, children into educated and productive adults, recruits into disciplined soldiers, patients into healthy people, etc. Foucault argues that the ideal of discipline as a means of social control is to render individuals docile. That does not mean that they become passive or sheep-like, but that disciplinary training simultaneously increases their abilities, skills, and usefulness while making them more compliant and manipulable.

The chief components of disciplinary social control in modern institutions like the prison and the school are surveillance, normalization, and examination (Foucault 1979). Surveillance refers to the various means used to make the lives and activities of individuals visible to authorities. In 1791, Jeremy Bentham published his book on the ideal prison, the panopticon or “seeing machine.” Prisoners’ cells would be arranged in a circle around a central observation tower where they could be both separated from each other and continually exposed to the view of prison guards. In this way, Bentham proposed, social control could become automatic because prisoners would be induced to monitor their own behaviour.

Similarly, in a school classroom, students sit in rows of desks immediately visible to the teacher at the front of the room. In a store, shoppers can be observed through one-way glass or video monitors. Contemporary surveillance expands the capacity for observation using video or electronic forms of surveillance to render the activities of a population visible. London, England, holds the dubious honour of being the most surveilled city in the world. The city’s “ring of steel” is a security cordon in which over half a million surveillance cameras are used to monitor and record traffic moving in and out of the city centre.

The practice of normalization refers to the way in which norms, such as the level of math ability expected from a grade 2 student, are first established and then used to assess, differentiate, and rank individuals according to their abilities (an A student, B student, C student, etc.). Individuals’ progress in developing their abilities, whether in math skills, good prison behaviour, health outcomes, or other areas, is established through constant comparisons with others and with natural and observable norms. Minor sanctions are used to continuously modify behaviour that does not comply with correct conduct: rewards are applied for good behaviour and penalties for bad.

Periodic examinations through the use of tests in schools, medical examinations in hospitals, inspections in prisons, year-end reviews in the workplace, etc. bring together surveillance and normalization in a way that enables each individual and each individual’s abilities to be assessed, documented, and known by authorities. On the basis of examinations, individuals can be subjected to different disciplinary procedures more suited to them. Gifted children might receive an enriched educational program, whereas poorer students might receive remedial lessons.

Foucault describes disciplinary social control as a key mechanism in creating a normalizing society . The establishment of norms and the development of disciplinary procedures to correct deviance from norms become increasingly central to the organization and operation of institutions from the 19th century onward. To the degree that “natural” or sociological norms are used to govern our lives more than laws and legal mechanisms, society can be said to be controlled through normalization and disciplinary procedures. Whereas the use of formal laws, courts , and the police come into play only when laws are broken, disciplinary techniques enable the continuous and ongoing social control of an expanding range of activities in our lives through surveillance, normalization, and examination. While we may never encounter the police for breaking a law, if we work, go to school, or end up in hospital, we are routinely subject to disciplinary control through most of the day.

7.2. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance

Why does deviance occur? How does it affect a society? Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories attempting to explain what deviance and crime mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with how the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Social disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory represent three functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, when black students across the United States participated in “sit-ins” during the civil rights movement, they challenged society’s notions of segregation. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1893). Seeing a student given a detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get a detention.

Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. In a certain way, this is the opposite of Durkheim’s thesis. Rather than deviance being a force that reinforces moral and social solidarity, it is the absence of moral and social solidarity that provides the conditions for social deviance to emerge.

Early Chicago School sociologists used an ecological model to map the zones in Chicago where high levels of social problem were concentrated. During this period, Chicago was experiencing a long period of economic growth, urban expansion, and foreign immigration. They were particularly interested in the zones of transition between established working class neighbourhoods and the manufacturing district. The city’s poorest residents tended to live in these transitional zones, where there was a mixture of races, immigrant ethnic groups, and non-English languages, and a high rate of influx as people moved in and out. They proposed that these zones were particularly prone to social disorder because the residents had not yet assimilated to the American way of life. When they did assimilate they moved out, making it difficult for a stable social ecology to become established there.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance. A person is not born a criminal, but becomes one over time, often based on factors in his or her social environment. This theme was taken up by Travis Hirschi’s control theory (1969). According to Hirschi, social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds. Many people would be willing to break laws or act in deviant ways to reap the rewards of pleasure, excitement, and profit, etc. if they had the opportunity. Those who do have the opportunity are those who are only weakly controlled by social restrictions. Similar to Durkheim’s theory of anomie, deviance is seen to result where feelings of disconnection from society predominate. Individuals who believe they are a part of society are less likely to commit crimes against it. Hirschi (1969) identified four types of social bonds that connect people to society:

Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society’s norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic partners.
Commitment refers to the investments we make in conforming to conventional behaviour. A well-respected local businesswoman who volunteers at her synagogue and is a member of the neighbourhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a woman who does not have a career or ties to the community. There is a cost/benefit calculation in the decision to commit a crime in which the costs of being caught are much higher for some than others.
Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance. Children who are members of Little League baseball teams have fewer family crises.
The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, he or she will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park because a clean environment is a social value to that person.

An individual who grows up in a poor neighbourhood with high rates of drug use, violence, teenage delinquency, and deprived parenting is more likely to become a criminal than an individual from a wealthy neighbourhood with a good school system and families who are involved positively in the community. The mutual dependencies and complex relationships that form the basis of a healthy “ecosystem” or social control do not get established. Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. For instance, studies have found that children from disadvantaged communities who attend preschool programs that teach basic social skills are significantly less likely to engage in criminal activity. In the same way, the Chicago School sociologists focused their efforts on community programs designed to help assimilate new immigrants into North American culture. However, in proposing that social disorganization is essentially a moral problem—that it is shared moral values that hold communities together and prevent crime and social disorder—questions about economic inequality, racism, and power dynamics do not get asked.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is, in a sense, a normal behaviour in a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. From birth, we are encouraged to achieve the goal of financial success. A woman who attends business school, receives her MBA, and goes on to make a million-dollar income as CEO of a company is said to be a success. However, not everyone in our society stands on equal footing. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. According to Merton’s theory, an entrepreneur who can not afford to launch his own company may be tempted to embezzle from his employer for start-up funds. The discrepancy between the reality of structural inequality and the high cultural value of economic success creates a strain that has to be resolved by some means. Merton defined five ways that people adapt to this gap between having a socially accepted goal but no socially accepted way to pursue it.

Conformity : The majority of people in society choose to conform and not to deviate. They pursue their society’s valued goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means.
Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These “social ritualists” focus on conformity to the accepted means of goal attainment while abandoning the distant, unobtainable dream of success.
Retreatism : Others retreat from the role strain and reject both society’s goals and accepted means. Some beggars and street people have withdrawn from society’s goal of financial success. They drop out.
Rebellion : A handful of people rebel, replacing a society’s goals and means with their own. Rebels seek to create a greatly modified social structure in which provision would be made for closer correspondence between merit, effort, and reward.

As many youth from poor backgrounds are exposed to the high value placed on material success in capitalist society but face insurmountable odds to achieving it, turning to illegal means to achieve success is a rational, if deviant, solution.

Critical Sociology

Critical sociology looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike functionalists, conflict theorists don’t see these factors as necessary functions of society, but as evidence of inequality in the system. As a result of inequality, many crimes can be understood as crimes of accommodation , or ways in which individuals cope with conditions of oppression (Quinney 1977). Predatory crimes like break and enters, robbery, and drug dealing are often simply economic survival strategies. Personal crimes like murder, assault, and sexual assault are products of the stresses and strains of living under stressful conditions of scarcity and deprivation. Defensive crimes like economic sabotage, illegal strikes, civil disobedience, and eco-terrorism are direct challenges to social injustice. The analysis of critical sociologists is not meant to excuse or rationalize crime, but to locate its underlying sources at the appropriate level so that they can be addressed effectively.

Critical sociologists do not see the normative order and the criminal justice system as simply neutral or “functional” with regard to the collective interests of society. Institutions of normalization and the criminal justice system have to be seen in context as mechanisms that actively maintain the power structure of the political-economic order. The rich, the powerful, and the privileged have unequal influence on who and what gets labelled deviant or criminal, particularly in instances when their privilege is being challenged. As capitalist society is based on the institution of private property, for example, it is not surprising that theft is a major category of crime. By the same token, when street people, addicts, or hippies drop out of society, they are labelled deviant and are subject to police harassment because they have refused to participate in productive labour.

On the other hand, the ruthless and sometimes sociopathic behaviour of many business people and politicians, otherwise regarded as deviant according to the normative codes of society, is often rewarded or regarded with respect. In his book The Power Elite (1956), sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of what he dubbed the power elite , a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources. Wealthy executives, politicians, celebrities, and military leaders often have access to national and international power, and in some cases, their decisions affect everyone in society. Because of this, the rules of society are stacked in favour of a privileged few who manipulate them to stay on top. It is these people who decide what is criminal and what is not, and the effects are often felt most by those who have little power. Mills’s theories explain why celebrities such as Chris Brown and Paris Hilton, or once-powerful politicians such as Eliot Spitzer and Tom DeLay, can commit crimes with little or no legal retribution.

Crime and Social Class

While functionalist theories often emphasize crime and deviance associated with the underprivileged, there is in fact no clear evidence that crimes are committed disproportionately by the poor or lower classes. There is an established association between the underprivileged and serious street crimes like armed robbery and assault, but these do not constitute the majority of crimes in society, nor the most serious crimes in terms of their overall social, personal, and environmental effects. On the other hand, crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful remain an underpunished and costly problem within society. White-collar or corporate crime refers to crimes committed by corporate employees or owners in the pursuit of profit or other organization goals. They are more difficult to detect because the transactions take place in private and are more difficult to prosecute because the criminals can secure expert legal advice on how to bend the rules.

In the United States it has been estimated that the yearly value of all street crime is roughly 5 percent of the value of corporate crime or “suite crime” (Snider 1994). Comparable data is not compiled in Canada; however, the Canadian Department of Justice reported that the total value of property stolen or damaged due to property crime in 2008 was an estimated $5.8 billion (Zhang 2008), which would put the cost of corporate crime at $116 billion (if the ratio holds in Canada). For example, Canadians for Tax Fairness estimates that wealthy Canadians have a combined total of $170 billion concealed in untaxed offshore tax havens (Tencer 2013). “Tax haven use has robbed at least $7.8 billion in tax revenues from Canada” (Howlett 2013).

PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 36 percent of Canadian companies were subject to white-collar crime in 2013 (theft, fraud, embezzlement, cybercrime). One in ten lost $5 million or more (McKenna 2014). Recent high-profile Ponzi scheme and investment frauds run into tens of millions of dollars each, destroying investors retirement savings. Vincent Lacroix was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2009 for defrauding investors of $115 million; Earl Jones was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2010 for defrauding investors of $50 million; Weizhen Tang was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2013 for defrauding investors of $52 million. These were highly publicized cases in which jail time was demanded by the public (although as nonviolent offenders the perpetrators are eligible for parole after serving one-sixth of their sentence). However, in 2011–2012 prison sentences were nearly twice as likely for the typically lower-class perpetrators of break and enters (59 percent) as they were for typically middle- and upper-class perpetrators of fraud (35 percent) (Boyce 2013).

This imbalance based on class power can also be put into perspective with respect to homicide rates (Samuelson 2000). In 2005, there were 658 homicides in Canada recorded by police, an average of 1.8 a day. This is an extremely serious crime, which merits the attention given to it by the criminal justice system. However, in 2005 there were also 1,097 workplace deaths that were, in principle, preventable. Canadians work on average 230 days a year, meaning that there were on average five workplace deaths a day for every working day in 2005 (Sharpe and Hardt 2006). Estimates from the United States suggest that only one-third of on-the-job deaths and injuries can be attributed to worker carelessness (Samuelson 2000).

In 2005, 51 percent of the workplace deaths in Canada were due to occupational diseases like cancers from exposure to asbestos (Sharpe and Hardt 2006). The Ocean Ranger oil-rig collapse that killed 84 workers off Newfoundland in 1982 and the Westray mine explosion that killed 26 workers in Nova Scotia in 1992 were due to design flaws and unsafe working conditions that were known to the owners. However, whereas corporations are prosecuted for regulatory violations governing health and safety, it is rare for corporations or corporate officials to be prosecuted for the consequences of those violations. “For example, a company would be fined for not installing safety bolts in a construction crane, but not prosecuted for the death of several workers who were below the crane when it collapsed (as in a recent case in Western Canada)” (Samuelson 2000).

Corporate crime is arguably a more serious type of crime than street crime, and yet white-collar criminals are treated relatively leniently. Fines, when they are imposed, are typically absorbed as a cost of doing business and passed on to consumers, and many crimes, from investment fraud to insider trading and price fixing, are simply not prosecuted. From a critical sociology point of view, this is because white-collar crime is committed by elites who are able to use their power and financial resources to evade punishment. Here are some examples:

In the United States, not a single criminal charge was filed against a corporate executive after the financial mismanagement of the 2008 financial crisis. The American Security and Exchange Commission levied a total of $2.73 billion in fines and out-of-court settlements, but the total cost of the financial crisis was estimated to be between $6 and $14 trillion (Pyke 2013).
In Canada, three Nortel executives were charged by the RCMP’s Integrated Market Enforcement Team (IMET) with fraudulently altering accounting procedures in 2002–2003 to make it appear that Nortel was running a profit (thereby triggering salary bonuses for themselves totalling $12 million), but were acquitted in 2013. The accounting procedures were found to inflate the value of the company, but the intent to defraud could not be proven. The RCMP’s IMET, implemented in 2003 to fight white-collar crime, managed only 11 convictions over the first nine years of its existence (McFarland and Blackwell 2013).
Enbridge’s 20,000 barrel spill of bitumen (tar sands) oil into the Kalamazoo River, Michigan, in 2010 was allowed to continue for 17 hours and involved twice re-pumping bitumen into the pipeline. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report noted that the spill was the result of “pervasive organizational failures,” and documents revealed that the pipeline operators were more concerned about getting home for the weekend than solving the problem (Rusnell 2012). No criminal charges were laid.

Feminist Contributions

Women who are regarded as criminally deviant are often seen as being doubly deviant . They have broken the laws but they have also broken gender norms about appropriate female behaviour, whereas men’s criminal behaviour is seen as consistent with their aggressive, self-assertive character. This double standard also explains the tendency to medicalize women’s deviance, to see it as the product of physiological or psychiatric pathology. For example, in the late 19th century, kleptomania was a diagnosis used in legal defences that linked an extreme desire for department store commodities with various forms of female physiological or psychiatric illness. The fact that “good” middle- and upper-class women, who were at that time coincidentally beginning to experience the benefits of independence from men, would turn to stealing in department stores to obtain the new feminine consumer items on display there, could not be explained without resorting to diagnosing the activity as an illness of the “weaker” sex (Kramar 2011).

Feminist analysis focuses on the way gender inequality influences the opportunities to commit crime and the definition, detection, and prosecution of crime. In part the gender difference revolves around patriarchal attitudes toward women and the disregard for matters considered to be of a private or domestic nature. For example, until 1969, abortion was illegal in Canada, meaning that hundreds of women died or were injured each year when they received illegal abortions (McLaren and McLaren 1997). It was not until the Supreme Court ruling in 1988 that struck down the law that it was acknowledged that women are capable of making their own choice, in consultation with a doctor, about the procedure. Similarly, until the 1970s, two major types of criminal deviance were largely ignored or were difficult to prosecute as crimes: sexual assault and spousal assault.

Through the 1970s, women worked to change the criminal justice system and establish rape crisis centres and battered women’s shelters, bringing attention to domestic violence. In 1983 the Criminal Code was amended to replace the crimes of rape and indecent assault with a three-tier structure of sexual assault (ranging from unwanted sexual touching that violates the integrity of the victim to sexual assault with a weapon or threats or causing bodily harm to aggravated sexual assault that results in wounding, maiming, disfiguring, or endangering the life of the victim) (Kong et al. 2003). Johnson (1996) reported that in the mid-1990s, when violence against women began to be surveyed systematically in Canada, 51 percent of Canadian women had been the subject to at least one sexual or physical assault since the age of 16.

The goal of the amendments was to emphasize that sexual assault is an act of violence, not a sexual act. Previously, rape had been defined as an act that involved penetration and was perpetrated against a woman who was not the wife of the accused. This had excluded spousal sexual assault as a crime and had also exposed women to secondary victimization by the criminal justice system when they tried to bring charges. Secondary victimization occurs when the women’s own sexual history and her willingness to consent are questioned in the process of laying charges and reaching a conviction, which as feminists pointed out, increased victims’ reluctance to lay charges.

In particular feminists challenged the twin myths of rape that were often the subtext of criminal justice proceedings presided over largely by men (Kramar 2011). The first myth is that women are untrustworthy and tend to lie about assault out of malice toward men, as a way of getting back at them for personal grievances. The second myth, is that women will say “no” to sexual relations when they really mean “yes.” Typical of these types of issues was the judge’s comment in a Manitoba Court of Appeal case in which a man plead guilty to sexually assaulting his twelve- or thirteen-year-old babysitter:

The girl, of course, could not consent in the legal sense, but nonetheless was a willing participant. She was apparently more sophisticated than many her age and was performing many household tasks including babysitting the accused’s children. The accused and his wife were somewhat estranged (cited in Kramar 2011).

Because the girl was willing to perform household chores in place of the man’s estranged wife, the judge assumed she was also willing to engage in sexual relations. In order to address these types of issue, feminists successfully pressed the Supreme Court to deliver rulings that restricted a defence attorney’s access to a victim’s medical and counselling records and rules of evidence were changed to prevent a woman’s past sexual history being used against her. Consent to sexual discourse was redefined as what a woman actually says or does, not what the man believes to be consent. Feminists also argued that spousal assault was a key component of patriarchal power. Typically it was hidden in the household and largely regarded as a private, domestic matter in which police were reluctant to get involved.

Interestingly women and men report similar rates of spousal violence—in 2009, 6 percent had experienced spousal violence in the previous five years—but women are more likely to experience more severe forms of violence including multiple victimizations and violence leading to physical injury (Sinha 2013). In order to empower women, feminists pressed lawmakers to develop zero-tolerance policies that would support aggressive policing and prosecution of offenders. These policies oblige police to lay charges in cases of domestic violence when a complaint is made, whether or not the victim wished to proceed with charges (Kramar 2011).

In 2009, 84 percent of violent spousal incidents reported by women to police resulted in charges being laid. However, according to victimization surveys only 30 percent of actual incidents were reported to police. The majority of women who did not report incidents to the police stated that they dealt with them in another way, felt they were a private matter, or did not think the incidents were important enough to report. A significant proportion, however, did not want anyone to find out (44 percent), did not want their spouse to be arrested (40 percent), or were too afraid of their spouse (19 percent) (Sinha 2013).

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviours as deviant or conventional. The key component of this approach is to emphasize the social processes through which deviant activities and identities are socially defined and then “lived” as deviant. Social groups and authorities create deviance by first making the rules and then applying them to people who are thereby labelled as outsiders (Becker 1963). Deviance is not an intrinsic quality of individuals but is created through the social interactions of individuals and various authorities. Deviance is something that, in essence, is learned.

Deviance as Learned Behaviour

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behaviour developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub 2006). His conclusions established differential association theory , stating that individuals learn deviant behaviour from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. A tween whose friends are sexually active is more likely to view sexual activity as acceptable.

A classic study of differential association is Howard Becker’s study of marijuana users in the jazz club scene of Chicago in the 1950s (Becker 1953). Becker paid his way through graduate studies by performing as a jazz pianist and took the opportunity to study his fellow musicians. He conducted 50 interviews and noted that becoming a marijuana user involved a social process of initiation into a deviant role that could not be accounted for by either the physiological properties of marijuana or the psychological needs (for escape, fantasy, etc.) of the individual. Rather the “career” of the marijuana user involved a sequence of changes in attitude and experience learned through social interactions with experienced users before marijuana could be regularly smoked for pleasure.

Regular marijuana use was a social achievement that required the individual to pass through three distinct stages. Failure to do so meant that the individual would not assume the deviant role as a regular user of marijuana. Firstly, individuals had to learn to smoke marijuana in a way that would produce real effects. Many first-time users do not feel the effects. If they are not shown how to inhale the smoke or how much to smoke, they might not feel the drug had any effect on them. Their “career” might end there if they are not encouraged by others to persist. Secondly, they had to learn to recognize the effects of “being high” and connect them with drug use.

Although people might display different symptoms of intoxication—feeling hungry, elated, rubbery, etc.—they might not recognize them as qualities associated with the marijuana or even recognize them as different at all. Through listening to experienced users talk about their experiences, novices are able to locate the same type of sensations in their own experience and notice something qualitatively different going on. Thirdly, they had to learn how to enjoy the sensations: they had to learn how to define the situation of getting high as pleasurable. Smoking marijuana is not necessarily pleasurable and often involves uncomfortable experiences like loss of control, impaired judgment, distorted perception, and paranoia. Unless the experiences can be redefined as pleasurable the individual will not become a regular user. Often experienced users are able to coach novices through difficulties and encourage them by telling them they will learn to like it. It is through differential association with a specific set of individuals that a person learns and assumes a deviant role. The role needs to be learned and its value recognized before it can become routine or normal for the individual.

Labelling Theory

Although all of us violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Often, those who do, however, have gradually come to believe they are deviant because they been labelled “deviant” by society. Labelling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behaviour to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviours themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviours. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures. As Becker put it, “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to the offender. The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour people so label” (1963).

It is important to note that labelling theory does not address the initial motives or reasons for the rule-breaking behaviour, which might be unknowable, but the importance of its social consequences. It does not attempt to answer the question why people break the rules or why they are deviant so much as why particular acts or particular individuals are labelled deviant while others are not. How do certain acts get labelled deviant and what are the consequences?

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labelling theory, identifying two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person’s self-concept and behaviour begin to change after his or her actions are labelled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labelled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, develops a reputation as a “troublemaker.” As a result, the student starts acting out even more and breaking more rules, adopting the “troublemaker” label and embracing this deviant identity.

Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts. The criminal justice system is ironically one of the primary agencies of socialization into the criminal “career path.” The labels “juvenile delinquent” or “criminal” are not automatically applied to individuals who break the law. A teenager who is picked up by the police for a minor misdemeanour might be labelled as a “good kid” who made a mistake and then released after a stern talking to, or he or she might be labelled a juvenile delinquent and processed as a young offender. In the first case, the incident may not make any impression on the teenager’s personality or on the way others react to him or her. In the second case, being labelled a juvenile delinquent sets up a set of responses to the teenager by police and authorities that lead to criminal charges, more severe penalties, and a process of socialization into the criminal identity.

In detention in particular, individuals learn how to assume the identity of serious offenders as they interact with hardened, long-term inmates within the prison culture (Wheeler 1961). The act of imprisonment itself modifies behaviour, to make individuals more criminal. Aaron Cicourel’s research in the 1960s showed how police used their discretionary powers to label rule-breaking teenagers who came from homes where the parents were divorced as juvenile delinquents and to arrest them more frequently than teenagers from intact homes (Cicourel 1968). Judges were also found to be more likely to impose harsher penalties on teenagers from divorced families.

