9.1 Deviance and Social Control

Deviance

What, exactly, is deviance? What is the relationship between deviance and crime? According to sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), deviance is a violation of norms. More specifically, it is a violation of established contextual, cultural, or social norms, whether folkways, mores, or codified law (1906). As discussed in the Culture chapter, 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 that are broadly recognized in a society, like lying or stealing. 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 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 (1994). 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 eating psychedelic mushrooms, 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 or addiction, which are not illegal in themselves but are widely regarded as serious or harmful. People agree that these behaviours call for institutional intervention. Finally, there are social diversions like facial piercings that violate norms in a provocative or are seen as distasteful, but are otherwise harmless.

The point is that the question, “What is deviant behaviour?” cannot be answered in a straightforward manner. No act or person is intrinsically deviant. 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. This means that where norms differ — locally, cross-culturally or historically — what constitutes deviance also differs. To understand why some acts are deviant and some are not, it is necessary to understand what the social 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. In a time of war, acts usually considered morally reprehensible, such as taking the life of another, may 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 follows closely from the first. Deviance is not an intrinsic (biological or psychological) attribute of individuals, nor an intrinsic quality of the acts themselves, but a product of social processes. The norms that define deviance are themselves continually defined and redefined through ongoing social processes — moral, political, legal, cultural, etc. Similarly, to become deviant means to be assigned a deviant identity or to actively assume a deviant identity. It is the outcome of a process of identity formation. It is not a single rule breaking act that defines someone as deviant. Being deviant is to incorporate rule-breaking into one’s life on an ongoing basis.

As discussed later in this chapter, it is a central tenet of symbolic interactionist labeling theory, that individuals become criminalized through contact with the criminal justice system (Becker, 1963). The well-known problem of using imprisonment to respond to criminal offenders is that prison influences individual behaviour and self-understanding, but often not in the way intended. Incarceration has a latent function.  Prisons can be agents of socialization into a life of crime. The act of imprisonment itself modifies individual behaviour to make individuals more criminal. If the insight of 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 — is added to this, it is evident that social variables and power