Unsurprisingly, Cicourel noted that subsequent research conducted on the social characteristics of teenagers who were charged and processed as juvenile delinquents found that children from divorced families were more likely to be charged and processed. Divorced families were seen as a cause of youth crime. This set up a vicious circle in which the research confirmed the prejudices of police and judges who continued to label, arrest, and convict the children of divorced families disproportionately. The labelling process acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy in which police found what they expected to see.

7.3. Crime and the Law

The sociological study of crime, deviance, and social control is especially important with respect to public policy debates. In 2012 the Conservative government passed the Safe Streets and Communities Act, a controversial piece of legislation because it introduced mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug and sex-related offences, restricted the use of conditional sentencing (i.e., non-prison punishments), imposed harsher sentences on certain categories of young offender, reduced the ability for Canadians with a criminal record to receive a pardon, and made it more difficult for Canadians imprisoned abroad to transfer back to a Canadian prison to be near family and support networks. The legislation imposes a mandatory six-month sentence for cultivating six marijuana plants, for example. This followed the Tackling Violent Crime Act passed in 2008, which among other provisions, imposed a mandatory three-year sentence for first-time gun-related offences.

This government policy represents a shift toward a punitive approach to crime control and away from preventive strategies such as drug rehabilitation, prison diversion, and social reintegration programs. Despite the evidence that rates of serious and violent crime have been falling in Canada, and while even some of the most conservative politicians in the United States have begun to reject the punitive approach as an expensive failure, the government pushed the legislation through Parliament. In response to evidence that puts into question the need for more punitive measures of crime control, the Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said, “Unlike the Opposition, we do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals. As far as our Government is concerned, one victim of crime is still one too many” (Galloway 2011). What accounts for the appeal of “get tough on criminals” policies at a time when rates of crime, and violent crime in particular, are falling and are currently at their lowest level since 1972 (Perreault 2013)? One reason is that violent crime is a form of deviance that lends itself to spectacular media coverage that distorts its actual threat to the public.

Television news broadcasts frequently begin with “chaos news”—crime, accidents, natural disasters—that present an image of society as a dangerous and unpredictable place. However, the image of crime presented in the headlines does not accurately represent the types of crime that actually occur. Whereas the news typically reports on the worst sorts of violent crime, violent crime made up only 21 percent of all police-reported crime in 2012 (down 17 percent from 2002), and homicides made up only one-tenth of 1 percent of all violent crimes in 2012 (down 16 percent from 2002). In 2012, the homicide rate fell to its lowest level since 1966 (Perreault 2013). Moreover, an analysis of television news reporting on murders in 2000 showed that while 44 percent of CBC news coverage and 48 percent of CTV news coverage focused on murders committed by strangers, only 12 percent of murders in Canada are committed by strangers. Similarly, while 24 percent of the CBC reports and 22 percent of the CTV reports referred to murders in which a gun had been used, only 3.3 percent of all violent crime involved the use of a gun in 1999.In 1999, 71 percent of violent crimes in Canada did not involve any weapon (Miljan 2001).

This distortion creates the conditions for moral panics around crime. As we noted earlier, a moral panic occurs when a relatively minor or atypical situation of deviance arises that is amplified and distorted by the media, police, or members of the public. It thereby comes to be defined as a general threat to the civility or moral fibre of society (Cohen 1972). As public attention is brought to the situation, more instances are discovered, the deviants are rebranded as “folk devils,” and authorities react by taking social control measures disproportionate to the original acts of deviance that began the cycle. For example, the implementation of mandatory minimum sentences for the cultivation of marijuana is framed in the Safe Streets and Communities legislation as a response to the infiltration of organized crime into Canada. For years newspapers have uncritically published police messaging on grow-ops and the marijuana trade that characterizes the activities as widespread, gang-related, and linked to the cross-border trade in guns and more serious drugs like heroin and cocaine.

Television news coverage often shows police in white, disposable hazardous-waste outfits removing marijuana plants from suburban houses, and presenting exaggerated estimates of the street value of the drugs. However a Justice Department study in 2011 revealed that out of a random sample of 500 grow-ops, only 5 percent had connections to organized crime. Moreover, an RCMP-funded study from 2005 noted that “firearms or other hazards” were found in only 6 percent of grow-op cases examined (Boyd and Carter 2014). While 76 percent of Canadians believe that marijuana should be legally available (Stockwell et al. 2006), and several jurisdictions (Washington State, Colorado, and Uruguay) have legalized marijuana, the Safe Streets and Communities Act appears to be an attempt to reinvigorate the punitive messaging of the “war on drugs” based on disinformation and moral panic around marijuana use and cultivation.

The political controversies that surround the question of how best to respond to crime are difficult to resolve at the level of political rhetoric. Often, in the news and public discourse, the issue is framed in moral terms and therefore, for example, the policy alternatives get narrowed to the option of either being “tough” on crime or “soft” on crime. “Tough” and “soft” are moral categories that reflect a moral characterization of the issue. A question framed by these types of moral categories cannot be resolved by using evidence-based procedures. Posing the debate in these moral terms narrows the range of options available and undermines the ability to raise questions about what responses to crime actually work.

What Is Crime?

Although deviance is a violation of social norms, it is not always punishable, and it is not necessarily bad. Crime , on the other hand, is a behaviour that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanctions. Walking to class backwards is a deviant behaviour. Driving with a blood alcohol percentage over the province’s limit is a crime. Like other forms of deviance, however, ambiguity exists concerning what constitutes a crime and whether all crimes are, in fact, “bad” and deserve punishment. For example, in 1946 Viola Desmond refused to sit in the balcony designated for blacks at a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where she was unable to see the screen. She was dragged from the cinema by two men who injured her knee, and she was then arrested, obliged to stay overnight in the male cell block, tried without counsel, and fined.

The courts ignored the issue of racial segregation in Canada. Instead her crime was determined to be tax evasion because she had not paid the 1 cent difference in tax between a balcony ticket and a main floor ticket. She took her case to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia where she lost. In hindsight, and long after her death, she was posthumously pardoned, because the application of the law was clearly in violation of norms of social equality. As you learned previously, all societies have informal and formal ways of maintaining social control. Within these systems of norms, societies have legal codes that maintain formal social control through laws, which are rules adopted and enforced by a political authority. Those who violate these rules incur negative formal sanctions. Normally, punishments are relative to the degree of the crime and the importance to society of the value underlying the law. As we will see, however, there are other factors that influence criminal sentencing.

Types of Crimes

Not all crimes are given equal weight. Society generally socializes its members to view certain crimes as more severe than others. For example, most people would consider murdering someone to be far worse than stealing a wallet and would expect a murderer to be punished more severely than a thief. In modern North American society, crimes are classified as one of two types based on their severity. Violent crimes (also known as “crimes against a person”) are based on the use of force or the threat of force. Rape, murder, and armed robbery fall under this category. Nonviolent crimes involve the destruction or theft of property, but do not use force or the threat of force. Because of this, they are also sometimes called “property crimes.” Larceny, car theft, and vandalism are all types of nonviolent crimes. If you use a crowbar to break into a car, you are committing a nonviolent crime; if you mug someone with the crowbar, you are committing a violent crime.

As we noted earlier in the section on critical sociological approaches, when we think of crime, we often picture street crime , or offences committed by ordinary people against other people or organizations, usually in public spaces. An often overlooked category is corporate crime (“suite crime”), or crime committed by white-collar workers in a business environment. Embezzlement, insider trading, and identity theft are all types of corporate crime. Although these types of offences rarely receive the same amount of media coverage as street crimes, they can be far more damaging. 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.

Making Connections: the Big Pictures

Hate crimes.

In the early morning of January 4, 1998, a 65-year-old Sikh caretaker in Surrey, B.C., was beaten to death in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Sikh temple by five white-supremacist skinheads, aged 17 to 25, as he was about to open the temple for early morning worship. 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. In an intercepted telephone call from the investigation leading to the skinheads’ arrest, one was recorded as saying, “Can’t go wrong with a Hindu death cause it always sends a f’n message” ( R. v. Miloszewski 1999). Attacks motivated by hate based on a person’s race, religion, or other characteristics are known as hate crimes . The category of hate crimes grew out of the provisions in the Criminal Code that prohibit hate propaganda (sections 318 and 319) including advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, or the willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group.

In 1996, section 718.2 of the Criminal Code was amended to introduce hate motivation as an aggravating factor in crime that needed to be considered in sentencing (Silver et al. 2004). In 2009 Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey on Victimization reported that 5 percent of the offences experienced by victims of crime in Canada were believed by the victims to be motivated by hate (approximately 399,000 incidents in total) (Perreault and Brennan, 2010). However, police reported hate crimes totalled only 1,473 incidents in 2009. About one-third of the General Social Survey respondents said they reported the hate-motivated incidents to the police. In 2011 police-reported hate crimes had dropped to 1,322 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 2013).

Crime Statistics

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. Since 1962, Statistics Canada has been collecting and publishing an archive of crime statistics known as the Uniform Crime Reports Survey (UCR). These annual publications contain data from all the police agencies in Canada. Although the UCR contains comprehensive data on police reports, it fails to take into account the fact that many crimes go unreported due to the victims’ unwillingness to report them, largely based on fear, shame, or distrust of the police. 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. To address some of these problems, in 1985, Statistics Canada began to publish a separate report known as the General Social Survey on Victimization (GSS). 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 2014, for example, survey data were gathered from 79,770 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.

The GSS reports a higher rate of crime than the UCR. In the 2009 GSS on Victimization , only 31 percent of criminal incidents experienced by respondents were reported to police (Perreault and Brennan 2010). Though the GSS is a critical source of statistical information, disadvantages exist. “Non-response,” or a victim’s failure to participate in the survey or a particular question, is among them. 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. Some victims’ recollection of the crimes can be inaccurate or simply forgotten over time. 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 1960, but following an all-time high in the 1980s and 1990s, rates of violent and nonviolent crimes started to decline. In 2012 they reached their lowest level since 1972 (Perreault 2013).

In 2012, approximately 2 million crimes occurred in Canada. Of those, 415,000 were classified as violent crimes, the majority being assault and robbery. The rate of violent crime reached its lowest level since 1987, led by decreases in sexual assault, common assault, and robbery. The homicide rate fell to its lowest level since 1966. An estimated 1.58 million nonviolent crimes also took place, the most common being theft under $5,000 and mischief. 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 2012), even though the statistics show a steady decline since 1991. 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 24. This age cohort has declined in size since 1991. Secondly, male unemployment is highly correlated with the crime rate. Following the recession of 1990–1991, better economic conditions improved male unemployment. Thirdly, police methods have arguably improved since 1991, 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.

Corrections

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 2011, approximately 38,000 adults were in prison in Canada, while another 125,000 were under community supervision or probation (Dauvergne 2012). By way of contrast, seven million Americans were behind bars in 2010 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2011). Canada’s rate of adult incarceration in 2011 was 140 per 100,000 population. In the United States in 2008, the incarceration rate was approximately 1,000 per 100,000 population. More than 1 in 100 U.S. adults were in jail or prison, the highest benchmark in U.S. history. While Americans account for 5 percent of the global population, they have 25 percent of the world’s inmates, the largest number of prisoners in the world (Liptak 2008). While Canada’s rate of incarceration is far lower than that of the United States, there are nevertheless some disturbing features of the Canadian corrections system.

As we noted in Chapter 1, from 2010 to 2011, 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 2013, they made up 23.2 percent of the federal penitentiary population. Aboriginal women made up 33.6 percent of incarcerated women in Canada. This problem of overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the corrections system continues to grow appreciably despite a Supreme Court ruling in 1999 that the social history of aboriginal offenders should be considered in sentencing. Prison is supposed to be used only as a last resort. Between 2003 and 2013, the aboriginal population in prison grew by 44 percent (Correctional Investigator Canada 2013).

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 2.9 percent of the Canadian population, but accounted for 9.5 percent of the total prison population in 2013, up from 6.3 percent in 2003–2004 (Correctional Investigator Canada 2013). A survey revealed that blacks in Toronto are subject to racial profiling by the police, which might partially explain their higher incarceration rate (Wortley 2003). 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. As one survey respondent put it: “If you are Black and drive a nice car, the police think you are a drug dealer or that you stole the car. They always pull you over to check you out” (Wortley 2003).

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. The offender is obliged to make restitution to the victim, thus “restoring” a situation of justice. 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 2013).

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. These might involve specialized counselling or treatment programs, community service under the supervision of elders, or the use of an aboriginal nation’s traditional penalties (Aboriginal Justice Directorate 2005). 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. 2013). 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.

aboriginal sentencing circles the involvement of aboriginal communities in the sentencing of aboriginal offenders

community-based sentencing offenders serve a conditional sentence in the community, usually by performing some sort of community service

compensatory social control a means of social control that obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a harm committed

conciliatory social control a means of social control that reconciles the parties of a dispute and mutually restores harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged

consensus crimes serious acts of deviance about which there is near-unanimous public agreement

conflict crimes acts of deviance that may be illegal but about which there is considerable public disagreement concerning their seriousness

control theory theory that states social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds and that deviance results from a feeling of disconnection from society

corporate crime crime committed by white-collar workers in a business environment

corrections system the system tasked with supervising individuals who have been arrested for, convicted of, or sentenced for criminal offences

court a system that has the authority to make decisions based on law

crime a behaviour that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanctions

crimes of accommodation crimes committed as ways in which individuals cope with conditions of oppression and inequality

criminal justice system an organization that exists to enforce a legal code

critical sociology looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance

cultural deviance theory that suggests conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society causes crime

deviance a violation of contextual, cultural, or social norms

differential association theory theory that states individuals learn deviant behaviour from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance

disciplinary social control detailed continuous training, control, and observation of individuals to improve their capabilities

doubly deviant women (or other categories of individual) who break both laws and gender (or other) norms

examination the use of tests by authorities to assess, document, and know individuals

folkways norms based on everyday cultural customs like etiquette

formal sanctions sanctions that are officially recognized and enforced

government practices by which individuals or organizations seek to govern the behaviour of others or themselves

hate crimes attacks based on a person’s race, religion, or other characteristics

informal sanctions sanctions that occur in face-to-face interactions

labelling theory the ascribing of a deviant behaviour to another person by members of society

law norms that are specified in explicit codes and enforced by government bodies

legal codes codes that maintain formal social control through laws

master status a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual

moral entrepreneur an individual or group who, in the service of its own interests, publicizes and problematizes “wrongdoing” and has the power to create and enforce rules to penalize wrongdoing

moral panic an expanding cycle of deviance, media-generated public fears, and police repression

mores serious moral injunctions or taboos that are broadly recognized in a society

negative sanctions punishments for violating norms

nonviolent crimes crimes that involve the destruction or theft of property, but do not use force or the threat of force

normalization the process by which norms are used to differentiate, rank, and correct individual behaviour

normalizing society a society that uses continual observation, discipline, and correction of its subjects to exercise social control

panopticon Jeremy Bentham’s “seeing machine” that became the model for the ideal prison

penal social control a means of social control that prohibits certain social behaviours and responds to violations with punishment

police a civil force in charge of regulating laws and public order at a federal, state, or community level

positive sanctions rewards given for conforming to norms

power elite a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources

primary deviance a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others

psychopathy a personality disorder characterized by anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions

racial profiling the singling out of a particular racial group for extra policing

recidivism the likelihood for people to be arrested again after an initial arrest

restorative justice conferencing focuses on establishing a direct, face-to-face connection between the offender and the victim

sanctions the means of enforcing rules

secondary deviance a change in a person’s self-concept and behaviour after his or her actions are labelled as deviant by members of society

secondary victimization after an initial victimization, secondary victimization is incurred through criminal justice processes

self-report study collection of data acquired using voluntary response methods, such as questionnaires or telephone interviews

social control the regulation and enforcement of norms

social deviations deviant acts that are not illegal but are widely regarded as harmful

social disorganization theory theory that asserts crime occurs in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control

social diversions acts that violate social norms but are generally regarded as harmless

social order an arrangement of practices and behaviours on which society’s members base their daily lives

sociopathy a personality disorder characterized by anti-social behaviour, diminished empathy, and lack of inhibitions

strain theory theory that addresses the relationship between having socially acceptable goals and having socially acceptable means to reach those goals

street crime crime committed by average people against other people or organizations, usually in public spaces

surveillance various means used to make the lives and activities of individuals visible to authorities

therapeutic social control a means of social control that uses therapy to return individuals to a normal state

traditional aboriginal justice centres on healing and building community rather than retribution

twin myths of rape the notion that women lie about sexual assault out of malice toward men and women will say “no” to sexual relations when they really mean “yes”

victimless crime activities against the law that do not result in injury to any individual other than the person who engages in them

violent crimes (also known as “crimes against a person”) based on the use of force or the threat of force

white-collar crime crimes committed by high status or privileged members of society

Section Summary

7.1. Deviance and Control Deviance is a violation of norms. Whether or not something is deviant depends on contextual definitions, the situation, and people’s response to the behaviour. 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.

7.2. 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. Violating norms can open society’s eyes to injustice in the system. 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.

7.3. 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 1991.

Section Quiz

7.1. Deviance and Control 1. Which of the following best describes how deviance is defined?

Deviance is defined by federal, provincial, and local laws.
Deviance’s definition is determined by one’s religion.
Deviance occurs whenever someone else is harmed by an action.
Deviance is socially defined.

2. In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to sit in the blacks-only section of the cinema in Nova Scotia. This is an example of______________.

A consensus crime
A conflict crime
A social deviation
A social diversion

3. 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. In this situation, the professor used __________ to maintain social control.

Informal positive sanctions
Formal negative sanction
Informal negative sanctions
Formal positive sanctions

4. Societies practise social control to maintain ________.

Formal sanctions
Social order
Cultural deviance
Sanction labelling

5. School discipline obliges students to sit in rows and listen to lessons quietly in order for them to learn. This strategy of education demonstrates_______.

Compensatory social control
Positive sanctions

7.2. 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. The student’s actions are an example of _________.

Primary deviance
Positive deviance
Secondary deviance
Master deviance

7. According to critical sociology, which of the following people is most likely to commit a crime of accommodation?

A student struggling to get better grades
An addict who sees a stack of CDs in an unlocked car
A professor who is tempted to publish someone else’s work as his own
A mechanic who dislikes a customer

8. According to social disorganization theory, where is crime most likely to occur?

A community where neighbours don’t know each other very well
A neighbourhood with mostly elderly citizens
A city with a large minority population
A college campus with students who are very competitive

9. Symbolic interactionists argue that crime is linked primarily to ________.

Master status
Family values

10. According to the concept of the power elite, why would a celebrity such as Charlie Sheen commit a crime?

Because his parents committed similar crimes
Because his fame protects him from retribution
Because his fame disconnects him from society
Because he is challenging socially accepted norms

11. A convicted sexual offender is released on parole and arrested two weeks later for repeated sexual crimes. How would labelling theory explain this?

The offender has been labelled deviant by society and has accepted this master status.
The offender has returned to his old neighbourhood and so re-established his former habits.
The offender has lost the social bonds he made in prison and feels disconnected from society.
The offender is poor and coping with conditions of oppression and inequality.

12. ______ deviance is a violation of norms that ______result in a person being labelled a deviant.

Secondary; does not
Negative; does
Primary; does not
Primary; may or may not

7.3. Crime and the Law 13. Which of the following is an example of corporate crime?

Embezzlement

14. Spousal abuse is an example of a ________.

Street crime
Corporate crime
Violent crime
Nonviolent crime

15. Which of the following situations best describes crime trends in Canada?

Rates of violent and nonviolent crimes are decreasing.
Rates of violent crimes are decreasing, but there are more nonviolent crimes now than ever before.
Crime rates have skyrocketed since the 1970s due to lax court rulings.
Rates of street crime have gone up, but corporate crime has gone down.

16. What is a disadvantage of crime victimization surveys?

They do not include demographic data, such as age or gender.
They may be unable to reach important groups, such as those without phones.
They do not address the relationship between the criminal and the victim.
They only include information collected by police officers.

Short Answer

If given the choice, would you purchase an unusual car such as a hearse for everyday use? How would your friends, family, or significant other react? Since deviance is culturally defined, most of the decisions we make are dependent on the reactions of others. Is there anything the people in your life encourage you to do that you don’t do? Why do you resist their encouragement?
Think of a recent time when you used informal negative sanctions. To what act of deviance were you responding? How did your actions affect the deviant person or persons? How did your reaction help maintain social control?
Pick a famous politician, business leader, or celebrity who has been arrested recently. What crime did he or she allegedly commit? Who was the victim? Explain his or her actions from the point of view of one of the major sociological paradigms. What factors best explain how this person might be punished if convicted of the crime?
If we assume that the power elite’s status is always passed down from generation to generation, how would Edwin Sutherland explain these patterns of power through differential association theory? What crimes do these elite few get away with?
Recall the crime statistics presented in this section. Do they surprise you? Are these statistics represented accurately in the media? Why is the public perception that crime rates are increasing and that punishment should be stricter when actual crime rates have been steadily decreasing?

Further Research

7.1. Deviance and Control Although we rarely think of it in this way, deviance can have a positive effect on society. Check out the Positive Deviance Initiative, a program initiated by Tufts University to promote social movements around the world that strive to improve people’s lives, at http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Positive_Deviance .

7.2. 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? What is the best way to deal with the problems of addiction?

The Four Pillars Drug Strategy: http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/four-pillars-drug-strategy.aspx
Health Officers Council of British Columbia, “A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada:” http://www.cfdp.ca/bchoc.pdf
Drug Prevention Network of Canada: http://dpnoc.ca/
Centre for Addictions Research (CAR BC): http://www.carbc.ca/

7.3. Crime and the Law How is crime data collected in Canada? Read about the victimization survey used by Statistics Canada and take the survey yourself. Visit http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=4504

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Galloway, Gloria. 2011. “Crime falls to 1973 levels as Tories push for sentencing reform” The Globe and Mail , July 21. Retrieved January 7, 2014 from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/crime-falls-to-1973-levels-as-tories-push-for-sentencing-reform/article600886

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Miloszewski, R.V. 1999. BCJ No. 2710. British Columbia Provincial Court. November 16.

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Solutions to Section Quiz

1. D | 2. B | 3. A | 4. B | 5. C | 6. A | 7. B | 8. A | 9. D | 10. B | 11. A | 12. C | 13. A | 14. C | 15. A | 16. B

Image Attributions

Figure 7.1. DEXTER by pimkie ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/pimkie_fotos/3484952865/ ) used under CC BY SA 2.0 license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ )

Figure 7.2. Lizzie Borden ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lizzie_borden.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain )

Figure 7.5. Cover page of 1550 edition of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and La Vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca by RJC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Machiavelli_Principe_Cover_Page.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain )

Figure 7.6. Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo by Friman ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Presidio-modelo2.JPG ) used under CC BY SA 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en )

Figure 7.10. Cover scan of a Famous Crimes by Fox Features Syndicate ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Famous_Crimes_54893.JPG ) is in the public domain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain )

Figure 7.13. Kingston ON – Dominion Penitentiary by R Orville Lyttle ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/26476116@N04/10603802374/in/photolist-ha2g1S-gx1uGg-gx1eXP-gwZJSU-gwZEP3-gx1w6G-gwZj4L-gx16Wh-gx1fb4-gwZo87-gx1M5u-gwZwRE-gx15BV-gx1FDt-gx1DHe-gwZR8Q-gx1rd5-gx1p2v-gx1Bxv-gwZSpt-gwZop9-gx13jN-gwZY6h-gx1gJT-gx18Bd-gx1P5w-gx1EmX-gwZV5C-gx242g-gwZjWY-gx1hot-gx1wBS-gx1z45-gx11kh-gx1gh2-gx1uoF-gwZn8b-gx1Unc-gx1okt-gx1NPG-gwZVrj-gx1Pwo-gx1BEM-gwZUUD-gwZZsA-gx1MBD-gx1i9r-gwZLCY-gwZZhg-gx1K8d-gx1EHt ) used under CC BY SA 2.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ )

Introduction to Sociology - 1st Canadian Edition Copyright © 2014 by William Little and Ron McGivern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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7.2 Explaining Deviance

Learning objective.

State the major arguments and assumptions of the various sociological explanations of deviance.

If we want to reduce violent crime and other serious deviance, we must first understand why it occurs. Many sociological theories of deviance exist, and together they offer a more complete understanding of deviance than any one theory offers by itself. Together they help answer the questions posed earlier: why rates of deviance differ within social categories and across locations, why some behaviors are more likely than others to be considered deviant, and why some kinds of people are more likely than others to be considered deviant and to be punished for deviant behavior. As a whole, sociological explanations highlight the importance of the social environment and of social interaction for deviance and the commision of crime. As such, they have important implications for how to reduce these behaviors. Consistent with this book’s public sociology theme, a discussion of several such crime-reduction strategies concludes this chapter.

We now turn to the major sociological explanations of crime and deviance. A summary of these explanations appears in Table 7.1 “Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime” .

Table 7.1 Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime

Major theory	Related explanation	Summary of explanation
Functionalist	Durkheim’s views	Deviance has several functions: (a) it clarifies norms and increases conformity, (b) it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant, and (c) it can help lead to positive social change.
	Social ecology	Certain social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods contribute to high crime rates. These characteristics include poverty, dilapidation, population density, and population turnover.
	Strain theory	According to Robert Merton, deviance among the poor results from a gap between the cultural emphasis on economic success and the inability to achieve such success through the legitimate means of working. According to Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, differential access to illegitimate means affects the type of deviance in which individuals experiencing strain engage.
	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.
	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.
Conflict		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 and race to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.
Conflict	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.
Symbolic interactionism	Differential association theory	Edwin H. 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.
Symbolic interactionism	Labeling theory	Deviance results from being labeled a deviant; nonlegal factors such as appearance, race, and social class affect how often labeling occurs.

Functionalist Explanations

Several explanations may be grouped under the functionalist perspective in sociology, as they all share this perspective’s central view on the importance of various aspects of society for social stability and other social needs.

Émile Durkheim: The Functions of Deviance

As noted earlier, Émile Durkheim said deviance is normal, but he did not stop there. In a surprising and still controversial twist, he also argued that deviance serves several important functions for society.

First, Durkheim said, deviance clarifies social norms and increases conformity. This happens because the discovery and punishment of deviance reminds people of the norms and reinforces the consequences of violating them. If your class were taking an exam and a student was caught cheating, the rest of the class would be instantly reminded of the rules about cheating and the punishment for it, and as a result they would be less likely to cheat.

A second function of deviance is that it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant. An example comes from the classic story The Ox-Bow Incident (Clark, 1940), in which three innocent men are accused of cattle rustling and are eventually lynched. The mob that does the lynching is very united in its frenzy against the men, and, at least at that moment, the bonds among the individuals in the mob are extremely strong.

A final function of deviance, said Durkheim, is that it can help lead to positive social change. Although some of the greatest figures in history—Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. to name just a few—were considered the worst kind of deviants in their time, we now honor them for their commitment and sacrifice.

Émile Durkheim wrote that deviance can lead to positive social change. Many Southerners had strong negative feelings about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, but history now honors him for his commitment and sacrifice.

U.S. Library of Congress – public domain.

Sociologist Herbert Gans (1996) pointed to an additional function of deviance: deviance creates jobs for the segments of society—police, prison guards, criminology professors, and so forth—whose main focus is to deal with deviants in some manner. If deviance and crime did not exist, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people in the United States would be out of work!

Although deviance can have all of these functions, many forms of it can certainly be quite harmful, as the story of the mugged voter that began this chapter reminds us. Violent crime and property crime in the United States victimize millions of people and households each year, while crime by corporations has effects that are even more harmful, as we discuss later. Drug use, prostitution, and other “victimless” crimes may involve willing participants, but these participants often cause themselves and others much harm. Although deviance according to Durkheim is inevitable and normal and serves important functions, that certainly does not mean the United States and other nations should be happy to have high rates of serious deviance. The sociological theories we discuss point to certain aspects of the social environment, broadly defined, that contribute to deviance and crime and that should be the focus of efforts to reduce these behaviors.

Social Ecology: Neighborhood and Community Characteristics

An important sociological approach, begun in the late 1800s and early 1900s by sociologists at the University of Chicago, stresses that certain social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods raise the odds that people growing up and living in these neighborhoods will commit deviance and crime. This line of thought is now called the social ecology approach (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008). Many criminogenic (crime-causing) neighborhood characteristics have been identified, including high rates of poverty, population density, dilapidated housing, residential mobility, and single-parent households. All of these problems are thought to contribute to social disorganization , or weakened social bonds and social institutions, that make it difficult to socialize children properly and to monitor suspicious behavior (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008; Sampson, 2006).

Sociology Making a Difference

Improving Neighborhood Conditions Helps Reduce Crime Rates

One of the sociological theories of crime discussed in the text is the social ecology approach. To review, this approach attributes high rates of deviance and crime to the neighborhood’s social and physical characteristics, including poverty, high population density, dilapidated housing, and high population turnover. These problems create social disorganization that weakens the neighborhood’s social institutions and impairs effective child socialization.

Much empirical evidence supports social ecology’s view about negative neighborhood conditions and crime rates and suggests that efforts to improve these conditions will lower crime rates. Some of the most persuasive evidence comes from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (directed by sociologist Robert J. Sampson), in which more than 6,000 children, ranging in age from birth to 18, and their parents and other caretakers were studied over a 7-year period. The social and physical characteristics of the dozens of neighborhoods in which the subjects lived were measured to permit assessment of these characteristics’ effects on the probability of delinquency. A number of studies using data from this project confirm the general assumptions of the social ecology approach. In particular, delinquency is higher in neighborhoods with lower levels of “collective efficacy,” that is, in neighborhoods with lower levels of community supervision of adolescent behavior.

The many studies from the Chicago project and data in several other cities show that neighborhood conditions greatly affect the extent of delinquency in urban neighborhoods. This body of research in turn suggests that strategies and programs that improve the social and physical conditions of urban neighborhoods may well help decrease the high rates of crime and delinquency that are so often found there. (Bellair & McNulty, 2009; Sampson, 2006)

Strain Theory

Failure to achieve the American dream lies at the heart of Robert Merton’s (1938) famous strain theory (also called anomie theory). Recall from Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” that Durkheim attributed high rates of suicide to anomie, or normlessness, that occurs in times when social norms are unclear or weak. Adapting this concept, Merton wanted to explain why poor people have higher deviance rates than the nonpoor. He reasoned that the United States values economic success above all else and also has norms that specify the approved means, working, for achieving economic success. Because the poor often cannot achieve the American dream of success through the conventional means of working, they experience a gap between the goal of economic success and the means of working. This gap, which Merton likened to Durkheim’s anomie because of the resulting lack of clarity over norms, leads to strain or frustration. To reduce their frustration, some poor people resort to several adaptations, including deviance, depending on whether they accept or reject the goal of economic success and the means of working. Table 7.2 “Merton’s Anomie Theory” presents the logical adaptations of the poor to the strain they experience. Let’s review these briefly.

Table 7.2 Merton’s Anomie Theory

Adaptation	Goal of economic success	Means of working
I. Conformity	+	+
II. Innovation	+	−
III. Ritualism	−	+
IV. Retreatism	−	−
V. Rebellion	±	±
+ means accept, − means reject, ± means reject and work for a new society

Despite their strain, most poor people continue to accept the goal of economic success and continue to believe they should work to make money. In other words, they continue to be good, law-abiding citizens. They conform to society’s norms and values, and, not surprisingly, Merton calls their adaptation conformity .

Faced with strain, some poor people continue to value economic success but come up with new means of achieving it. They rob people or banks, commit fraud, or use other illegal means of acquiring money or property. Merton calls this adaptation innovation .

Other poor people continue to work at a job without much hope of greatly improving their lot in life. They go to work day after day as a habit. Merton calls this third adaptation ritualism . This adaptation does not involve deviant behavior but is a logical response to the strain poor people experience.

One of Robert Merton’s adaptations in his strain theory is retreatism, in which poor people abandon society’s goal of economic success and reject its means of employment to reach this goal. Many of today’s homeless people might be considered retreatists under Merton’s typology.

Franco Folini – Homeless woman with dogs – CC BY-SA 2.0.

In Merton’s fourth adaptation, retreatism , some poor people withdraw from society by becoming hobos or vagrants or by becoming addicted to alcohol, heroin, or other drugs. Their response to the strain they feel is to reject both the goal of economic success and the means of working.

Merton’s fifth and final adaptation is rebellion . Here poor people not only reject the goal of success and the means of working but work actively to bring about a new society with a new value system. These people are the radicals and revolutionaries of their time. Because Merton developed his strain theory in the aftermath of the Great Depression, in which the labor and socialist movements had been quite active, it is not surprising that he thought of rebellion as a logical adaptation of the poor to their lack of economic success.

Although Merton’s theory has been popular over the years, it has some limitations. Perhaps most important, 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. It also does not explain why some poor people choose one adaptation over another.

Merton’s strain theory stimulated other explanations of deviance that built on his concept of strain. Differential opportunity theory , developed by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), tried to explain why the poor choose one or the other of Merton’s adaptations. Whereas Merton stressed that the poor have differential access to legitimate means (working), Cloward and Ohlin stressed that they have differential access to illegitimate means . For example, some live in neighborhoods 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.

In a more recent formulation, two sociologists, Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (2007), expanded Merton’s view by arguing that in the United States crime arises from several of our most important values, including an overemphasis on economic success, individualism, and competition. These values produce crime by making many Americans, rich or poor, feel they never have enough money and by prompting them to help themselves even at other people’s expense. Crime in the United States, then, arises ironically from the country’s most basic values.

In yet another extension of Merton’s theory, Robert Agnew (2007) reasoned that adolescents experience various kinds of strain in addition to the economic type addressed by Merton. A romantic relationship may end, a family member may die, or students may be taunted or bullied at school. Repeated strain-inducing incidents such as these produce anger, frustration, and other negative emotions, and these emotions in turn prompt delinquency and drug use.

Deviant Subcultures

Some sociologists stress that poverty and other community conditions give rise to certain subcultures through which adolescents acquire values that promote deviant behavior. One of the first to make this point was Albert K. Cohen (1955), whose status frustration theory says that lower-class boys do poorly in school because schools emphasize middle-class values. School failure reduces their status and self-esteem, which the 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. Cohen had nothing to say about girls, as he assumed they cared little about how well they did in school, placing more importance on marriage and family instead, and hence would remain nondelinquent even if they did not do well. Scholars later criticized his disregard for girls and assumptions about them.

Another sociologist, Walter Miller (1958), said poor boys become delinquent because they live amid a lower-class subculture that includes several focal concerns , or values, that help lead to delinquency. These focal concerns include 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. Critics said Miller exaggerated the differences between the value systems in poor inner-city neighborhoods and wealthier, middle-class communities (Akers & Sellers, 2008).

A very popular subcultural explanation is the so-called subculture of violence thesis, first advanced by Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti (1967). In some inner-city areas, they said, a subculture of violence promotes a violent response to insults and other problems, which people in middle-class areas would probably ignore. The subculture of violence, they continued, arises partly 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 (Cao, Adams, & Jensen, 1997). On the other hand, recent ethnographic (qualitative) research suggests that large segments of the urban poor do adopt a “code” of toughness and violence to promote respect (Anderson, 1999). As this conflicting evidence illustrates, the subculture of violence view remains controversial and merits further scrutiny.

Social Control Theory

Travis Hirschi (1969) argued that human nature is basically selfish and thus wondered why people do not commit deviance. His answer, which is now called social control theory (also known as social bonding theory ), was that their bonds to conventional social institutions such as the family and the school keep them from violating social norms. Hirschi’s basic perspective reflects Durkheim’s view that strong social norms reduce deviance such as suicide.

Hirschi outlined four types of bonds to conventional social institutions: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

Attachment refers to how much we feel loyal to these institutions and care about the opinions 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.
Commitment refers to 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.
Involvement refers to the amount of time we spend in conventional activities. The more time we spend, the less opportunity we have to be deviant.
Belief refers to our acceptance of society’s norms. The more we believe in these norms, the less we deviate.

A gamily sharing some watermelon outside

Travis Hirschi’s social control theory stresses the importance of bonds to social institutions for preventing deviance. His theory emphasized the importance of attachment to one’s family in this regard.

More Good Foundation – Mormon Family Dinner – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Hirschi’s theory has been very popular. Many studies find that youths with weaker bonds to their parents and schools are more likely to be deviant. But the theory has its critics (Akers & Sellers, 2008). One problem centers on the chicken-and-egg question of causal order. For example, many studies support social control theory by finding that delinquent youths often have worse relationships with their parents than do nondelinquent youths. Is that because the bad relationships prompt the youths to be delinquent, as Hirschi thought? Or is it because the youths’ delinquency worsens their relationship with their parents? Despite these questions, Hirschi’s social control theory continues to influence our understanding of deviance. To the extent it is correct, it suggests several strategies for preventing crime, including programs designed to improve parenting and relations between parents and children (Welsh & Farrington, 2007).

Conflict and Feminist Explanations

Explanations of crime rooted in the conflict perspective reflect its general view that society is a struggle between the “haves” at the top of society with social, economic, and political power and the “have-nots” at the bottom. Accordingly, they assume that those 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 (Bohm & Vogel, 2011). The poor and minorities are more likely because of their poverty and race to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. These explanations also blame street crime by the poor on the economic deprivation and inequality in which they live rather than on any moral failings of the poor.

Some conflict explanations also say that capitalism helps create street crime by the poor. An early proponent of this view was Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger (1916), who said that capitalism as an economic system involves competition for profit. This competition leads to an emphasis in a capitalist society’s culture on egoism , or self-seeking behavior, and greed . Because profit becomes so important, 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.

Not surprisingly, conflict explanations have sparked much controversy (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Many scholars dismiss them for painting an overly critical picture of the United States and ignoring the excesses of noncapitalistic nations, while others say the theories overstate the degree of inequality in the legal system. In assessing the debate over conflict explanations, a fair conclusion is that their view on discrimination by the legal system applies more to victimless crime (discussed in a later section) than to conventional crime, where it is difficult to argue that laws against such things as murder and robbery reflect the needs of the powerful. However, much evidence supports the conflict assertion that the poor and minorities face disadvantages in the legal system (Reiman & Leighton, 2010). Simply put, the poor cannot afford good attorneys, private investigators, and the other advantages that money brings in court. As just one example, if someone much poorer than O. J. Simpson, the former football player and media celebrity, had been arrested, as he was in 1994, for viciously murdering two people, the defendant would almost certainly have been found guilty. Simpson was able to afford a defense costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and won a jury acquittal in his criminal trial (Barkan, 1996). Also in accordance with conflict theory’s views, corporate executives, among the most powerful members of society, often break the law without fear of imprisonment, as we shall see in our discussion of white-collar crime later in this chapter. Finally, many studies support conflict theory’s view that the roots of crimes by poor people lie in social inequality and economic deprivation (Barkan, 2009).

Feminist Perspectives

Feminist perspectives on crime and criminal justice also fall into the broad rubric of conflict explanations and have burgeoned in the last two decades. Much of this work concerns rape and sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and other crimes against women that were largely neglected until feminists began writing about them in the 1970s (Griffin, 1971). Their views have since influenced public and official attitudes about rape and domestic violence, which used to be thought as something that girls and women brought on themselves. The feminist approach instead places the blame for these crimes squarely on society’s inequality against women and antiquated views about relations between the sexes (Renzetti, 2011).

Another focus of feminist work is gender and legal processing. Are women better or worse off than men when it comes to the chances of being arrested and punished? After many studies in the last two decades, the best answer is that we are not sure (Belknap, 2007). Women are treated a little more harshly than men for minor crimes and a little less harshly for serious crimes, but the gender effect in general is weak.

A third focus concerns the gender difference in serious crime, as women and girls are much less likely than men and boys to engage in violence and to commit serious property crimes such as burglary and motor vehicle theft. Most sociologists attribute this difference to gender socialization. Simply put, socialization into the male gender role, or masculinity, leads to values such as competitiveness and behavioral patterns such as spending more time away from home that all promote deviance. Conversely, despite whatever disadvantages it may have, socialization into the female gender role, or femininity, promotes values such as gentleness and behavior patterns such as spending more time at home that help limit deviance (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004). Noting that males commit so much crime, Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind (1988, p. 527) wrote,

A large price is paid for structures of male domination and for the very qualities that drive men to be successful, to control others, and to wield uncompromising power.…Gender differences in crime suggest that crime may not be so normal after all. Such differences challenge us to see that in the lives of women, men have a great deal more to learn.

A young boy posed with his fists up, ready to fight

Gender socialization helps explain why females commit less serious crime than males. Boys are raised to be competitive and aggressive, while girls are raised to be more gentle and nurturing.

Philippe Put – Fight – CC BY 2.0.

Two decades later, that challenge still remains.

Symbolic Interactionist Explanations

Because symbolic interactionism focuses on the means people gain from their social interaction, symbolic interactionist explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social interaction and social processes that normal individuals experience. These explanations help us understand why some people are more likely than others living in the same kinds of social environments. Several such explanations exist.

Differential Association Theory

One popular set of explanations, often called learning theories , emphasizes that deviance is learned from interacting with other people who believe it is OK to commit deviance and who often commit deviance themselves. Deviance, then, arises from normal socialization processes. The most influential such explanation is Edwin H. Sutherland’s (1947) differential association theory , which says that criminal behavior is learned by interacting with close friends and family members. These individuals teach us not only how to commit various crimes but also the values, motives, and rationalizations that we need to adopt in order to justify breaking the law. The earlier in our life that we associate with deviant individuals and the more often we do so, the more likely we become deviant ourselves. In this way, a normal social process, socialization, can lead normal people to commit deviance.

Sutherland’s theory of differential association was one of the most influential sociological theories ever. Over the years much research has documented the importance of adolescents’ peer relationships for their entrance into the world of drugs and delinquency (Akers & Sellers, 2008). However, some critics say that not all deviance results from the influences of deviant peers. Still, differential association theory and the larger category of learning theories it represents remain a valuable approach to understanding deviance and crime.

Labeling Theory

If we arrest and imprison someone, we hope they will be “scared straight,” or deterred from committing a crime again. Labeling theory assumes precisely the opposite: it says that labeling someone deviant increases the chances that the labeled person will continue to commit deviance. According to labeling theory, this happens because the labeled person ends up with a deviant self-image that leads to even more deviance. Deviance is the result of being labeled (Bohm & Vogel, 2011).

This effect is reinforced by how society treats someone who has been labeled. Research shows that job applicants with a criminal record are much less likely than those without a record to be hired (Pager, 2009). Suppose you had a criminal record and had seen the error of your ways but were rejected by several potential employers. Do you think you might be just a little frustrated? If your unemployment continues, might you think about committing a crime again? Meanwhile, you want to meet some law-abiding friends, so you go to a singles bar. You start talking with someone who interests you, and in response to this person’s question, you say you are between jobs. When your companion asks about your last job, you reply that you were in prison for armed robbery. How do you think your companion will react after hearing this? As this scenario suggests, being labeled deviant can make it difficult to avoid a continued life of deviance.

Labeling theory also asks whether some people and behaviors are indeed more likely than others to acquire a deviant label. In particular, it asserts that nonlegal factors such as appearance, race, and social class affect how often official labeling occurs.

Labeling theory assumes that someone who is labeled deviant will be more likely to commit deviance as a result. One problem that ex-prisoners face after being released back into society is that potential employers do not want to hire them. This fact makes it more likely that they will commit new offenses.

Victor – Handcuffs – CC BY 2.0.

William Chambliss’s (1973) classic analysis of the “Saints” and the “Roughnecks” is an excellent example of this argument. The Saints were eight male high-school students from middle-class backgrounds who were very delinquent, while the Roughnecks were six male students in the same high school who were also very delinquent but who came from poor, working-class families. Although the Saints’ behavior was arguably more harmful than the Roughnecks’, their actions were considered harmless pranks, and they were never arrested. After graduating from high school, they went on to college and graduate and professional school and ended up in respectable careers. In contrast, the Roughnecks were widely viewed as troublemakers and often got into trouble for their behavior. As adults they either ended up in low-paying jobs or went to prison.

Labeling theory’s views on the effects of being labeled and on the importance of nonlegal factors for official labeling remain controversial. Nonetheless, the theory has greatly influenced the study of deviance and crime in the last few decades and promises to do so for many years to come.

Key Takeaways

Both biological and psychological explanations assume that deviance stems from problems arising inside the individual.
Sociological explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social environment.
Several functionalist explanations exist. Durkheim highlighted the functions that deviance serves for society. Merton’s strain theory assumed that deviance among the poor results from their inability to achieve the economic success so valued in American society. Other explanations highlight the role played by the social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods, of deviant subcultures, and of weak bonds to social institutions.
Conflict explanations assume that the wealthy and powerful use the legal system to protect their own interests and to keep the poor and racial minorities subservient. Feminist perspectives highlight the importance of gender inequality for crimes against women and of male socialization for the gender difference in criminality.
Interactionist explanations highlight the importance of social interaction in the commitment of deviance and in reactions to deviance. Labeling theory assumes that the labeling process helps ensure that someone will continue to commit deviance, and it also assumes that some people are more likely than others to be labeled deviant because of their appearance, race, social class, and other characteristics.

For Your Review

In what important way do biological and psychological explanations differ from sociological explanations?
What are any two functions of deviance according to Durkheim?
What are any two criminogenic social or physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods?
What are any two assumptions of feminist perspectives on deviance and crime?
According to labeling theory, what happens when someone is labeled as a deviant?

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Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city . New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Barkan, S. E. (1996). The social science significance of the O. J. Simpson case. In G. Barak (Ed.), Representing O. J.: Murder, criminal justice and mass culture (pp. 36–42). Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston.

Barkan, S. E. (2009). The value of quantitative analysis for a critical understanding of crime and society. Critical Criminology, 17 , 247–259.

Belknap, J. (2007). The invisible woman: Gender, crime, and justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Bellair, P. E., & McNulty, T. L. (2009). Gang membership, drug selling, and violence in neighborhood context. Justice Quarterly, 26 , 644–669.

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Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs . New York, NY: Free Press.

Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang . New York, NY: Free Press.

Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5, 497–538.

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Griffin, S. (1971, September). Rape: The all-American crime. Ramparts, 10 , 26–35.

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Mears, D. P., Wang, X., Hay, C., & Bales, W. D. (2008). Social ecology and recidivism: Implications for prisoner reentry. Criminology, 46, 301–340.

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Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14 , 5–19.

Pager, D. (2009). Marked: Race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Renzetti, C. (2011). Feminist criminology . Manuscript submitted for publication.

Sampson, R. J. (2006). How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates. In P.-O. H. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 31–60). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology . Philadelphia, PA: J. P. Lippincott.

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Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence . London, England: Social Science Paperbacks.

7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society through four sociologist’s theories
Explain how conflict theory understands deviance and crime in society
Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labeling and other theories

Why does deviance occur? How does it affect a society? Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories that attempt to explain what deviance and crime mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with the way the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Strain theory and social disorganization theory represent two functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, when Black students across the United States participated in sit-ins during the civil rights movement, they challenged society’s notions of segregation. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1893). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Durkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the “collective conscience,” which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. “A crime is a crime because we condemn it,” he said (1893). He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. For example, in large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is an inherent part of a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. From birth, we’re encouraged to achieve the “American Dream” of financial success. A person who attends business school, receives an MBA, and goes on to make a million-dollar income as CEO of a company is said to be a success. However, not everyone in our society stands on equal footing. That MBA-turned-CEO may have grown up in the best school district and had means to hire tutors. Another person may grow up in a neighborhood with lower-quality schools, and may not be able to pay for extra help. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. According to Merton’s theory, an entrepreneur who can’t afford to launch their own company may be tempted to embezzle from their employer for start-up funds.

Merton defined five ways people respond to this gap between having a socially accepted goal and having no socially accepted way to pursue it.

Conformity : Those who conform choose not to deviate. They pursue their goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means.
Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These members of society focus on conformity rather than attaining a distant dream.
Retreatism : Others retreat and reject society’s goals and means. Some people who beg and people who are homeless have withdrawn from society’s goal of financial success.
Rebellion : A handful of people rebel and replace a society’s goals and means with their own. Terrorists or freedom fighters look to overthrow a society’s goals through socially unacceptable means.

Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. An individual who grows up in a poor neighborhood with high rates of drug use, violence, teenage delinquency, and deprived parenting is more likely to become engaged in crime than an individual from a wealthy neighborhood with a good school system and families who are involved positively in the community.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance. A person isn’t born as someone who will commit crimes but becomes one over time, often based on factors in their social environment. Robert Sampson and Byron Groves (1989) found that poverty and family disruption in given localities had a strong positive correlation with social disorganization. They also determined that social disorganization was, in turn, associated with high rates of crime and delinquency—or deviance. Recent studies Sampson conducted with Lydia Bean (2006) revealed similar findings. High rates of poverty and single-parent homes correlated with high rates of juvenile violence. Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. For instance, studies have found that children from disadvantaged communities who attend preschool programs that teach basic social skills are significantly less likely to engage in criminal activity. (Lally 1987)

Conflict Theory

Conflict theory looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike functionalists, conflict theorists don’t see these factors as positive functions of society. They see them as evidence of inequality in the system. They also challenge social disorganization theory and control theory and argue that both ignore racial and socioeconomic issues and oversimplify social trends (Akers 1991). Conflict theorists also look for answers to the correlation of gender and race with wealth and crime.

Karl Marx: An Unequal System

Conflict theory was greatly influenced by the work of German philosopher, economist, and social scientist Karl Marx. Marx believed that the general population was divided into two groups. He labeled the wealthy, who controlled the means of production and business, the bourgeois. He labeled the workers who depended on the bourgeois for employment and survival the proletariat. Marx believed that the bourgeois centralized their power and influence through government, laws, and other authority agencies in order to maintain and expand their positions of power in society. Though Marx spoke little of deviance, his ideas created the foundation for conflict theorists who study the intersection of deviance and crime with wealth and power.

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite

In his book The Power Elite (1956), sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of what he dubbed the power elite , a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources. Wealthy executives, politicians, celebrities, and military leaders often have access to national and international power, and in some cases, their decisions affect everyone in society. Because of this, the rules of society are stacked in favor of a privileged few who manipulate them to stay on top. It is these people who decide what is criminal and what is not, and the effects are often felt most by those who have little power. Mills’ theories explain why celebrities can commit crimes and suffer little or no legal retribution. For example, USA Today maintains a database of NFL players accused and convicted of crimes. 51 NFL players had been convicted of committing domestic violence between the years 2000 and 2019. They have been sentenced to a collective 49 days in jail, and most of those sentences were deferred or otherwise reduced. In most cases, suspensions and fines levied by the NFL or individual teams were more severe than the justice system's (Schrotenboer 2020 and clickitticket.com 2019).

Crime and Social Class

This imbalance based on class power is also found within U.S. criminal law. In the 1980s, the use of crack cocaine (a less expensive but powerful drug) quickly became an epidemic that swept the country’s poorest urban communities. Its pricier counterpart, cocaine, was associated with upscale users and was a drug of choice for the wealthy. The legal implications of being caught by authorities with crack versus cocaine were starkly different. In 1986, federal law mandated that being caught in possession of 50 grams of crack was punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. An equivalent prison sentence for cocaine possession, however, required possession of 5,000 grams. In other words, the sentencing disparity was 1 to 100 (New York Times Editorial Staff 2011). This inequality in the severity of punishment for crack versus cocaine paralleled the unequal social class of respective users. A conflict theorist would note that those in society who hold the power are also the ones who make the laws concerning crime. In doing so, they make laws that will benefit them, while the powerless classes who lack the resources to make such decisions suffer the consequences. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, states passed numerous laws increasing penalties, especially for repeat offenders. The U.S. government passed an even more significant law, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (known as the 1994 Crime Bill), which further increased penalties, funded prisons, and incentivized law enforcement agencies to further pursue drug offenders. One outcome of these policies was the mass incarceration of Black and Hispanic people, which led to a cycle of poverty and reduced social mobility. The crack-cocaine punishment disparity remained until 2010, when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased the disparity to 1 to 18 (The Sentencing Project 2010).

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviors as deviant or conventional.

Labeling Theory

Although all of us violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Those who do, however, have often been labeled “deviant” by society and have gradually come to believe it themselves. Labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person’s self-concept and behavior begin to change after his or her actions are labeled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, develops a reputation as a “troublemaker.” As a result, the student starts acting out even more and breaking more rules; the student has adopted the “troublemaker” label and embraced this deviant identity. Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts.

Techniques of Neutralization

How do people deal with the labels they are given? This was the subject of a study done by Sykes and Matza (1957). They studied teenage boys who had been labeled as juvenile delinquents to see how they either embraced or denied these labels. Have you ever used any of these techniques?

Let’s take a scenario and apply all five techniques to explain how they are used. A young person is working for a retail store as a cashier. Their cash drawer has been coming up short for a few days. When the boss confronts the employee, they are labeled as a thief for the suspicion of stealing. How does the employee deal with this label?

The Denial of Responsibility: When someone doesn’t take responsibility for their actions or blames others. They may use this technique and say that it was their boss’s fault because they don’t get paid enough to make rent or because they’re getting a divorce. They are rejecting the label by denying responsibility for the action.

The Denial of Injury: Sometimes people will look at a situation in terms of what effect it has on others. If the employee uses this technique they may say, “What’s the big deal? Nobody got hurt. Your insurance will take care of it.” The person doesn’t see their actions as a big deal because nobody “got hurt.”

The Denial of the Victim: If there is no victim there’s no crime. In this technique the person sees their actions as justified or that the victim deserved it. Our employee may look at their situation and say, “I’ve worked here for years without a raise. I was owed that money and if you won’t give it to me I’ll get it my own way.”

The Condemnation of the Condemners: The employee might “turn it around on” the boss by blaming them. They may say something like, “You don’t know my life, you have no reason to judge me.” This is taking the focus off of their actions and putting the onus on the accuser to, essentially, prove the person is living up to the label, which also shifts the narrative away from the deviant behavior.

Appeal to a Higher Authority: The final technique that may be used is to claim that the actions were for a higher purpose. The employee may tell the boss that they stole the money because their mom is sick and needs medicine or something like that. They are justifying their actions by making it seem as though the purpose for the behavior is a greater “good” than the action is “bad.” (Sykes & Matza, 1957)

Social Policy and Debate

The right to vote.

Strickland appeared in court in 2001. More than ten years later, she is still feeling the sting of her sentencing. Why? Because Mississippi is one of twelve states in the United States that bans convicted felons from voting (ProCon 2011).

To Strickland, who said she had always voted, the news came as a great shock. She isn’t alone. Some 5.3 million people in the United States are currently barred from voting because of felony convictions (ProCon 2009). These individuals include inmates, parolees, probationers, and even people who have never been jailed, such as Leola Strickland.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states are allowed to deny voting privileges to individuals who have participated in “rebellion or other crime” (Krajick 2004). Although there are no federally mandated laws on the matter, most states practice at least one form of felony disenfranchisement .

Is it fair to prevent citizens from participating in such an important process? Proponents of disfranchisement laws argue that felons have a debt to pay to society. Being stripped of their right to vote is part of the punishment for criminal deeds. Such proponents point out that voting isn’t the only instance in which ex-felons are denied rights; state laws also ban released criminals from holding public office, obtaining professional licenses, and sometimes even inheriting property (Lott and Jones 2008).

Opponents of felony disfranchisement in the United States argue that voting is a basic human right and should be available to all citizens regardless of past deeds. Many point out that felony disfranchisement has its roots in the 1800s, when it was used primarily to block Black citizens from voting. These laws disproportionately target poor minority members, denying them a chance to participate in a system that, as a social conflict theorist would point out, is already constructed to their disadvantage (Holding 2006). Those who cite labeling theory worry that denying deviants the right to vote will only further encourage deviant behavior. If ex-criminals are disenfranchised from voting, are they being disenfranchised from society?

Edwin Sutherland: Differential Association

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behavior developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub 2006). His conclusions established differential association theory , which suggested that individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. For example, a young person whose friends are sexually active is more likely to view sexual activity as acceptable. Sutherland developed a series of propositions to explain how deviance is learned. In proposition five, for example, he discussed how people begin to accept and participate in a behavior after learning whether it is viewed as “favorable” by those around them. In proposition six, Sutherland expressed the ways that exposure to more “definitions” favoring the deviant behavior than those opposing it may eventually lead a person to partake in deviance (Sutherland 1960), applying almost a quantitative element to the learning of certain behaviors. In the example above, a young person may find sexual activity more acceptable once a certain number of their friends become sexually active, not after only one does so.

Sutherland’s theory may explain why crime is multigenerational. A longitudinal study beginning in the 1960s found that the best predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior in children was whether their parents had been convicted of a crime (Todd and Jury 1996). Children who were younger than ten years old when their parents were convicted were more likely than other children to engage in spousal abuse and criminal behavior by their early thirties. Even when taking socioeconomic factors such as dangerous neighborhoods, poor school systems, and overcrowded housing into consideration, researchers found that parents were the main influence on the behavior of their offspring (Todd and Jury 1996).

Travis Hirschi: Control Theory

Continuing with an examination of large social factors, control theory states that social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds and that deviance results from a feeling of disconnection from society. Individuals who believe they are a part of society are less likely to commit crimes against it.

Travis Hirschi (1969) identified four types of social bonds that connect people to society:

Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society’s norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic partners.
Commitment refers to the investments we make in the community. A well-respected local businessperson who volunteers at their synagogue and is a member of the neighborhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a person who doesn’t have a career or ties to the community.
Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance. A child who plays little league baseball and takes art classes has fewer opportunities to ______.
The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, they will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park, because a clean environment is a social value to them (Hirschi 1969).


Strain Theory	Robert Merton	A lack of ways to reach socially accepted goals by accepted methods
Social Disorganization Theory	University of Chicago researchers	Weak social ties and a lack of social control; society has lost the ability to enforce norms with some groups

Unequal System	Karl Marx	Inequalities in wealth and power that arise from the economic system
Power Elite	C. Wright Mills	Ability of those in power to define deviance in ways that maintain the status quo

Labeling Theory	Edwin Lemert	The reactions of others, particularly those in power who are able to determine labels
Differential Association Theory	Edwin Sutherland	Learning and modeling deviant behavior seen in other people close to the individual
Control Theory	Travis Hirschi	Feelings of disconnection from society

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Subcultural Theories of Deviance

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Key Takeaways

Subcultural theories argue that crime is rooted in criminal subcultures, and criminologists must identify the cultural codes and common values that exist in these groups.
There are numerous subcultural theories that developed in the 20th century. The most notable of these are those of Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin.
According to Albert Cohen’s status frustration theory, deviant working-class subcultures emerge because people within the working class are denied status in society. These delinquents band together and devise their own values contrary to those of greater society.
Cloward and Ohlin proposed that there are three types of deviant subcultures that emerge due to varying social factors: criminal, conflict, and retreatist subcultures.
Walter Miller’s cultural deviance theory proposes that the lower classes have different sets of values altogether from those of higher social strata. These values have been established over and passed down for many generations.
Matzo counters many of the underlying assumptions of subcultural theories by suggesting that all people, regardless of class or deviant status, have similar cultural values. Deviants, in Miller’s view, are differentiated from others in their ability to justify their deviance.

Introduction to Subcultural Theories

Subcultural theory, developed by Al Cohen (1955) and others, argues that criminologists must understand criminal behavior as being rooted in the collective reality of a criminal subculture.

As a result, criminologists must define the cultural codes and traits that define that subculture such as codes of speech and conduct, styles of dress, shared emotions, and common problems — and, in turn, investigate the ways in which criminality within the subculture can offer members of the subculture a solution to a shared problem.

Subcultural theory emphasizes how criminals, in their own view, do not act criminally. As members of subcultures, criminals have different behavioral requirements, values, and norms than those of mainstream society. These criminals conform to their own subculture.

Thus, what is considered deviant or criminal for one person can be normal for another, even necessary, as it is prescribed by one’s own system of values and norms.

Because deviant behavior is a result of conformity, subcultural theories believe that deviation from mainstream society is inherently more common in some groups than others.

Subcultural theory emerged from two distinct sociological traditions (Williams, 2011). These sociological traditions had five notable thinkers:

Albert Cohen, who devised Status Frustration Theory;
Cloward and Ohlin, who describes three types of deviant subcultures;
Walter Miller, who wrote on the focal concerns of the working class;
Charles Murray, who studies the underclass and crime.

Albert Cohen: Deviant Subcultures emerge because of Status Frustration

Albert Cohen (1955) argued that working-class subcultures emerge because people within the working class are denied status in society.

Cohen believed that working-class boys wished to emulate middle-class values and aspirations, but lacked the means of achieving success.

Status frustration, or more specifically, a sense of personal failure and inadequacy, emerged as a result.

Many boys, Cohen argued, respond to this sense of personal failure and inadequacy in the face of middle-class standards by rejecting socially acceptable values and patterns of acceptable behavior.

Because this feeling of rejection and inadequacy extends to large groups of people, adolescents band together and form delinquent subcultures, which counter the norms and values of mainstream culture through offering status to those who are the most deviant.

This deviance can extend from malicious behavior to intimidation, the breaking of rules in institutions within schools, and even crime. This pattern of deviance begins in school before rising in severity later on, as deviants become truant or possibly involved in gangs.

The status frustration theory has received a large amount of pushback. Roach and Gursslin (1965) argued that there was little empirical support for the hypothesis, and that the theory itself is traced to the tendency of academic literature to obscure the actual characteristic of the lower-class.

Rather than considering status deprivation to be the principal characteristic of the lower class, Roach and Gursslin argued, material deprivation should be.

Cloward and Ohlin’s Illegitimate Opportunity Structures

Cloward and Ohlin propelled Cohen’s subcultural theory further in proposing that there are three types of deviant subcultures. These subcultures can emerge in response to the “illegitimate opportunity structure” available to the deviant subcultures. These are criminal subcultures, conflict subcultures, and retreatist subcultures.

Criminal Subcultures (socialize young people into criminal activity)

Criminal subcultures involve crimes carried out for practical purposes, such as theft. These subcultures, according to Cloward and Ohlin (2017), develop in stable working-class areas where there is an established pattern of crime.

Crimes such as theft give young criminals learning opportunities and a career structure, as well as a means of entering the legitimate job market by providing a means of achieving financial stability.

For example, a young adult who steals valuable car parts or smartphones may find a way of financing education or vocational training.

Adult criminals in this subculture exercise social control over the young to prevent them from carrying out non-utilitarian delinquent acts — such as vandalism — which could attract the attention of the police.

Conflict Subcultures (where there is little social cohesion)

Conflict subcultures, meanwhile, emerge in socially disorganized areas where there is high population turnover and thus a lack of community or social cohesion. This lack of social cohesion prevents the formation of stable adult criminal subcultures.

Both legal and illicit means of achieving mainstream goals are limited, and young people express their frustration at the lack of opportunity through street crime and obtaining status through following the values of their peer subcultures.

Crimes in conflict subcultures are often characterized by violence, gang warfare, and violent robbery (Cloward & Ohlin, year).

Retreatist Subcultures (those who fail to gain access to the other two subcultures)

Retreatist subcultures emerge among lower-class youths who fail to succeed both in mainstream society and in crime and gang cultures.

This results in, according to Cloward and Ohlin (2017), escapism through drug addiction and alcoholism, financed by petty theft, shoplifting, and prostitution.

Walter Miller’s Cultural Deviance Theory

Walter Miller (1958), following Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin, revived interest in delinquency as a product of alternative values. He posits that the underclass is responsible for the majority of street crime.

Miller focused on gang delinquency in Boston during the 1950s, and asserted that delinquent activity is primarily motivated by an attempt to realize the values of the lower-class community in itself, which relate to toughness, adventure, and autonomy (Carey & McAnany, 1984).

In contrast to other subcultural theories, Miller did not see deviant behavior occurring due to the inability of the lower/working class to achieve success, but in terms of the existence of a distinctive lower-class subculture.

Focal Concerns

Miller argued that, for centuries, the working class possessed their own culture and traditions fundamentally different from those of the higher classes. This culture, Miller suggests, has been passed on for many generations.

In comparison to higher social strata, the lower classes are concerned with:

Toughness : a concern for hyper masculinity and finding expression and courage in the face of physical threats as well as a rejection of timidity and weakness. This can, in practice, lead to assault as the group attempts to maintain their reputation.
Smartness : the capacity to outwit and deceive others. This can result in crimes such as hustling, conning, pimping, pickpocketing, and petty theft.
Excitement : the search for emotional stimulus, as sought by practices such as gambling, sex, and drug and alcohol consumption.
Fate : the belief that little can be done to change social status and one’s way of living.
Trouble : an acceptance that one’s life will involve violence, and thus involvement in, rather than avoidance of, physical conflict.

Follow-up studies on class attitudes, contrary to Miller’s theory, have not uncovered any alternative set of lower-class values.

Some studies that incorporate miller’s concerns in their designs show that all youth, regardless of their delinquency or class status, evaluate conventional images of success equally highly and more highly than delinquent ones (Carey & McAnany, 1984).

David Matza’s Delinquency and Drift

David Matza (2018) attacked some of the assumptions on which subcultural theories of crime are based by claiming that delinquents have similar values to those who are not delinquent, and even voice similar feelings of outrage about crime as those in the rest of society.

Matza’s theory also accounts for the way that behavior is adaptable and flexible, involving dimensions of choice and free will.

According to Matza, delinquents are committed to the same values and norms as the rest of society, and society prevents them from being delinquent most of the time.

When delinquents commit crimes, they express regret and remorse, and disapprove of crimes such as mugging, armed robbery, and fighting with weapons. In Matza’s words, these deviants drift into deviant activities through spontaneity and impulsiveness.

Although delinquents, in Matza’s theory, do not approve of crimes, they use techniques of neutralization to justify their own criminal behavior.

These can include denial of responsibility, denial of the victim, denial of the injury, condemnation of those who accuse them, and an appeal to higher loyalties, such as not believing it right to abandon one’s friends during a fight (Matza, 2018).

Everyone also, according to Matza, has a set of subterranean values — such as greed and aggressiveness — which are generally controlled, but may appear in particular situations. These subterranean values contrast with traditional values and roles, such as one’s place in one’s family or one’s occupation.

The last element of Matza’s (2018) subcultural theory of delinquency is drift, which provides a justification for why only some people commit crimes.

Matza argues that drift is a period in adolescence where an adolescent’s bonds from society are loosened, making them more susceptible to suggestions of deviant acts from their peer group.

This loosening of ties occurs as youths feel as though they lack control over their own lives and long to gain autonomy. Thus, to show that they have control over their lives, adolescents may commit a delinquent act without necessarily committing themselves to a life of crime.

Matza’s subcultural theory has received numerous criticisms.

One of these is its lack of attempt to group delinquency in a wider framework of economic and social circumstances that drive certain groups — such as male working-class boys — to commit more crimes than others.

Taylor, Walton, and Young (2013), additionally, raised doubts about the view that those who use the techniques of neutralization are not challenging the dominant views in society, and Steven Box (1987) suggests that evidence that criminals are remorseful may not be sincere.

Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory of Crime

Most recently, the American new right sociologist Charles Murray (2005) created the underclass theory of crime. This underclass refers to a group of people in America who were unemployed over the long-term and effectively dependent on government assistance.

Murray believed that the children of this underclass would be essentially cut off from ordinary social life, and thus not constrained by the ordinary norms and values of workers. Murray believed that participation in the underclass is a lifestyle choice and pathological.

Murray argued that the culture transmitted by the underclass would result in high crime rates and low participation in the labor force among future generations, as the underclass had and could never be socialized and taught basic conditioning.

Murray’s underclass theory of crime has proven contentious in sociology, with some researchers claiming that it has sparked “welfare politics” (Prideaux, 2010).

Subcultural theory vs. Cultural criminology vs. Social Control Theory

Cultural criminology is an approach to the study of crime that sees crime as a product of the culture in which it occurs. The people who commit and control crimes, in this view, use the meaning of established cultural practices as justification for the committing and controlling of crimes.

Subcultural theory has many similarities too, and is a subset of, culture criminology. Like cultural criminology, it critiques criminological models that ignore or assume the subtleties of how meaning and symbolism shape criminal subcultures.

In contrast to social control theorists , however, subcultural theorists believe that the pull of the peer group causes people to commit crime, rather than a lack of attachment to family or other mainstream institutions.

Subcultural theory also confers an advantage in describing crimes such as vandalism and “playing chicken” that strain theory cannot explain. Deviance, within criminal subcultures, is a cooperative response to marginalization.

Box, S. (1987). Recession, crime and punishment. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Carey, J. T., & McAnany, P. D. (1984). Introduction to juvenile delinquency: Youth and the law. Prentice-Hall.

Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press.

Cohen, A. K. (2016) Kriminelle Subkulturen. In: Klimke, D. & Legnaro, A. (Hrsg.) Kriminologische Grundlagentexte. Springer VS: Wiesbaden. S. 269-280 .

Cohen, A. K. (1957) Kriminelle Subkulturen. In: Heintz, P. & König, R. (Hrsg.) Soziologie der Jugendkriminalität. Studien zur Sozialwissenschaft. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. S. 103-117.

Cohen, Albert K. and Short, J. (1968). Research in Delinquent Subcultures. In: Journal of Social Issues , S.20–37.

Downes, D.M. & Rock, P. E. (2007). Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule-breaking (5th ed.). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Matza, D. (2018). Delinquency and drift. Routledge.

Miller, W. (1958). Inter-institutional conflict as a major impediment to delinquency prevention. Human Organization, 17(3), 20-23.

Miller, Walter B. (1958): Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. In: Journal of Social Issues , 15, S.5-19.

Murray, C. (2005). The underclass. Criminological perspectives: Essential readings, 127-141.

Prideaux, S. J. (2010). The welfare politics of Charles Murray are alive and well in the UK. International Journal of Social Welfare, 19(3), 293-302.

Roach, J. L., & Gursslin, O. R. (1965). The lower class, status frustration and social disorganization. Social Forces, 43(4), 501-510.

Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (2013). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. Routledge.

Thrasher, Frederic M. (1927). The Gang. A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago [u.a.]: University of Chicago Press.

Whyte, William F. (1943): Street Corner Society. Chicago [u.a.]: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, J. P. (2011). Subcultural theory: Traditions and concepts. Polity.

Yablonski, Lewis (1959): The delinquent gangs as a near group. In: Social Problems , 7, S.108-109.

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Crime, diversity, culture, and cultural defense.

Clara Rigoni Clara Rigoni Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.409
Published online: 30 July 2018

Contemporary societies are culturally diverse. This diversity can be the result of different historical and social processes and might affect the uniformity and efficiency of criminal justice systems. Colonization of indigenous populations that started in the 15th century later European colonization of Africa and migration flows following the Second World War have contributed to this diversity in different ways. The growing importance acquired by culture in the criminal law domain went hand in hand with the attention received by it both in the human rights field (especially linked to minority rights) and in the field of sociological and criminological theories.

Nowadays, crimes such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and other behaviors grounded in “culture or tradition” form the object of several international human rights instruments and media reports. The way in which criminal justice systems deal with such cases, and more in general with cultural factors, varies greatly. Different instruments have been proposed to allow the consideration of cultural elements within criminal proceedings among which (in common law countries) is the formalization of an autonomous “cultural defense.” However, international human rights instruments, especially those protecting the rights of vulnerable subjects such as women and children, have repeatedly discouraged states to take into account “culture, religion, and tradition” as grounds for justification (see, e.g., the Istanbul Convention).

Criminal proceedings are not the only setting to deal with culture and crime. More recently, the development of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and restorative justice both within formal and informal (community) settings have given an additional option to take culture into account in the resolution of disputes (in terms of procedures used and normativities in play). Concerns exist with regard to the substantive and procedural rights of participants to these programs. However, these alternatives could represent a way to allow a certain degree of legal pluralism and facilitate access to justice for minority groups.

indigenous people
immigration
cultural defense
alternative dispute resolution
restorative justice

A Definition of “Culture”

A first question to be posed when dealing with crime and culture is what we intend with the term “culture.” The definition of culture has been at the center of the debate among cultural anthropologists for centuries. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recalling a definition given by the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor has defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a human as a member of society” (Tylor, 1871 ; UNESCO website). During the course of the 20th century , a myriad of definitions and approaches to culture characterized different trends in social and cultural anthropology (and many other disciplines). While some scholars (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952 ; Parsons, 1951 ) understood culture merely as a system of values, beliefs, and normative standards, later doctrine (Bourdieu, 1977 ; Ortner, 1984 ) associated culture with action and practices (Merry, 2003 ). A great deal of the discussion on culture, developed in the second half of the 1900s, revolves around the quarrel between those who describe culture as something static, monolithic, well-defined, and those who underline the need for looking at it as a practice, a process in constant transformation exposed to both external and internal challenges. In the last few decades, an increasing number of social and cultural anthropologists have denounced the risk that conceiving culture as static and homogeneous brings in terms of its compatibility with human rights. According to these scholars, the only way to reconcile culture (and cultural diversity) with human rights is to recognize that cultures are often hybrid, complex, and in a process of constant transformation (Parolari, 2016 ). “Essentializing” cultures risks to conceive them as separate entities; overemphasize their boundaries; and favor stereotypes and prejudices about them but also to portray them as internally homogeneous and silence the voices of those members that do not share or criticize certain practices and traditions (Benhabib, 2002 ). Even if certain aspects of a culture endure over time and are transmitted from one generation to another, it is also true that cultures themselves are exposed to a variety of factors, including other cultures that have an impact on their preservation and transformation. This phenomenon is known as “acculturation” and takes place when individuals coming from different cultural groups come into contact with each other and change their cultural patterns as a result of this contact (Redfield, Linton, & Herskovits, 1936 ; Renteln, 2004 ). It was so during the past, under big empires, during colonization, and it is even more so in today’s globalized societies, where communication, contact, and exchange among people coming from different parts of the world have become very easy. The same is true for migrants belonging to second or third generations, who are exposed to a variety of cultures and often contribute to change them from within. Admitting that cultures are heterogeneous and not always uniform also means recognizing the existence of a plurality of voices and positions with regard to certain specific cultural practices. The different attitudes individuals might have toward a given tradition might be due to a variety of factors, such as gender, age, individual beliefs, level of exposure to other cultures, and many other structural factors (including, of course, socioeconomic ones) (van Broeck, 2001 ). Individual identities can be described by a plurality of collective narratives and in most cases cannot be reduced to defined ethnic, religious, cultural, or linguistic boundaries (Benhabib, 2002 ). Undisputed is, however, that culture affects, to a certain extent, individual perceptions and behaviors. This phenomenon has been named by social anthropologists “enculturation,” a concept that refers to “the process of socialization into and maintenance of the norms of one’s indigenous culture, including its salient ideas, concepts and values” (Kim, Ahn, & Lam, 2009 , quoting Herskovits, 1948 ). Conrad Philipp Kottak defines enculturation as:

the process where the culture that is currently established teaches an individual the accepted norms and values of the culture or society where the individual lives. The individual can become an accepted member and fulfil the needed functions and roles of the group. Most importantly the individual knows and establishes a context of boundaries and accepted behaviour that dictates what is acceptable and not acceptable within the framework of that society. It teaches individuals their role within society as well as what is accepted behaviour within that society and lifestyle. (Kottak, 2007 )

Each individual internalizes certain elements of one (or more) culture that he/she learns through socialization. These cultural influences are so deep that they are reflected in one’s behavior, even subconsciously (Linton, 1955 ).

Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Societies

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, contemporary societies are culturally diverse. This diversity can be the result of different historical and social processes and might affect the uniformity and efficiency of criminal justice systems. Among these processes, those that mostly influenced the pluralization of our societies in the last few centuries, three are worth mentioning: the colonization process initiated by European settlers at the end of the 15th century that destroyed indigenous peoples’ cultures and justice systems in different parts of the world and the subsequent attempt to restore the damages caused by the so-called conquista; later colonization processes in sub-Saharan Africa and the introduction of a two-layer system of (European) state law and customary law; and the huge migration flows directed to European and North American states that followed the Second World War and caused a diversification in the population of these countries and the increase of cultural clashes.

Indigenous Peoples

Colonial (and neocolonial) processes that took place in the last six centuries in countries such as Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin American states strongly affected the development of indigenous populations living in these territories. Upon their arrival, European settlers did not only take control of the land and natural resources but also of educational, cultural, religious, and justice institutions. This resulted in the partial destruction of indigenous culture, values, social and political organization, and brought to the socioeconomic marginalization of indigenous groups within new colonial societies. The level of marginalization varies depending on several factors, especially on the territorial distribution of indigenous peoples, often confined in remote areas such as reservations or indigenous protected areas where they are granted a certain degree of sovereignty (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016 ; Nielsen & Robyn, 2003 ). One of the areas in which this marginalization is more evident is that of criminal justice. The overrepresentation of indigenous populations within the criminal justice system, with regard to both victims and offenders, is a common trait of all settler colonial states. The reasons for such an overrepresentation are many and go from socioeconomic conditions, unemployment, and widespread substance abuse, to racism and discriminatory attitudes of criminal justice authorities in policing, charging, judging, and sentencing indigenous people. Little access to justice and legal aid also contribute to increased levels of victimization and to higher incarceration rates. Moreover, in the colonial process criminal law (and criminalization) became a way to impose new sociocultural values and a new social order, to legitimize the use of force by the colonizers on indigenous people, to increase control and policing over these communities, and reduce their political and institutional independency (Anthony, 2013 ; Cunneen & Tauri, 2016 ; Monchalin, 2016 ). It should not surprise, therefore, that indigenous claims for self-determination often go through requests for autonomy within the criminal justice sphere.

In order to accommodate these claims and to reduce the overrepresentation of indigenous people in prison, several countries have recognized indigenous traditional programs as an alternative or a supplement to the formal criminal justice system (see, among others, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand). These programs are run by the justice system in cooperation with indigenous groups; they employ indigenous (and sometimes also non-indigenous) personnel; they make extensive use of rituals, alternative forms of punishment, community policing, and community-based sanctions that better respond to the group’s idea of (substantive and procedural) justice, which often rests on a restorative rather than retributive conception. Ideas of law and justice within indigenous groups differ from colonial ones under several aspects. Collective responsibility for the wrongdoing overrides the individual one; ideas of “guilt” and “innocence” do not exist in many indigenous cultures; the role of the victim and the community (and their restoration) becomes crucial in the judicial process. Examples of traditional programs are family group conferences, peacemaking circles, sentencing circles, and elder panels, where the victim and the offender accompanied by their supporters and/or family members sit together with other members of the community, including community leaders and elders, in order to find a solution to the conflict and repair the harm done (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016 ; Morris & Maxwell, 2003 ; Williams, 2002 ).

Concerns exist with regard to guarantees offered to vulnerable subjects, especially women and children. The use of traditional programs for crimes such as domestic and sexual violence is regarded with high skepticism. Criticisms are related to the concern that communities might condone harmful practices and undermine the rights of victims. Despite these risks, however, these programs are also seen as a way to reaffirm indigenous culture and tradition, and the culturally sensitive procedures that they entail are practices to which the community is accustomed and are therefore seen by many as capable of empowering victims and of facilitating their access to justice (Jahan, 2008 ).

Colonialism in Africa

European colonization of Africa (especially sub-Saharan Africa) started at the end of the 18th century . Law was the instrument through which colonial powers imposed their control on colonized territories and sought to transform these societies and impose a new culture. European colonizers brought with them their legal systems and imposed values and rules on the colonized countries initially through existing institutions. With the increase of colonial power, a set of state courts was developed in order to allow the enforcement of Western laws for Europeans. African courts, especially in rural areas, were instead charged with the enforcement of indigenous (precolonial) law. This resulted in the creation of a dual system, one for the colonizers and one for the colonized, and it marked the beginning of a policy of legal pluralism that in many cases survives until now. The contact with Western values and the need for adapting to a new economic and social context produced a transformation of indigenous laws, culture, and traditions, giving rise to what we define as “customary law,” which partially differs also from precolonial law (Kämmerer, 2008 ; Merry, 1991 ; Tamanaha, 2015 ).

Postcolonial countries are still struggling to reconcile this dual system and to decide which law has to be applied in which courts. In many former colonies, the partition between official legislation enforced by state institutions and customary norms adopted by informal courts can still be found today and usually reflects a division between urban and rural areas. Here, state institutions are often weak or nonexistent, and the organization of the population (e.g., in tribes or kin groups) facilitates the survival of customary or traditional courts run by tribal elders and community leaders (Merry, 1991 ; Tamanaha, 2015 ). Traditional and informal mechanisms also exist in certain areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia, especially in areas where formal justice institutions are missing or are lacking legitimacy and political authority (Chirayath, Sage, & Woolcock, 2005 ; Wardak, 2004 , 2006 ). This is not only the case in colonized territories but also in post-conflict societies where both accountability and reconciliation are needed. Recently, governmental and non-governmental organizations have promoted the development of alternative and informal mechanisms as part of a grassroots and more informal approach to justice in order to facilitate access to justice, conciliation, and local control (Jahan, 2008 ; Merry, 1991 ; Sullo, 2016 ).

The situation is even more complicated in countries, such as Togo or Uganda, in which several colonial administrations (German, French, British, etc.) followed one another. Here the postcolonial scenario is even more fragmented. State law consists of several layers of different Western legislation, which contributed to shape, and nowadays interact with the customary law of the colonized territory.

Immigration After the Second World War

A third factor of cultural diversity in contemporary societies is the phenomenon of immigration. Contemporary international migration is unprecedented to what concerns its scale, character, and intensity (Orgad, 2015 ). On the global level, the number of migrants has increased steadily in the last decades and has doubled or even tripled in developed countries such as the United States and Europe. The so-called European migration crisis has led to an escalation in the increase of third country nationals in Europe, which became the destination for millions of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers arriving to Southern European countries through the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes. Eurostat estimates that as of January 1, 2016 , the non-EU citizens living in the 28 European states were 20.7 million, a number that is intended to grow in the next years (Eurostat Migration and Migrant Population Statistics). Also, the character of migration somehow changed in the last century. During the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries , migration flows were mainly restricted to the Western world (typically, although not only, from Europe to North America) and consisted of labor migrants who moved to another country usually for a limited period of time (Orgad, 2015 ). After the end of the Second World War, refugees’ movements across the globe and the end of colonization changed this pattern. Former colonial powers, for instance France and the United Kingdom, started receiving immigrants from their previous colonies, while Northern European countries recruited labor forces from Southern Europe and later on Eastern Europe. Family reunification started acquiring importance and brought a certain stability to migration, previously mainly seen as temporary (Orgad, 2015 ; De la Rica, Glitz, & Ortega, 2013 ; Stalker, 2002 ; Weissbrodt, 2014 ). Nowadays, the majority of migrants crossing European borders come from the Middle East (in particular Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq), Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa (UNHCR-Refugee/Migrants Emergency Response). Next to more traditional labor migrants, both asylum seeking and family reunification play a major role in this process. The intensity of contemporary migration is also remarkable. The pace at which migrants are arriving in Europe is rapidly changing demographic trends in these countries. Western population and the total fertility rate in Western countries are declining, and in many European cities the growth of the migrant population is faster than that of the non-migrant population (Orgad, 2015 ).

High levels of social, cultural, and religious heterogeneity resulting from these processes challenge the model of nation-state on the basis of which European and North American states are organized since centuries (Algan, Bisin, & Verdier, 2012 ). Nation-states used to rely on a strong concept of sovereignty exercised through the instrument of citizenship, the only relevant criterion of affiliation. All other identity (collective) dimensions, such as ethnicity or religion, were meant to fade in front of a universal idea of the right-bearing individual. In the 1980s/1990s, the claims of minority groups to see their cultures, religions, and traditions recognized within Western liberal states brought to the adoption of multicultural policies aimed at the accommodation of minority rights in the public sphere. The traditional conception of citizenship, based on the belonging to a nation-state was juxtaposed to a new idea of multiple belonging and collective identity. The recognition of difference became essential to reach equality at a broader level (Carens, 2000 ; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2003 ). However, the so-called war on terror initiated after the 9/11 attacks in New York and the peak in the migration flows directed toward Europe and North America, together with the growing claims of autonomy coming from minority groups, have somehow reversed the trend and have brought the discourse on integration at the center of the political agenda of most European countries. The perceived threat to Western liberal values and the revival of national identities have led to a retreat from multiculturalism and to the rise of nationalist movements (Algan et al., 2012 ; Orgad, 2015 ). Clashes between minority and majority groups are framed in human rights terms and become particularly heated in the area of criminal law. Violence against women and children (such as female genital mutilations, forced marriages, sexual and domestic violence, etc.) and discourses on gender roles are often at the center of the debate. The plurality of normativities to which members of minority groups are subjected is perceived to threaten an ideal universal conception of rights and principles such as equality, freedom, justice, and autonomy, while the claims for jurisdictional autonomy coming from minority groups challenge the value-imposing function of criminal law and fundamental principles such as the rule of law and the monopoly of the state over the use of violence.

The Relationship Between Culture and Crime

In some ways, all crime is related to or influenced by culture. However, in the last few years, the attention of the international community and of Western liberal democracies has increasingly focused on the relationship between crime and culture and especially of certain cultural traditions. In the last few decades Europe has witnessed the arrival of flows of Muslim immigrants that have revitalized the debate on religion. While in the past, religiosity was connected to the idea of law-abiding citizens, nowadays religion, especially Islam, is often associated with violence. In this discourse religion and culture have been used interchangeably, and the latter has often provided an alternative to avoid discussing sensitive issues such as freedom of religion. Other reasons have contributed to associate culture with crime; among those, two are worth mentioning: the growing importance of culture within the human rights scenario and the development of criminological theories focused on the interaction between culture and crime.

Human Rights and the Right to Culture

The place occupied by culture within the human rights discourse is highly debated. While initially the recognition of culture and cultural differences was seen as an obstacle for the pursuit of (universal) individual human rights, later on the supporters of cultural relativism reversed this opposition. During the 20th century , many international instruments started recognizing the value of cultural features and protecting them, at first in the form of individual rights, later on also under the category of group (collective) rights. Starting from the 1980s, international and supranational institutions increasingly focused on minority rights and cultural diversity, especially, although not only, in connection with indigenous peoples’ claims. Such claims related mainly to issues of self-determination, cultural autonomy, language rights, control over land and national resources, possibility of exercising traditional practices, right to specific education, and exemptions from laws (Cowan, Dembour, & Wilson, 2001 ; Firestone, Lily, & Torres de Noronha, 2005 ; Henrard, 2013 ; Wenzel, 2011 ).

Through a process that has been named “culturalization of human rights law” (Lenzerini, 2014 ), culture became a human right of its own. Today, the right to culture is enshrined in many international human rights documents (see, among others, article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted in 2001 , recognizes the value of cultural diversity as a “common heritage of humanity” (art. 1). It underlines the value of cultural diversity and cultural pluralism for democratic societies and fosters the implementation of cultural rights as an integral part of human rights. Of course, being the right to culture (and to cultural diversity) fully recognized as a fundamental right, it is also subject to the limits, which derive from the universal, indivisible, and interdependent character of human rights. Article 4 of the Declaration clearly states that “no one can invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human rights guaranteed by international law, nor to limit their scope.” This limitation becomes particularly important in the relationship between culture and crime.

Criminological Theories Investigating the Role of Culture in Crime

During the first half of the 20th century , the concept of culture became central also to another field of study, that of sociology and, in particular, of criminology. The interaction between cultural and criminal practices was at the heart of several criminological theories, which developed between the 1930s and the 1960s, such as the culture conflict theory and subcultural theories. These theories saw crime as a collective behavior, resulting from the adherence to a (sub)cultural group, different from the dominant one.

Thorsten Sellin and the “Culture Conflict Theory”

In the 1930s, the Swedish American sociologist Thorsten Sellin developed the culture conflict theory , which explains crime as a conflict between different conduct norms regulating the behaviors of (groups of) individuals (Sellin, 1938 ). Drawing from cultural anthropology studies, Sellin defines conduct norms as a product of social life, aimed at protecting the social values of a group. These norms “define the reaction or response which in a given person is approved or disapproved by the normative group” when this person is acting under certain circumstances (Sellin, 1938 ). While acting in his/her daily routine, a person is supposed to conform to the conduct norms of the group(s) he/she belongs to, such as the familial, religious, political, or other groups. It might happen that one specific life situation is simultaneously regulated by a plurality of conduct norms (deriving from the different social groups of which an individual is a member) and that these norms fail to agree with each other. By breaching one of these conflicting rules, an individual adopts what, in the eyes of the relevant social group, is considered an “abnormal” (deviant) conduct. If, however, the rule infringed coincides with a criminal norm in force in the dominant society, this deviant behavior amounts to crime (Sellin, 1938 ). Sellin further distinguishes between what he calls primary and secondary conflicts. Primary conflicts occur when the norms of two different cultures (or cultural codes) clash. They may arise when two different codes regulate two contiguous areas; when the law of one group is extended to the territory of another group (as in the case of indigenous peoples or colonized territories); or, finally, when members of one cultural group migrate to another group. Secondary conflicts, by contrast, are the result of a process of “social differentiation,” that is to say of the evolution and fragmentation of one single culture into several ones. As mentioned, primary conflicts are typical of indigenous populations, colonized territories, and first-generation (foreign-born) migrants, who often preserve their loyalty to the norms of their original group and fail to assimilate to the behavioral and/or legal norms of the “new” dominant society. Secondary conflicts characterize, among others, the behavior of second-generation migrants. These individuals are often caught between two or more cultures, and their behavior is therefore influenced by different normative orders. While receiving a certain education within their families, they are at least partially acculturated with the norms of the host society. The result is confusion in their standards and codes of behavior and an internal struggle between conflicting forces (Adler, Mueller, & Laufer, 2013 ; Foblets, 1998 ; Melossi, 2015 ; Sellin, 1938 ).

The Chicago School and Subcultural Theories

Subcultural theories were developed in the context of the Chicago School of Sociology, which since the beginning of the 1900s focused on the study of urban sociology, in particular of immigration and minority communities. A subculture is defined as a “subdivision within the dominant culture that has its own norms, beliefs, and values” (Adler et al., 2013 ). Subcultural theories explain crime as a collective phenomenon, resulting from the adherence to values and norms, which are different from those of the dominant society. In situations of marginalization from the mainstream society, individuals bond together and develop their own norms, beliefs, and symbols, creating new identities and ways of life. In his Delinquent Boys ( 1955 ), Albert Cohen develops Merton’s theory of anomia to explain what he calls the “gang culture.” According to Cohen, youth from lower socioeconomic classes fail to achieve success within the mainstream (middle-class) society because of their disadvantaged backgrounds. The frustration resulting from this failure brings them to a refusal of the values of the middle class and pushes them toward subcultures, where they can aim at achieving success and status by committing crime. Walter Miller further developed Cohen’s theory rejecting, however, the role assigned by the latter to middle-class values. According to Miller, members of subcultures conform to a different set of values, which are different from and not influenced by those of the middle class. These lower-class values include, among others, toughness, smartness, and autonomy and are often demonstrated through the commission of crime (Adler et al., 2013 ; Cohen, 1955 ; Ferrell, 1995 ; Miller, 1958 ; Nwalozie, 2015 ).

Behaviors Resulting From the Influence of Cultural (and Subcultural) Values

Situations in which individuals commit acts that are influenced by the cultural norms of the minority group of which they are part but are contrary to the criminal laws of the dominant society have been named by certain doctrine as cultural offenses or culturally motivated crimes . According to Jeroen van Broeck a cultural offense is an:

act by a member of a minority culture, which is considered an offence by the legal system of the dominant culture. That same act is nevertheless, within the cultural group of the offender, condoned, accepted as normal behaviour and approved or even endorsed and promoted in the given situation.” (van Broeck, 2001 )

This definition is, however, too vague to provide clear criteria that could help assessing the role that culture had in the commission of the crime and the weight that it should be given in the criminal proceeding. The examples that follow might help identifying those behaviors that often have been labeled by the doctrine as cultural offenses.

Examples of Behaviors

The dynamic character of cultures and traditions and the difficulties encountered in identifying cases in which a cultural element is crucial in the offense make it hard, if not impossible, to crystallize all possible conducts giving rise to a cultural clash amounting to crime in a given state. However, examples deriving from national case law and legislation have been collected by scholars and help identifying “categories” of crimes, which often are considered, especially in Western countries, as grounded in a cultural, or better said norm conflict. Some of them fall within existing offenses and have as a peculiarity the cultural “motivation” ( in concreto ) for the offender. Others, instead, have been formalized as new and specific offenses with the aim of recognizing the specificity of these crimes and their connection with a specific cultural tradition in order to provide better protection for victims.

Female Genital Mutilation

Certainly, the most problematic are crimes that involve women and children as victims and are usually referred to as “harmful traditional practices” (UN Women website). These practices have been the object of international documents and conventions aimed at the protection of women and children and have been introduced as specific offenses in the criminal codes of many countries. The most known is the crime of female genital mutilation (FGM), which includes clitoridectomy, excision, infibulation, and any other harmful procedure to female genitalia that is performed for non-medical purposes (World Health Organization, 2018 ). This ritual is practiced in many areas of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and among immigrant communities in Europe and North America. It is usually performed on young girls (but sometimes also on adult women) and is deemed to ensure their virginity until marriage and her fidelity afterward. It becomes also a sign of cultural identity and a requirement for community membership (World Health Organization, 2018 ). This practice has formed the object of several international resolutions and recommendations and has been introduced in many national criminal codes as a specific offense. A similar discussion regarding the possibility of making male circumcision a crime was held in the last few years in some European countries. So far, no country has criminalized circumcision, which however remains punishable under provisions incriminating bodily harm. In certain countries, such as Germany, the willingness to shield certain (religious) groups from punishment has brought to the introduction of a justification for the practice of circumcision grounded on the right to parental care and custody and on freedom of religion.

Forced Marriage

Another practice, which has recently been at the center of national and international human rights strategies and has been criminalized by several countries as a specific offense is that of forced marriage . In certain countries, especially in rural areas, girls and boys (but also adult women) are forced to marry the partner their family has chosen for them and/or to remain married later on in life. This practice is closely linked to the idea of honor governing certain societies, but it is also influenced by economic reasons (such as the protection of family assets) and by issues related to migration (e.g., the preservation of the group in the diaspora or the facilitation of migration for other members of the family or the community) (Payton, 2015 ). Forced marriages can also be linked to other forms of violence perpetrated before the marriage by the parents (domestic violence, segregation, abduction, etc.), during the marriage by the husband (sexual and domestic violence) and also after the marriage in the event of a divorce, by the family of the wife or the husband (violence that can amount to killing).

Honor-Based Violence

Also connected to the idea of honor (and the related concept of shame) is so-called honor-based violence . Nowadays, cultures of honor are found in societies with tribal traditions, dominated by patrilineal, extended family clans (for example in South and Central Asia, Middle East, and North Africa) and in Western countries with high rates of immigrant population coming from these same societies (Oberwittler & Kasselt, 2014 ). In these patriarchal societies, the code of honor reproduces the status of a family or an entire group and relies largely on the sexuality of female family (or group) members. When the honor of a group is breached (or is perceived to have been breached) and shame is brought on that group, a reaction is needed in order to re-establish the status quo ante . A variety of crimes can be committed in the attempt to prevent or avenge a loss of honor. The most serious form of honor crime is homicide, so-called honor killing , usually perpetrated toward girls (rarely men) who are perceived to have brought shame on the family with their immoral behavior. In order to qualify as an honor killing, the murder should be premeditated and organized; it is seen as the result of a collective decision-making process that involves a “family council” in which the final decision is made and the details of the killing are specified (Honour-Based Violence Awareness Network). Another form of murder related to the idea of honor is the one perpetrated in the context of a blood feud . Blood feuds usually arise due to quarrels over land or over women and can last years or even decades. The killing of a member of the family of the “perpetrator” by the family of the “victim” triggers a spiral of violence fostered by revenge, which may result in the murder of several members of both families until an agreement is reached (Tellenbach, 2006 ). Other crimes, often committed in the name of honor and tradition, are, among others, sex-selective abortion , female infanticide , and forced abortion (for cases of pre-marital or extra-marital pregnancy). A different conception of honor, not necessarily linked to sexuality but more to moral integrity and respect, can be at the basis of other types of violence, including murder. This is the case of reactions to certain insults whose seriousness can only be understood by having a look at the cultural context in which they are exchanged (Basile, 2010 ).

Other Offenses

Other forms of killings are related to old superstitions. It is, for example, the case of witch killing and the killing of albinos , especially diffused in certain African regions or to rituals such as the Japanese oyaku shinju , parent-child suicide as a reaction to shame (Carstens, 2009 ; Renteln, 2004 ).

Overall, the majority of cases in which the cultural element is invoked by the defendant as a justification for his/her behavior are related to crimes perpetrated against family members. They consist of domestic violence , sexual violence , child abuse , and sometime amount to segregation or slavery . The justification brought forward by the accused is linked to a different conception of parental authority and the role of the pater familias , a different code of conduct for women, especially with regard to the relationship between men and women. Sometimes they concern the refusal of parents to send their children to school or to the use of minor children for begging or the extraction of social welfare (for example, in rom communities) or the refusal to authorize medical treatments (such as surgeries or blood transfusions). A variety of rituals linked to healing, superstition, and possession may also involve physical violence, scars (so-called scarification) and tattoos. In certain countries, marriage by capture is still practiced and involves the kidnapping and rape of the future wife (Basile, 2010 ; Renteln, 2004 ; Ruggiu, 2012 ).

Other offenses conflict with public order in Western societies. Among them are drug consumption (linked to religious or ritual ceremonies), traditional or religious attire (such as covering the face or wearing a weapon like the Sikh kirpan ), use of animals for certain ceremonies or their ritual slaughtering (prohibited in some countries), polygamy , and ritual burials (Renteln, 2004 ).

Cultural Differences in Criminal Law

The identification of the most common conflicts of norms is only a first step in the analysis of the relationship between culture and crime or, better said, between culture and the criminal justice system. Criminal law defines what behavior is deviant and what is not and has a value-imposing function. Criminal justice systems reflect principles and values shared by the dominant society and help orient the behavior of citizens (Durkheim, 1983 ). An important question to be answered pertains to the weight that cultures others than the dominant one is or should be given within criminal law and criminal proceedings. Is multicultural criminal justice desirable or should criminal justice authorities rely on a strict principle of formal equality and ignore any cultural considerations? And if cultural difference is taken into account, what could be a suitable instrument to do so?

The doctrinal debate has engaged both political philosophers and criminal lawyers who have brought reasons in support and against the use of culture within criminal proceedings. While political philosophers have mainly focused on the construction of the individual identity; on issues of socialization and agency; and on concepts such as equality, freedom, and justice in multicultural contexts, criminal lawyers have analyzed fundamental criminal law principles, paying attention to the ascription of responsibility, the assessment of blameworthiness, and to questions of punishment and just desert (Kymlicka, Lernestedt, & Matravers, 2014 ). The following paragraphs will try to recall the major arguments appearing in the mentioned debate and the different instruments used to bring culture in the criminal justice system, sometimes with the purpose of excluding punishment for members of minority groups, some others with the intent to extend punitivity.

Criminalization

A first way in which culture enters the criminal justice system is through choices of criminalization. Criminalization is necessarily based upon cultural assumptions and is used to avoid harm and ensure the respect of human rights and protect victims. Gender equality, protection of minors, as well as protection of public health and safety, are often at the basis of criminalization of behaviors that despite being detrimental to certain subjects are considered acceptable within certain groups, including the majority of a society (Kymlicka, Lernestedt, & Matravers, 2014 ). One example is represented by the evolution of legislations on sexual and domestic violence, which now criminalize behaviors considered “normal” by the majority of the society 50 or 60 years ago. Currently, at least in Western countries, the focus has shifted toward behaviors responding to traditional practices or customs considered expressions of different normative systems, contrary to international human rights standards and to the principles of liberal democracies. Typical examples of criminalization of “cultural” practices are recent legislations criminalizing forced and child marriages and female genital mutilation. The legislators of many countries have felt the need to expressly criminalize acts that would have fallen under more general categories of crimes (such has bodily harm, threat, coercion, etc.) to reinforce the disvalue attached to such behaviors, practiced by certain groups within their societies, and deny any room for pluralism in this area (see European Fundamental Rights Agency, 2014 ; Haenen, 2014 ; Thiara, Condon & Schröttle, 2011 ). While in the past, the discourse on cultural practices and their recognition within the criminal justice system was aimed at reducing punitivity for offenders coming from minority groups, 1 more recently the discussion moved in the opposite direction. Great importance in this sense is to be given to the Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (hereinafter Istanbul Convention). The convention encourages states to take action to eliminate any form of violence against women, and in doing so it often stresses the need to eradicate “prejudices, customs, traditions and other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men” and to “ensure that culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called ‘honour’ shall not be considered as justification for any acts of violence covered by the scope of this Convention” (Istanbul Convention, art. 12). The convention also encourages states to criminalize behaviors such as that of forcing somebody into a marriage (art. 37) and of coercing someone to undergo (or performing) female genital mutilation (art. 38). Article 42 of the convention underlines once again that “culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called ‘honour’ shall not be regarded as justification for such acts. This covers, in particular, claims that the victim has transgressed cultural, religious, social or traditional norms or customs of appropriate behaviour.” It seems clear from the text that no room should be left for the appreciation of cultural practices with a decriminalizing or mitigating purpose.

Decriminalization and Exemptions

A second, and to some extent opposite, way through which culture can play a role within the criminal justice system is through decriminalization of certain behaviors or exemptions from criminal provisions for certain groups in order to allow them to perform their traditions and customs. In such a way, decriminalization of certain practices can be used to shield individuals from punishment and ensure the respect of their human rights. This has been the case for homosexuality, which has been decriminalized in Western Europe in the last few decades. Although this practice remains a crime in many areas of Africa and South East Asia, the respect of human rights imposes nowadays a complete decriminalization (see Johnson & Vanderbeck, 2014 ). A similar discourse has been made for polygamy, which is instead considered a crime in most of the Western world, although some claim for its decriminalization (for a discussion on this point, see Husak, 2014 ; Parekh, 2006 ). Partially different is the question of (women) adultery, which is still punished in several countries, especially Muslim ones, sometimes very severely. International organizations and NGOs working for the protection of women’s rights have repeatedly asked states to remove from their criminal codes provisions incriminating adultery (see UN Virtual Knowledge Centre to End Violence against Women and Girls).

Exemptions from criminal law provisions for minority groups have been discussed and sometimes granted in the name of freedom of religion and belief and in the name of tolerance. This is, for example, the case of indigenous peoples and other groups, such as Rastafarians, that in certain states are exempted from laws criminalizing the possession and consumption of narcotics (Kymlicka et al., 2014 ; Renteln, 2004 ). A similar decision, although on a different matter, has been taken by the German Parliament, which in 2012 passed a bill to decriminalize non-therapeutic male circumcision performed under certain circumstances on children (art. 1631 German Criminal Code), in order to shield parents of certain religious groups from the accuse of bodily injury.

Other Instruments That Diminish or Exclude Defendant’s Culpability

Another possible form of interaction between culture and criminal law concerns the way in which responsibility is ascribed and blameworthiness assessed. The idea of a just punishment necessarily involves evaluations of individual blameworthiness and implies a certain degree of agency in the subject to be punished (Kymlicka et al., 2014 ). So far, traditional criminal law instruments have been used by defendants (not always successfully) in order to see their cultural claims analyzed in courts and their responsibility reduced or eliminated.

Ignorance of the Law

A first argument that could be raised by defendants is ignorance of the law . A defendant might argue that when committing the crime, he/she was not aware of the existence of a criminal provision prohibiting that behavior, either because of his/her recent arrival in the country (often coupled with the absence of a similar provision in the country of origin) or because of his/her culture, which allows or even encourages such a behavior (Greenawalt, 2014 ). The general principle in criminal law is that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” However, in order to comply with standards of due process and to fully respect the principle of individual responsibility, the principle has been mitigated, especially at the jurisprudential level, and exceptions are now admitted in cases where ignorance of the law is considered reasonably justified (Greenawalt, 2014 ; Renteln, 1992 –1993).

Mistake of Fact

A similar discourse can be made for mistake of fact , when the perception of reality, and therefore the mistake, is caused by the cultural background of the accused. A mistake negates the mens rea when the act would have been lawful if the facts were as the defendants supposed them to be (Sams, 1986 ). The mistake should be honest and the behavior should be a consequence of the mistake itself. In case of immigrant defendants, their belief and societal norms might be considered the cause for a mistake and therefore exclude responsibility (Sams, 1986 ).

Justifications

Justifications might be invoked in order to exclude responsibility of the offender. They preclude the existence of a criminal offense, even in the presence of both actus reus and mens rea . While the harm caused by the crime remains a legally recognized harm, under certain conditions, it is outweighed by the need to avoid a greater harm and is therefore justified (Robinson, 1982 ). This is the case, for example, in situations of necessity (in which a subject is forced to make a choice between two evils) and in situations in which the subject acts in self-defense , that is to say in response to an unlawful aggression. In such cases, the author is morally justified for the action committed. Cultural considerations have sometimes been used by defendants as a ground for justifications as they could affect the appreciation of what constitutes an evil or an unlawful aggression (Greenawalt, 2014 ; Renteln, 1992 –1993). However, given the exceptional and exculpatory character of justifications, broadening their scope on the basis of cultural considerations does not seem to be advisable.

Other typical instruments that might be grounded on cultural evidence are excuses. Excuses recognize the wrongfulness of the act but exclude, at least partially, the liability of the offender. They refer to the circumstances or conditions under which the accused has acted and which have influenced his/her conduct (Lacey, 2011 ). The application of criminal law and punishment presupposes the existence of an individual (the actor) with certain minimum capacities, both volitional and cognitive ones (Lacey, 2016 ). Volitional capacities (or conditions) refer to the ability of the offender to control his/her behavior and might be reduced in situations of fear, distress, or rage. Cognitive conditions, instead, refer to the capability of the offender to appreciate the wrongful character of his/her conduct and its consequences. Socialization can play a significant role in the way in which this appreciation takes place (Lacey, 2016 ). One example of excuse is provocation that in given circumstances is capable of reducing accuses of murder to manslaughter. Different systems have different rules to what concerns provocation, but usually the excuse applies when the author has committed the act under extreme emotional disturbance caused by somebody else’s unjust behavior. The question therefore becomes whether the loss of control of the actor can be understood as reasonable or not. Here cultural consideration might again play a significant role (Greenawalt, 2014 ; see also Amirthalingam, 2009 ; Sing, 1999 ).

A further possibility is to consider a defendant’s cultural arguments in the sentencing phase, either in the sense of mitigating or enhancing punishment. As already mentioned, international instruments such as the Istanbul Convention prevent states from granting mitigation of punishment on the basis of “culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called honour” while some countries have considered enhancing punishment based on cultural arguments. In some cases, however, sentencing guidelines and judges’ discretion have been used to reduce punishment for offenders coming from minority groups, on the basis of the motivations brought forward by them 2 (Shein, 2007 ; Sikora, 2001 ; Woodman, 2009 ). On the one hand, this could allow the necessary flexibility required in a field that is hardly subject to generalization. On the other hand, however, giving judges high degrees of discretion would endanger equality of treatment and would leave considerations about the relevance of cultural traditions to personal evaluations (Greenawalt, 2014 ).

Specific rehabilitation programs, focused on the cultural influence experienced by the offender, might also be imposed in addition or as an alternative to ordinary punishment, such as those recommended to so-called Latino batterers in the United States. Restorative justice practices (see the next paragraphs) also make extensive use of alternative forms of punishment, often tailored to the need of the offender, the victim, and the affected community.

Formalization of an Autonomous Cultural Defense?

The previous paragraphs identified existing criminal law instruments that are or might be used in order to introduce culture in a criminal proceeding. In the last few decades, however, scholars have been discussing the possibility of introducing an autonomous defense based solely on culture. The discussion took place mainly in common low systems; and so far, no country has decided to introduce such an instrument. “A cultural defence is a defence asserted by immigrants, refugees and indigenous people based on their customs or customary law. A successful cultural defence would permit the reduction (and possible elimination) of a charge with a concomitant reduction in punishment” (Renteln, 1992 –1993). This autonomous, general defense would create an exception for certain defendants who could see their culpability diminished (if not excluded) based on their cultural traditions. However, a lot of questions would be raised in case such a defense had to be introduced. First, it is not clear who would be entitled to raise the defense (Greenawalt, 2014 ; Sams, 1986 ). Second, one could wonder why such a defense should be allowed for culture and not for other relevant factors or background conditions that have a similar impact on the life of individuals, such as socioeconomic conditions, abusive parents, violent neighborhood, and so on (Greenawalt, 2014 ; Lacey, 2011 , 2016 ).

The debate on the opportunity of introducing a cultural defense involved both policy and legal arguments. The following paragraphs will retrace the main arguments in support and against the formalization of such an instrument.

Arguments in Support of the Cultural Defense

Those who support the formalization of a cultural defense see it as an expression of the principles of individualized justice and cultural pluralism. In cases in which the offender acted without fully comprehending the disvalue of his/her conduct or did so in adherence to fundamental cultural values conflicting with the criminal norms of the dominant society, this element should not be underestimated in the evaluation of his/her degree of culpability (Anonymous, 1986 ). Moreover, by judging everyone according to the standards of his/her native culture, cultural diversity would be preserved and the principle of equality among ethnic groups fulfilled (Wong, 1999 ).

Supporters of the cultural defense rely on the theory of enculturation to stress the importance that cultural values have in shaping people’s personality and in orientating (even subconsciously) human behavior. Alison Dundes Renteln argues for the recognition of a cultural defense as a partial excuse. According to the author, a partial excuse would allow the accommodation of the motivation of the defendant and his/her degree of culpability, without requiring an acquittal or, on the contrary, excessive punishment. In order to allow some flexibility but at the same time guide judges and prevent abuses, Renteln formulates a test that should help in the application of the defense. The test should rely on the testimony of an expert and consists of three questions: (1) Is the litigant a member of the ethnic group? (2) Does the group have such a tradition? (3) Was the litigant influenced by the tradition when he or she acted? (Renteln, 2004 ). A longer and more elaborated test was proposed by Ilenia Ruggiu in 2012 . This second test encompasses 12 passages and deals with objective, subjective, and relational aspects. The following questions need to be answered: (1) Is it possible to define the practice as cultural? (2) What description of the cultural practice and the group that adopts it should be given? (3) Should the practice be placed within the bigger cultural (normative) system of the group? (4) Is the practice essential and mandatory within this system? (5) Is the practice undisputed or do discussions and criticism exist? (6) Is the group discriminated against within the society? (7) How would have the “reasonable cultural person” (a member of the same group) reacted? (8) How honest is the subject? (9) Does one need to find a practice in the dominant culture that has a similar meaning for a member of that culture (a “cultural equivalent”)? (10) Does the practice involve harm? (11) What is the impact of the practice on the dominant culture? (12) What are the reasons brought by the defendant that explain why the practice should be maintained? (Ruggiu, 2012 ).

The test proposed by Ruggiu touches upon many of the problematic issues related to the introduction of a formal cultural defense in the criminal justice system. These same issues are often raised by opponents of this instrument to show the risks and disadvantages of the formalization of a specific defense related to culture.

Arguments Against the Cultural Defence

Arguments against the formalization of a cultural defense relate mainly to three aspects: the problematic definition of the concept of culture, the consequences in terms of gender and power imbalances, and the impact of the defense on core legal principles.

To what concerns the first aspect, according to opponents of the cultural defense, culture is a fluid and evolving concept, and any attempt to define it under standardized criteria brings with it the risk of essentialism. Even through the use of experts in courts, it would be impossible to get a comprehensive idea of a cultural group and its practices and to create a rule flexible enough to be applied to a variety of cases. Describing a culture through its most problematic practices risks creating divisions between the dominant society and the minority group, promoting “othering” and stereotypes. Rather than offering minorities a more equal solution, the defense might create a differential set of rules along ethnic lines and contribute to the revival of old racist and exclusionary discourses (Chiu, 1994 ; Coleman, 1996 ; Fournier, 2002 ; Karayanni, 2009 ; Volpp, 1996 ; Wong, 1999 ).

A second argument used against the recognition of a specific defense is the alleged incompatibility between multiculturalism and women’s rights. The majority of feminist movements challenge the idea that multicultural policies provide better freedom and security for all members of a group. In their view, a strong tension exists between feminism and multiculturalism, as multicultural policies (including the cultural defense) tend to overlook the differences existing within groups and the gender and power imbalances, which play a role in the communitarian dimension. Cultures (and religions) in history have favored the control of women by men, through practices such as female genital mutilations, forced marriages, and polygamy. Granting these groups specific rights in the name of culture means reinforcing patriarchal traditions. (Chiu, 1994 ; Okin, 1997 ; Phillips, 2003 ; Volpp, 2001 ). In this direction moved the above-mentioned Istanbul Convention that forbids states to take into account culture and tradition as a ground for reduction of punishment.

A third category of criticism relates to some core principles of criminal justice systems that could be endangered by the recognition of such an instrument. The first one is the principle of equality (and non-discrimination). Allowing a special treatment for certain “categories” of subjects would open the way for a multitude of claims for differential regimes and undermine the uniformity and stability of the criminal justice system and the maintenance of social order. Besides this, both general and specific deterrence would be weakened as well as the normative function of criminal law. As it would be impossible to foresee all possible cases to which the cultural defense could be applied (including behaviors, ethnic or religious groups, individuals, etc.) the principle of legal certainty, a core element of the rule of law, would also be infringed (Bernardi, 2006 ; Coleman, 1996 ). Moreover, according to its opponents, the cultural defense clashes with another founding principle of most Western criminal justice systems, that of individual responsibility. Considering culture as the primary motive of action, the responsibility would inevitably shift from the offender to the culture, or more specifically to the tradition or custom at stake. According to some scholars, therefore, the role assigned to culture would be too big and would obfuscate other conditions and circumstances that also had an impact on the offender’s conduct (Chiu, 1994 ; Wong, 1999 ). Related to this last point is the accusation that a cultural defense would portray members of minority cultures as lacking autonomy. The determinist understanding of culture, which often pervades the debate about accommodation of minorities, represents individuals coming from minority groups as entirely controlled by cultural norms, incapable of making independent choices and of exiting the group (Phillips, 2007 ).

At the moment, the formalization of a cultural defense seems unlikely. Although cultural evidence is sometimes taken into account by judges through existing defenses, international human rights instruments are clearly discouraging states to recognize culture, religion, and tradition as a justification for crime, at least when harm (and vulnerable subjects such as women and children) is involved.

As suggested by Nicola Lacey, the overall debate on the cultural defense should probably be placed within a broader discussion on the scope and role of criminal law, its normative character, and the goals of criminalization ( 2011 ).

Alternative Dispute Resolution and Restorative Justice

The considerations made so far concerned the place for cultural differences within the criminal justice system. There are, however, ways of dealing with such differences outside the formal system. For the purpose of this article, it is worth mentioning the importance acquired in the last few decades by alternative dispute resolution mechanisms (ADR) and in particular by the restorative justice (RJ) movement (Braithwaite, 2003 ; Christie, 1977 ). Often, it is not only the criminalization of certain behaviors that clashes with specific cultures or traditions but also the procedures used to assess a person’s guilt. ADR and, more specifically for criminal cases, RJ mechanisms are sometimes used to allow room for discussion and appreciation of cultural practices and to deliver justice in a more culturally sensitive way (Williams, 2002 ). These mechanisms can be linked to the formal justice system (which can refer cases to external RJ agencies) or act independently from it (as the example of community-based organizations or leaders).

Restorative Justice Mechanisms

The diffusion of ADR in the Western world began between the 1960s and the 1970s with the aim of reducing the costs and the duration of legal proceedings. Some features clearly distinguish Western dispute resolution from a traditional, indigenous one. In particular, professionalism is at the center of this new trend, and specific knowledge is required in order to perform the role of mediator or arbitrator. Moreover Western countries have tried to partially incorporate ADR within the framework of the formal justice system with the aim of extending a state’s control over them (Abu-Nimer, 2001 ; Singer, 1990 ). While ADR such as arbitration and negotiation are mainly used for civil and commercial issues, restorative justice, and in particular mediation, is suitable to solve criminal disputes. RJ has been described as “a process whereby parties with a stake in a specific offence collectively resolve how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future” (Marshall, 1999 ). The appearance of restorative justice in Western contemporary debate dates back to the publication, in 1997 , of the article “Conflicts as Property” by the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, in which he criticizes the predominant role of the State within criminal proceedings and he claims the need “to return[s] conflicts to their rightful owners,” that is to say, the victim, the offender, and the community affected by the crime (Christie, 1977 ). Restorative justice originates from the practices of indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It refuses a strictly retributive conception of punishment, and it focuses instead on the reparation of the harm done by the crime often through the compensation of the victim (and sometimes of the community) and the reintegration of the offender in the community (so-called reintegrative shaming) (Braithwaite, 1989 ). RJ models are mainly three: victim-offender-mediation; family-group-conferencing; and peacemaking (or sentencing) circles. All programs bring together the offender and the victim of a crime and a third, neutral person, while the two latter involve a larger circle of people somehow connected to the parties or affected by the crime. Sometimes representatives of the state are involved. All the mentioned mechanisms allow a great deal of dialogue among participants and a discussion among values and principles relevant for the parties and for the community involved and some degree of flexibility to what concerns the solutions to be adopted in order to punish the offender and repair the harm done by the crime. Often a plurality of normativities, including state law, religious; and cultural norms, play a role in understanding and resolving a dispute.

Community Alternative Dispute Resolution

The diffusion of ADR within immigrant communities in Europe is often looked at with skepticism. These forms of private or informal justice usually make use of mediation or arbitration procedures relying on customary or religious norms.

Particularly debated is the role of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal and Sharia Councils in the United Kingdom. The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT) is recognized under the Arbitration Act ( 1996 ) and provides services in the area of family disputes and divorce, commercial and civil arbitration, and inheritance, arbitrating on the basis of Sharia law. In 2008 , it launched an initiative on forced marriages, a practice that was criminalized in 2014 (MAT website). The tribunal has also been accused of dealing with situations of domestic and family violence through the practice of arbitration, failing to report cases to the police. Similar accusations have been directed toward Islamic Sharia Councils, established in the United Kingdom to advise Muslims on issues of personal and family law. Once again, criticism has been raised with regard to the procedures followed and cases heard within the councils. Religious leaders operating within these bodies are accused of pressuring female victims of violence to reconcile with the perpetrators (often the husbands) of threatening them and deterring them from reporting crimes to the police (MacEoin & Green, 2009 ; One Law for All Report, 2010 ; Zee, 2016 ).

In Germany, a similar discussion is currently going on with regard to certain migrant groups (Turkish, Kurdish, Lebanese, etc.) that tend to solve their internal conflicts without recurring to the formal criminal justice system (so-called Paralleljustiz) (Rohe & Jaraba, 2015 ). Imams or other well-respected persons within the community are addressed when disputes related to family, marriage, personal status, honor, and other forms of violence occur. As for criminal cases, the resolution of the dispute sees the involvement of a third person (the mediator or arbitrator) and the families of the victim and offender. Common meetings might take place and compensation from the perpetrator to the victim is prescribed. Traditional, customary, and religious norms might play a role in the resolution of the dispute. In such cases, the participation of formal justice institutions becomes unnecessary or, in certain cases, even counterproductive and victims and witnesses are forced (or spontaneously decide) to withdraw their declarations (Rottleuthner, 2012 ; Wagner, 2011 ).

Despite the fact that most criminal offenses are not reported to the police, such a privatization of criminal law is seen by many as a threat to the state’s monopoly over the use of force. Moreover, it raises questions about the respect of both victims’ and offenders’ substantive and procedural rights in the resolution of the dispute. Besides these critical positions there are, however, those who see an important function carried out by these mediators or arbitrators, such as breaking the circle of violence in situations of revenge and retaliatory action (e.g., blood feuds) between clans and facilitating access to justice for certain members of the community whose needs are not addressed by the formal justice system (Rottleuthner, 2014 ).

In lack of a criminal justice system capable of addressing the needs of victims and defendants coming from minority groups, community dispute resolution mechanisms represent a possible alternative for them. The risks presented above exist also with regard to these programs. State authorities should be able to make use of the expertise existing within communities and cooperate with community bodies in order to ensure the respect of human rights while allowing a certain degree of pluralism and facilitating access to justice for all.

SOC101: Introduction to Sociology (2020.A.01)

Deviance, crime, and social control.

Read this chapter for a review of deviance, crime, and social control. As you read each section, consider the following topics:

Read this section for an introduction to deviance and social control. What do you think about the experiences of the two students discussed in the chapter? Do you agree with the school's ruling about the dress code? Why or why not?
Take note of the definition of deviance and how social control is enforced through types of sanctions (Table 1). Can you think of times when you have been affected by sanctions?
Take note of the various theoretical perspectives typically used in sociology to describe or explain deviant behavior. Focusing on labeling theory and secondary deviance, can you think of a time in your life when a label assigned to you may have affected your behavior?
Take note of the various theoretical perspectives explaining deviance in society. Take note of the examples accompanying each theoretical model.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance

Learning objectives.

Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society through four sociologist's theories
Explain how conflict theory understands deviance and crime in society
Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labeling and other theories

Protesters are shown here wearing yellow chicken costumers and holding PETA signs

Figure 7.4 Functionalists believe that deviance plays an important role in society and can be used to challenge people's views. Protesters, such as these PETA members, often use this method to draw attention to their cause. Why does deviance occur? How does it affect a society? Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories that attempt to explain what deviance and crime mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with the way the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Strain theory, social disorganization theory, and cultural deviance theory represent three functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people's present views (1893). For instance, when black students across the United States participated in sit-ins during the civil rights movement, they challenged society's notions of segregation. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1893). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn't allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is an inherent part of a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim's ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. From birth, we're encouraged to achieve the "American Dream" of financial success. A woman who attends business school, receives her MBA, and goes on to make a million-dollar income as CEO of a company is said to be a success. However, not everyone in our society stands on equal footing. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. According to Merton's theory, an entrepreneur who can't afford to launch his own company may be tempted to embezzle from his employer for start-up funds. Merton defined five ways people respond to this gap between having a socially accepted goal and having no socially accepted way to pursue it.

Conformity : Those who conform choose not to deviate. They pursue their goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means.
Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These members of society focus on conformity rather than attaining a distant dream.
Retreatism : Others retreat and reject society's goals and means. Some beggars and street people have withdrawn from society's goal of financial success.
Rebellion : A handful of people rebel and replace a society's goals and means with their own. Terrorists or freedom fighters look to overthrow a society's goals through socially unacceptable means.

Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. An individual who grows up in a poor neighborhood with high rates of drug use, violence, teenage delinquency, and deprived parenting is more likely to become a criminal than an individual from a wealthy neighborhood with a good school system and families who are involved positively in the community.

A block of run-down, dirty rowhouses is shown.

Figure 7.5 Proponents of social disorganization theory believe that individuals who grow up in impoverished areas are more likely to participate in deviant or criminal behaviors.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance. A person isn't born a criminal but becomes one over time, often based on factors in his or her social environment. Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. For instance, studies have found that children from disadvantaged communities who attend preschool programs that teach basic social skills are significantly less likely to engage in criminal activity.

Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay: Cultural Deviance Theory

Cultural deviance theory suggests that conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society causes crime. Researchers Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) studied crime patterns in Chicago in the early 1900s. They found that violence and crime were at their worst in the middle of the city and gradually decreased the farther someone traveled from the urban center toward the suburbs. Shaw and McKay noticed that this pattern matched the migration patterns of Chicago citizens. New immigrants, many of them poor and lacking knowledge of the English language, lived in neighborhoods inside the city. As the urban population expanded, wealthier people moved to the suburbs and left behind the less privileged. Shaw and McKay concluded that socioeconomic status correlated to race and ethnicity resulted in a higher crime rate. The mix of cultures and values created a smaller society with different ideas of deviance, and those values and ideas were transferred from generation to generation. The theory of Shaw and McKay has been further tested and expounded upon by Robert Sampson and Byron Groves (1989). They found that poverty, ethnic diversity, and family disruption in given localities had a strong positive correlation with social disorganization. They also determined that social disorganization was, in turn, associated with high rates of crime and delinquency - or deviance. Recent studies Sampson conducted with Lydia Bean (2006) revealed similar findings. High rates of poverty and single-parent homes correlated with high rates of juvenile violence.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theory looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike functionalists, conflict theorists don't see these factors as positive functions of society. They see them as evidence of inequality in the system. They also challenge social disorganization theory and control theory and argue that both ignore racial and socioeconomic issues and oversimplify social trends. Conflict theorists also look for answers to the correlation of gender and race with wealth and crime.

Karl Marx: An Unequal System

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite

Crime and Social Class

While crime is often associated with the underprivileged, crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful remain an under-punished and costly problem within society. The FBI reported that victims of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft lost a total of $15.3 billion dollars in 2009 (FB1 2010). In comparison, when former advisor and financier Bernie Madoff was arrested in 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reported that the estimated losses of his financial Ponzi scheme fraud were close to $50 billion. This imbalance based on class power is also found within U.S. criminal law. In the 1980s, the use of crack cocaine (cocaine in its purest form) quickly became an epidemic that swept the country's poorest urban communities. Its pricier counterpart, cocaine, was associated with upscale users and was a drug of choice for the wealthy. The legal implications of being caught by authorities with crack versus cocaine were starkly different. In 1986, federal law mandated that being caught in possession of 50 grams of crack was punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. An equivalent prison sentence for cocaine possession, however, required possession of 5,000 grams. In other words, the sentencing disparity was 1 to 100. This inequality in the severity of punishment for crack versus cocaine paralleled the unequal social class of respective users. A conflict theorist would note that those in society who hold the power are also the ones who make the laws concerning crime. In doing so, they make laws that will benefit them, while the powerless classes who lack the resources to make such decisions suffer the consequences. The crack-cocaine punishment disparity remained until 2010, when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased the disparity to 1 to 18.

A small pile of confiscated cocaine is shown here.

Figure 7.6 From 1986 until 2010, the punishment for possessing crack, a "poor person's drug," was 100 times stricter than the punishment for cocaine use, a drug favored by the wealthy.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviors as deviant or conventional. Labeling theory, differential association, social disorganization theory, and control theory fall within the realm of symbolic interactionism.

Labeling Theory

Although all of us violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Those who do, however, have often been labeled "deviant" by society and have gradually come to believe it themselves. Labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures. Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory and identified two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual's self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future. Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person's self-concept and behavior begin to change after his or her actions are labeled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a "deviant" as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, he develops a reputation as a "troublemaker". As a result, the student starts acting out even more and breaking more rules; he has adopted the "troublemaker" label and embraced this deviant identity. Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts.

Social Policy and Debate

The right to vote.

Before she lost her job as an administrative assistant, Leola Strickland postdated and mailed a handful of checks for amounts ranging from $90 to $500. By the time she was able to find a new job, the checks had bounced, and she was convicted of fraud under Mississippi law. Strickland pleaded guilty to a felony charge and repaid her debts; in return, she was spared from serving prison time. Strickland appeared in court in 2001. More than ten years later, she is still feeling the sting of her sentencing. Why? Because Mississippi is one of twelve states in the United States that bans convicted felons from voting. To Strickland, who said she had always voted, the news came as a great shock. She isn't alone. Some 5.3 million people in the United States are currently barred from voting because of felony convictions. These individuals include inmates, parolees, probationers, and even people who have never been jailed, such as Leola Strickland. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states are allowed to deny voting privileges to individuals who have participated in "rebellion or other crime". Although there are no federally mandated laws on the matter, most states practice at least one form of felony disenfranchisement. At present, it's estimated that approximately 2.4 percent of the possible voting population is disfranchised, that is, lacking the right to vote. Is it fair to prevent citizens from participating in such an important process? Proponents of disfranchisement laws argue that felons have a debt to pay to society. Being stripped of their right to vote is part of the punishment for criminal deeds. Such proponents point out that voting isn't the only instance in which ex-felons are denied rights; state laws also ban released criminals from holding public office, obtaining professional licenses, and sometimes even inheriting property. Opponents of felony disfranchisement in the United States argue that voting is a basic human right and should be available to all citizens regardless of past deeds. Many point out that felony disfranchisement has its roots in the 1800s, when it was used primarily to block black citizens from voting. Even nowadays, these laws disproportionately target poor minority members, denying them a chance to participate in a system that, as a social conflict theorist would point out, is already constructed to their disadvantage. Those who cite labeling theory worry that denying deviants the right to vote will only further encourage deviant behavior. If ex-criminals are disenfranchised from voting, are they being disenfranchised from society?

A woman is shown voting at a voting booth.

Figure 7.7 Should a former felony conviction permanently strip a U.S. citizen of the right to vote?

Edwin Sutherland: Differential Association

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behavior developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning. His conclusions established differential association theory , which suggested that individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. A tween whose friends are sexually active is more likely to view sexual activity as acceptable. Sutherland's theory may explain why crime is multigenerational. A longitudinal study beginning in the 1960s found that the best predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior in children was whether their parents had been convicted of a crime. Children who were younger than ten years old when their parents were convicted were more likely than other children to engage in spousal abuse and criminal behavior by their early thirties. Even when taking socioeconomic factors such as dangerous neighborhoods, poor school systems, and overcrowded housing into consideration, researchers found that parents were the main influence on the behavior of their offspring.

Travis Hirschi: Control Theory

Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society's norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic partners.
Commitment refers to the investments we make in the community. A well-respected local businesswoman who volunteers at her synagogue and is a member of the neighborhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a woman who doesn't have a career or ties to the community.
Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person's likelihood of deviance. Children who are members of little league baseball teams have fewer family crises.
The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, he or she will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park, because a clean environment is a social value to him.


Strain Theory	Robert Merton	A lack of ways to reach socially accepted goals by accepted methods
Social Disorganization Theory	University of Chicago researchers	Weak social ties and a lack of social control; society has lost the ability to enforce norms with some groups
Cultural Deviance Theory	Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay	Conformity to the cultural norms of lower-class society

Unequal System	Karl Marx	Inequalities in wealth and power that arise from the economic system
Power Elite	C. Wright Mills	Ability of those in power to define deviance in ways that maintain the status quo

Labeling Theory	Edwin Lemert	The reactions of others, particularly those in power who are able to determine labels
Differential Association Theory	Edwin Sutherland	Learning and modeling deviant behavior seen in other people close to the individual
Control Theory	Travis Hirschi	Feelings of disconnection from society

Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Deviance

An Interactionist Appreciation

Cite this chapter

Daniel Dotter

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There have been longstanding conflicts between scientific theories and more humanistic perspectives in the history of deviance studies (Matza 1969; Schur 1980). As well, in recent decades the trajectory of this history has been influenced by the development of criminology and criminal justice (Dotter 2004). With this backdrop, the present paper has three purposes. First, I will argue that interactionist labeling remains today a crucial theoretical perspective for the study of deviance and crime. With regard to the former, interactionism has arguably been the primary theoretical focus for nearly a century (Becker 1963/73; Faris 1970). As such, the centrality of a causal model of deviance (i. e., “why” questions, of the antecedents to misbehavior) has, especially since the 1960s, been continually challenged by various interactionist perspectives examining the meaning context of deviance as stigmatization (Douglas 1984; Goffman 1963/86). Mainstream criminology, and more recently the field of criminal justice, have always had a primary place for scientific and rationalistic models (Akers and Sellers 2009); the perspective of cultural criminology has developed as a counter-argument to the dominant “boring” causal analysis of the mainstream, as well as its largely uncritical acceptance of classical and neo-classical legalisms (Ferrell and Sanders 1995; Ferrell, Hayward, and Young 2008; Hayward and Presdee 2010).

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Dotter, D. (2011). Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Deviance. In: Peters, H., Dellwing, M. (eds) Langweiliges Verbrechen. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-93402-0_6

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Subcultural Theories of Deviance

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 10, 2022 by Karl Thompson

Subcultural Theory: The Basics

A Subculture is a group that has values that are different to the mainstream culture. Subcultural theorists argue that deviance is the result of whole groups breaking off from society who have deviant values (subcultures) and deviance is a result of these individuals conforming to the values and norms of the subculture to which they belong.

In contrast to Social Control theorists, it is the pull of the peer group that encourages individuals to commit crime, rather than the lack of attachment to the family or other mainstream institutions. Subcultural theory also helps explain non-utilitarian crimes such as vandalism and joy riding which strain theory cannot really explain. Deviance is a collective response to marginalisation.

four subcultural social theorists of deviance you should know about…

Albert cohen: deviant subcultures emerge because of status frustration.

Albert Cohen argues that working class subcultures emerge because they are denied status in society. Just like Merton, Cohen argued that working class boys strove to emulate middle-class values and aspirations, but lacked the means to achieve success. This led to status frustration: a sense of personal failure and inadequacy.

Cohen argued that many boys react to this by rejecting socially acceptable values and patterns of acceptable behaviour. Because there are several boys going through the same experiences, they end up banding together and forming delinquent subcultures.

This delinquent subculture reverses the norms and values of mainstream culture, offering positive rewards (status) to those who are the most deviant. Status may be gained by being malicious, intimidating others, breaking school rules or the law and generally causing trouble.

Cloward and Ohlin’s 3 types of subculture

Cloward and Ohlin develop Cohen’s subcultural theory further, expanding on it in order to try and explain why different types of subculture emerge in different regions. They suggest that the ‘illegitimate opportunity structure’ affects what type of subculture emerges in response to status frustration – The varied social circumstances in which working-class youth live give rise to three types of delinquent subculture.

1. Criminal Subcultures are characterised by utilitarian crimes, such as theft. They develop in more stable working class areas where there is an established pattern of crime. This provided a learning opportunity and career structure for aspiring young criminals, and an alternative to the legitimate job market as a means of achieving financial rewards. Adult criminals exercise social control over the young to stop them carrying out non-utilitarian delinquent acts – such as vandalism – which might attract the attention of the police.

3. Retreatist subcultures emerge among those lower class youth who are ‘double failures’ – they have failed to succeed in both mainstream society and in the crime and gang cultures above. The response is a retreat into drug addiction and alcoholism, paid for by petty theft, shoplifting and prostitution

Evaluations of consensus subcultural theories

Signposting and related posts .

Hirschi’s Social Control Theory of Crime

`Cultural Deviance Theory':

R. Matsueda
Published 1 November 1997
Theoretical Criminology

35 Citations

The remarkable persistence of a flawed theory:, the empirical status of gottfredson and hirschi's general theory of crime: a meta‐analysis, testing control theory and differential association: a reanalysis of the richmond youth project data*, paternoster on human agency and crime: a rejoinder to critics on his behalf, micro-macro criminology, social process theories of crime, gender and crime among felony offenders: assessing the generality of social control and differential association theories, why is “bad” parenting criminogenic implications from rival theories, delinquent peer influence on offending versatility: can peers promote specialized delinquency, a theoretical explanation of the influence of gentrification on neighborhood crime, 15 references, is differential association/social learning cultural deviance theory*, on the logical adequacy of cultural deviance theories, the current state of differential association theory, techniques of neutralization: a theory of delinquency., testing control theory and differential association: a causal modeling approach., toward an integrated theory of white-collar crime, reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: specifying a symbolic interactionist theory, role-taking, role commitment, and delinquency: a theory of differential social control, differential association and marijuana use: a closer look at sutherland (with a little help from becker)*, parents, peers, and delinquent action: a test of the differential association perspective, related papers.

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Cultural Deviance, Political Crime, Public Media and Security: Perspectives on the Cultural History of Crime and Criminal Justice in Early Modern Europe

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1 The historiography of crime and criminal justice in early modern Europe covers a wide array of topics and approaches, focusing on the social history of crime and conflict, violence and theft, the criminal justice system, penal law, punishments, procedure and infrajudicial conflict regulation. Although addressed in many studies and well-established historical issues, culture, religion, transnationality, politics and security still seem to be prospective fields for further research in the history of crime and criminal justice. Hence, the following essay attempts to exemplarily outline possible approaches to study the various interdependencies of culture, crime and criminal justice in early modern Europe by focusing on cultural diversity and deviance, political conflict and crime, judicial and popular media, and the concomitant security discourses.

1 For a recent general overview see the articles in Knepper and Johansen (2016, p.848-1043).

2 Devereaux and Griffiths (2004); Kalifa (2005); Lévy and Srebnick (2005); McMahon 2008; Wiltenburg ( (...)
3 Foblets et al. (2010); Melossi et al. (2011); Kymlicka et al. (2014); Mersmann and Kippenberg (2016 (...)

2 This approach is able to draw on the recent “cultural turn” in the history of crime and criminal justice 1 that has shifted the focus from the previous topics of “punishment, penal practice and culture” and “crime, criminals and literature” towards the cultural meaning and representation of crime and criminal justice in popular culture and print media, as well as the interdependencies between the various practices, communications and proceedings of criminal justice and the public sphere 2 . In the following I propose to further develop the new directions in the cultural history of criminal justice and to include – to a greater extent – cultural diversity, religious and political dissent, migration, transnationality and security as relevant research issues, which related disciplines have elaborated with regard to culture and criminal law/justice 3 . The first consequence of this would be to focus on the various functions and practises of the criminal justice system in dealing with specific forms of conflict, deviance and crime linked to diversity, transnationality and security as dimensions of cultural history – and to a certain extent intertwined with specific threats, narratives, discourses and (popular) media. In taking this as a basic starting point, two approaches seem to be especially promising.

3 Firstly, the relation of the early modern criminal justice system to cultural diversity and deviance. This includes the regulation of conflicts related to cultural differences (resulting from migration/transnationality, ethnicity, religion, politics) as well as the criminalisation and prosecution of the respective crimes and groups, not to mention the cultural dimension of judicial practise and its agents and proceedings. Secondly, the interplay between the early modern criminal justice system and the public media that formed a “popular legal culture”, which created and disseminated specific images, narratives and labels of threats, crime and justice linked with culture and security. This is based on the assumption that early modern criminal justice was also characterised by legal diversity, various forms of communication and infrajudicial practises.

4 Foblets et al. (2010, p.xiii).

4 If we conceptualise “culture” as collective “ways of life” – resulting from and manifesting in shared social practises, customs, habits, communications, attitudes and values – then early modern Europe was characterised by a growing cultural variety. Since the sixteenth century the ideal-typical uniform, hierarchical Christian society of orders has undergone a social, political, spatial and cultural differentiation that included the spread of various religions/”confessions” (denominations), increasing migration, and the growth of social and “ethnic” minorities. This resulted in an increase of cultural diversity, which we may define as “diverse cultures within the borders of particular political communities” 4 . Within this setting, religion, foreignness, migration, honour and, to some extent, gender constituted the main categories of cultural diversity, whereas categories such as age, sexual preference and ethnicity played a more limited role when it came to the perception of cultural differences. Although the political sphere did not constitute an element of cultural diversity per se, we can likewise observe a growing differentiation of political culture in early modern Europe that produced political diversity and dissent.

5 Overall, this growing cultural diversity challenged the Europe’s various legal systems – and criminal justice in particular – since the resulting differences and conflicts, not to mention the respective groups, habits and practises, were perceived and labelled as deviant – in some cases even criminalised and prosecuted. This concerned, for example, migrating and marginal groups (“vagrants”) as well as dissenting religious groups (criminalised as sects), or political dissenters (labelled as conspiracies). They were not only perceived as socially deviant but regarded as a threat to the state, security and order because of their deviant cultural attributes, habits and practises related to foreignness, language, migration, a mobile way of living, religious rites or political dissent – as well as the formation of (secretive) groups or associations that more or less “voluntarily” separated themselves from the “main-stream” society. Although not all of these cultural attributes constituted a crime per se, they were associated with typical elements or labels of criminal behaviour: the formation of secretive, dangerous and criminal groups or associations, such as robber gangs or heretical sects, illegal crossing of borders, thievery, robbery and violence as well as disobedience, sedition and upheaval.

5 Rousseaux (2005); Garnot (2013); Gerstenmayer (2013).

6 Kästner and Schwerhoff (2013); Piltz and Schwerhoff (2015).

7 Salomé (2010); Härter and De Benedictis (2013); Härter (2014a); Härter (2016).

6 Criminal justice history has studied some of these phenomena thoroughly, for instance, vagrants, bandits and robber gangs, with regard to their prosecution and punishment as well as concerning their respective images in popular media 5 . The recently bourgeoning field of religious deviance has also paid considerable attention to the cultural dimension of crime and criminal justice 6 . Furthermore, several studies dealing with the history of political crime – in particular regicide, assassination and revolt – have mapped the relations to popular media and the cross-border ties 7 . However, stressing the cultural dimension and the intertwined elements of cultural diversity and deviance, as well as combining this with the above-mentioned approaches, could very well prove profitable for future research.

7 A first step could be to extend the historical concept of crime as deviant behaviour criminalised in contemporary penal law and juridical discourses by adding and specifying intersected cultural elements, namely transnationality/migration, religious and political dissent and security. As mentioned above, I propose to focus on conflicts and crimes related to cultural diversity and dissent that the criminal justice systems in early modern Europe dealt with, in particular by labelling, criminalising and prosecuting culturally deviant behaviour and groups. Although this seems to be a somewhat vague concept of “cultural crime”, several categories of cultural diversity can be linked with deviant/criminal behaviour and the concomitant labels and practices of criminal justice. This will be sketched out in the following three exemplary topics:

8 Mersmann and Kippenberg (2016).

9 Knepper (2010).

8 The first possible area of focus to study cultural diversity and crime could be migration and transnationality, which manifested in cross-border crimes and foreign, marginal groups labelled as mobile “criminal gangs”. Recently, transnational history has focused its attention on cultural factors, and conversely, the transnational dimension is of great importance for the history of culture and criminal justice, in particular regarding such issues as migration, the exchange of goods, knowledge and media, or transnational crime 8 . Since the concept of “international crime” had not been established (or even invented) before the nineteenth century 9 , the transnational dimension of crime in early modern Europe was closely associated with groups and practises that were primarily perceived and labelled as foreign, mobile and culturally deviant. This concerned migrants, minorities and marginal groups such as vagrants, the Gypsies, the Jews (and other migrating mobile religious minorities), “infamous people”, mercenaries and others with a nomadic lifestyle that crossed borders.

9 Based on the categories of foreignness, mobility/migration and, to some extent, ethnicity, they were not only perceived as culturally deviant but also labelled as threats to society, public order, and security and even linked with specific crimes. This manifested itself specifically in penal and administrative laws as well as in the concomitant juridical-political discourses observable in many early modern European countries at that time. They would enter countries unwelcomed, spread infectious diseases, seduce the residents and commit various crimes associated with their customs, habits and mobile way of life, namely idle, masterless and permanently wandering. Besides illegal migration and begging, they were associated with smuggling, the defrauding of customs (and other associated charges like convoy fees or supplementary taxes), cheating, thieving, robbing and murder. Although cultural differences constituted only one factor in the labelling of such groups, the transgression of spatial and cultural boundaries and the alleged “criminal culture” or “underworld” constituted pivotal elements of cultural deviance and “transnational crimes” that also influenced the practises of criminal justice.

10 Rousseaux (2005); Lemmings and Walker (2009); Knepper (2010).

10 The history of crime and criminal justice has indeed produced excellent studies on vagrants and robbers; however, instead of focusing on property crimes and violence, future research should consider placing greater emphasis on the cultural and transnational aspects: the context of migration and the prosecution of migrants and other culturally diverging, mobile groups as well as the spatial, transnational dimension and specific crimes of a cross-border nature. Furthermore, a more detailed examination of how early modern criminal justice systems dealt with the cultural and transnational dimensions of crime and the respective groups as well as how cultural attributes influenced the representation of crime and criminal justice in the public media and the respective crime and security discourses, for instance, with regard to the relation between general fears and crime panics, might prove quite fruitful 10 .

11 Kästner and Schwerhoff (2013); Piltz and Schwerhoff (2015).

11 A second possible area of focus to study the cultural dimension of crime is religion, in particular crimes related to religious deviance, denominational or religious minorities (such as Jews or Muslims) and groups labelled as “criminal sects”. Although traditional church and criminal law had criminalised dissident religious behaviour and belief as superstition, blasphemy or heresy, with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, and over the course of the early modern period, the concepts, narratives and practises of criminal justice underwent considerable change. Based on this, some researchers have suggested “religious deviance” as a prospective field of research 11 .

12 Specifically, this concerns cultural deviance and associated crimes of groups and minorities engaged in collective dissent with regard to religion, group configuration, mobility/migration and other diverging cultural practises. Labels, criminalisation and prosecution predominantly focused on the “sect” as a specific group that differed culturally but was also linked with criminal behaviour: they formed autonomous communities and secret groups within society that endangered order and security through disobedience, sedition and the seduction of subjects. Hence, from the authorities’ perspective, religious deviance could lead to religious and political crimes such as revolt and overthrow. In this regard the concept of the “criminal sect” was related to that of “criminal conspiracy”, for both fields of cultural deviance and crime were linked through similar narratives and labels associated with the dominating religious as well as political culture and security.

12 Kallenberg (2015); Härter (2017).

13 Research could not only further explore these interdependencies – in particular with regard to the practices of criminal justice – but also study in more detail how the criminal justice systems in early modern Europe dealt with religious deviance/crime and the respective minority groups, such as the Jews or the Gypsies, that differed in terms of culture, religion and ethnicity (or were perceived/labelled as such). The focus should not only include the repression and exclusion of religious minorities through criminal justice but should also be extended to the broader study of the meaning of religious and cultural factors for the prosecution, adjudication and punishment of such groups. Conversely, it would also be worth looking at the opportunities they had to access justice, to apply cultural agency and knowledge to their advantage (for instance, to defend themselves) or to use infrajudicial practices such as petitioning and pardon 12 .

13 Härter and de Graaf (2012); Härter and De Benedictis (2013).

14 A third possible area of focus for the further study of cultural diversity and criminal justice could be political dissent and crime, which formed an essential element of the development of political culture in early modern Europe. Political dissent not only initiated political conflicts but generated culturally deviant behaviour that could be labelled as a political crime, ranging from seditious pamphlets and gatherings about upheaval and revolt to regicide, assassination and “criminal conspiracies”. Its cultural dimension manifested in the performative and public nature of political conflict and dissent, the interconnection with religious dissent as well as in the responses of the legal systems involved and the media attention it received 13 . In this regard “political crime” constituted a specific label and legal mode for early modern political systems (and cultures) to respond to political conflict and dissent by means of criminal justice. The criminalisation of political dissent and the way criminal justice dealt with political crimes referred to basic elements (or labels) of cultural diversity and deviance: the dissenting group (often conceptualised as a criminal conspiracy operating in secrecy with divergent rituals and practises); the cross-border, transnational or foreign influences of other powers, groups and religions (e.g. the Jesuits or the “Papal conspiracy”); as well as the customs, opinions, ideologies and practises that differed from the dominant culture and that aimed at the seduction of subjects, the instigation of dissent and change and, therefore, constituted a fundamental threat to order and security.

14 Salomé (2012); Turrel (2012).

15 Härter (2014a); Härter (2014b); Härter (2016).

15 Although research has produced several case studies dealing with political crimes and related incidents, only a few have combined the concepts and methods of criminal justice history with a cultural approach 14 . They focus on the responses of the concerned legal systems – notably the trial, the punishment, new legislation and preventative measures – as well as on the concurrent discourses and the representation of political crime in judicial and popular print. As cultural phenomena, political crime and the respective legal responses produced judicial media, such as the collections of state trials, and were covered by popular media such as illustrated broadsides and crime pamphlets. Besides the news and information, they conveyed – sometimes transnationally – culturally imprinted images and narratives, more typically including the “diabolical”, “treacherous” assassin, the heroic victim, the political martyr, the religious nature of political crime or the foreign, transnational conspiracy 15 .

16 Consequently, the cultural meaning of political crimes (and the underlying conflicts) as well as the cultural dimension of criminal justice in dealing with such crimes and conflicts are prospective fields for further research. Specifically, it could focus on the interdependencies between political crime as a cultural phenomenon, the respective practices of criminal justice and the cultural representation (images, narratives) in popular media and the concomitant legal, political and security discourses. Moreover, a historical analysis of political crime and criminal justice could yield new insights into the political culture of early modern Europe and how it dealt with diversity, dissent and conflict.

17 As already noted, further research on the interdependencies of cultural diversity/deviance, crime and criminal justice could elaborate methods and concepts recently developed in the history of crime and criminal justice. An initial approach could be to analyse the meaning and impact of cultural factors – including images and narratives – within the practice of criminal justice and related infrajudicial practises. A prerequisite for this, however, is grasping early modern criminal justice not as a monolithic, enclosed state-based judiciary, but as a complex, diverse system of communicative interactions between various actors on different stages that also comprise judicial and infrajudicial practises and even extend to the broader cultural context, in particular through judicial and popular media and discourses.

18 As a result, different cultural actors, factors and images/narratives influenced communication, proceedings, adjudication and punishments. This generated ambiguous functions of criminal justice which merit further study: the criminalisation of behaviour that deviated also in cultural terms, the persecution of deviant cultural activities and practises as well as the social control, disciplining or exclusion of concerned groups. This raises the question whether criminal justice served to consolidate the cultural identity of a dominant society and produce cultural homogeneity. On the other hand, however, criminal justice could also regulate conflicts resulting from cultural diversity and deviance, and it could provide cultural opportunities or limited judicial autonomy for individual groups. If we conceptualise the protagonists of cultural diversity not as merely passive objects of criminal justice, a central question could be, how and to what extent did individual actors and groups use their “cultural agency” (customs, practises, knowledge, arguments and strategies) and infrajudicial opportunities (such as supplicating, petitioning, pardon, mediation, etc.) to negotiate conflicts, crimes or punishments and, in this respect, the boundaries of cultural diversity and deviance. The respective analyses of the varied and informative sources of early modern criminal justice could yield valuable insights if courts constituted an arena for cultural – in particular religious and political – conflicts, not to mention their management, regulation or settlement. Moreover, this approach could render further insights into the interplay between judicial and infrajudicial modes of criminal justice, since culturally diverging groups seem to be prone to regulate crime and conflict through extra- or infrajudicial institutions, proceedings and practises, especially if they were granted respective legal/judicial autonomies (as in the case of the Jews, for instance).

19 Given the fact that the early modern criminal justice system did not grant potential exemptions to cultural minorities, the application of modern concepts like “cultural evidence” or “cultural defence” could hardly be characterised as appropriate. But judicial diversity, infrajudicial practices and the specific culture of criminal procedure, as a performative and communicative interaction, which extended through judicial and popular media to the public sphere, enable the study of criminal justice as both a medium of a cultural discourse and a contest of cultural interpretation regarding deviant behaviour and crime. This can, for instance, be further studied with respect to the culturally grounded labels, narratives and images that the early modern criminal justice system applied, generated and disseminated through punishment, adjudication, prosecution and criminal law (and comparable public and administrative laws). Criminal justice constructed social and cultural differences, labelled (or criminalised) cultural practises and the transgression of cultural boundaries and, as a result, shaped culturally-based stereotypes and transferred the cultural dimension of crime into the public media and general security discourses.

16 Kalifa (2005); Shoemaker (2009); Wiltenburg (2012); Ward (2014); Härter (forthcoming).

17 Härter et al. (2010); Salomé (2012); Turrel (2012); Härter (2014a); Härter (2014b); Härter (2016).

20 Consequently, the well-established research on the representation of crime in public print could be extended to the more specific issues of cultural deviance and the interplay between criminal justice, public media and security discourses. The various forms of communication within the different judicial and infrajudicial settings of criminal justice influenced or even generated the development of related judicial, mainstream and popular print media, which as a whole formed a “popular legal culture” and was closely linked to the cultural dimension of criminal proceedings 16 . The English Collections of State-Trials , for instance, evolved out of the context of political crime, and Pitavals causes célèbres also focused on crimes related to cultural factors of crime and criminal justice. On the whole, judicial, pragmatic and popular print – ranging from judicial pamphlets and collections of decisions and cases to “search and wanted lists”, “reports from the files” to last dying speeches, illustrated broadsheets, crime pamphlets, trial-collections, press and literature – created and disseminated not only images and narratives associated with cultural diversity and deviance, but also connected with the exemplary topics outlined above, including migration, transnationality, cross-border crime, mobile criminal gangs, religious deviance, criminal sects and political crimes (such as revolt and assassination attempts) 17 .

21 The analyses should also take into account that dissenting actors and groups could likewise make use of such media as a component of their cultural and legal agency, and that popular media created cultural images and narratives of crime that could substantially diverge from the ones the criminal justice system generated or used. These ambiguous images of crime and criminal justice related to cultural diversity and deviance not only influenced general attitudes and fears, but can be studied as a key element of security and the associated discourses. During the early modern period, security developed into a leading category and main field of state activity (in particular in the areas of policing and criminal justice); however, as a fundamentally discursive construct, it was also related to threats, images, narratives and crimes based on cultural diversity and deviance, e.g. foreign intruders, mobile marginal groups, religious and political dissenters, sects and conspiracies.

18 Härter (2013).

22 Thus, a final perspective on the future of research could be to analyse how the specific interdependencies between cultural diversity and deviance (including the respective images and narratives thereof), the practices and modes of the criminal justice system in dealing with the related crimes as well as its interplay with public media and security discourses influenced the policing of politics and the emergence of transnational security regimes in Europe since the end of the early modern period 18 . It seems that the cultural dimension of early modern criminal justice, as outlined above, constitutes a promising approach to more closely connect the history of crime and criminal justice with long-term developments and current questions concerning cultural diversity in a “global world” that still challenges law and society.

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2 Devereaux and Griffiths (2004); Kalifa (2005); Lévy and Srebnick (2005); McMahon 2008; Wiltenburg (2012); Ward (2014).

3 Foblets et al. (2010); Melossi et al. (2011); Kymlicka et al. (2014); Mersmann and Kippenberg (2016).

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Karl Härter , « Cultural Deviance, Political Crime, Public Media and Security: Perspectives on the Cultural History of Crime and Criminal Justice in Early Modern Europe » , Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies [En ligne], Vol. 21, n°2 | 2017, mis en ligne le 19 juillet 2020 , consulté le 30 août 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1941 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1941

Karl Härter

Max Planck Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany haerter[at]rg.mpg.de

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The Cultural Deviance Theory in criminology posits that an individual's cultural and social environments significantly influence their propensity to engage in deviant or criminal behavior.
(PDF) The Role of Cultural Criminology: A Theoretical and
Thus, social control creates crime not just as a new classification of an already existing behavior; in this way control creates behavior that would not have taken place otherwise through the creation of secondary deviance. The cultural turns of these two theoretical strands, subcultural and labeling theories, constituted the emergence of the ...
7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime
Cultural deviance theory suggests that conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society causes crime. Researchers Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) studied crime patterns in Chicago in the early 1900s. They found that violence and crime were at their worst in the middle of the city and gradually decreased the farther ...
Chapter 7. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Social disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory represent three functionalist perspectives on deviance in society. Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance. Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges ...
7.2 Explaining Deviance
Summary of explanation. Functionalist. Durkheim's views. Deviance has several functions: (a) it clarifies norms and increases conformity, (b) it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant, and (c) it can help lead to positive social change. Social ecology.
7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime
Strain theory and social disorganization theory represent two functionalist perspectives on deviance in society. Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance. Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people's present views (1893).
Subcultural Theories of Deviance
Cloward and Ohlin proposed that there are three types of deviant subcultures that emerge due to varying social factors: criminal, conflict, and retreatist subcultures. Walter Miller's cultural deviance theory proposes that the lower classes have different sets of values altogether from those of higher social strata.
Cultural Conflict Definition, Theory & Examples
Culture Conflict Theory, also known as Cultural Deviance Theory, is a theory that suggests that conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society leads to higher crime rates ...
Crime, Diversity, Culture, and Cultural Defense
Supporters of the cultural defense rely on the theory of enculturation to stress the importance that cultural values have in shaping people's personality and in orientating (even subconsciously) human behavior. Alison Dundes Renteln argues for the recognition of a cultural defense as a partial excuse. According to the author, a partial excuse ...
Deviance, Crime, and Social Control: Theoretical Perspectives on
Cultural deviance theory suggests that conformity to the prevailing cultural norms of lower-class society causes crime. Researchers Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) studied crime patterns in Chicago in the early 1900s. They found that violence and crime were at their worst in the middle of the city and gradually decreased the farther ...
On the Logical Adequacy of Cultural Deviance Theories
This paper examines the logical adequacy of cultural deviance theories, specifically Sutherland's differential association theory and Akers's social learning theory. There are four crucial questions that cultural deviance theorists have not addressed adequately: (1) What is the content of deviant norms? (2) What is the origin of deviant norms and subcultures?
Cultural Deviance Theory
Cultural Deviance Theory is a, "branch of social structure theory that sees strain and social disorganization together resulting in a unique lower-class culture that conflicts with conventional social norms" (Siegel, 2018, P. 581). Acts that are viewed as deviant vary between social orders. Deviance can be said to be socially built; the ...
PDF Chapter 7: Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
established contextual, cultural, or social norms, whether folkways, mores, or codified law (1906). It can be as minor as picking one's nose in public or as major as committing murder. Although the word "deviance" has a negative connotation in everyday language, sociologists recognize that deviance is not necessarily bad (Schoepflin 2011).
Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Deviance
There have been longstanding conflicts between scientific theories and more humanistic perspectives in the history of deviance studies (Matza 1969; Schur 1980). As well, in recent decades the trajectory of this history has been influenced by the development of criminology and criminal justice (Dotter 2004). With this backdrop, the present paper ...
Subcultural Theories of Deviance
four subcultural social theorists of deviance you should know about…. 1. Albert Cohen's Status Frustration Theory. 2. Cloward and Ohlin's three types of subculture. 3. Walter Miller - the focal concerns of the working class. 4. Charles Murray - the underclass and Crime (links to the New Right)
Introduction to Deviance, The Undead: Contemporary Deviancy and Social
The sociology of deviance refuses to die, despite decades-long critiques. In the 1970s, Scheff, Gove, and Chauncey treated the pages of the American Sociological Review to debates about labeling theories' approaches to mental illness (e.g. Chauncey Citation 1975; Gove Citation 1975; Scheff Citation 1975).Around the same time, feminist sociologists, Marxist criminologists, critical race ...
`Cultural Deviance Theory':
Costello (1997) has attempted to defend Kornhauser's (1978) interpretation of Sutherland's differential association theory as a `cultural deviance theory.' In so doing, she claims that Matsueda (1988), Akers (1996) and Bernard and Snipes (1996) have misinterpreted Sutherland's theory to the point of altering the original theory to respond to Kornhauser's criticisms. In this article, I point ...
Cultural Deviance, Political Crime, Public Media and Security
Hence, the following essay attempts to exemplarily outline possible approaches to study the various interdependencies of culture, crime and criminal justice in early modern Europe by focusing on cultural diversity and deviance, political conflict and crime, judicial and popular media, and the concomitant security discourses. ... Karl Härter ...
Social Disorganization Theory And Cultural Deviance Theory
The social disorganization theory was first referenced with the displacement among immigrants. Scholars believed this was due to the immigrants inability to transfer norms and values from their first homes in the old country to the new culture. It was the ideology and values along with the competition for dominance of the concepts and beliefs ...

Cultural Deviance Theory – Definition, Examples, Pros & Cons

Origins of Cultural Deviance Theory

Six Focal Concerns of Cultural Deviance Theory

List of Real-Life Examples

Advantages of Cultural Deviance Theory

Criticisms and Disadvantages of Cultural Deviance Theory

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The Role of Cultural Criminology: A Theoretical and Methodological Lineage

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7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

7.3.1 Historical Theories of Deviance

7.3.1.1 Durkheim and Functionalism

7.3.1.2 Social Disorganization Theory

7.3.1.3 Cultural Deviance Theory

7.3.2 Modern Theories of Deviance

7.3.2.1 Robert Merton’s Strain Theory: Rethinking Durkheim

7.3.2.2 William Julius Wilson: Rethinking the Role of Neighborhoods

7.3.2.3 Karl Marx’s Unequal System Theory

7.3.2.4 C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite Theory

7.3.2.5 Michele Foucault: Discipline and Punishment Theory

7.3.2.6 Lemert’s Labeling Theory

7.3.2.7 Sykes and Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization

7.3.2.8 Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

7.3.3 Licenses and Attributions for Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

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Chapter 7. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Introduction to Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Making Connections: Careers in Sociology

Social Control

Social Control as Government and Discipline

Functionalism

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Social Disorganization Theory

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Critical Sociology

Crime and Social Class

Feminist Contributions

Symbolic Interactionism

Deviance as Learned Behaviour

Labelling Theory

What Is Crime?

Types of Crimes

Making Connections: the Big Pictures

Crime Statistics

Corrections

Section Summary

Section Quiz

Short Answer

Further Research

Solutions to Section Quiz

Image Attributions

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7.2 Explaining Deviance

Functionalist Explanations

Émile Durkheim: The Functions of Deviance

Social Ecology: Neighborhood and Community Characteristics

Sociology Making a Difference

Strain Theory

Deviant Subcultures

Social Control Theory

Conflict and Feminist Explanations

Feminist Perspectives

Symbolic Interactionist Explanations

Differential Association Theory

Labeling Theory

Key Takeaways

For Your Review

7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Functionalism

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Social Disorganization Theory

Conflict Theory

Karl Marx: An Unequal System

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite

Crime and Social Class

Symbolic Interactionism

Labeling Theory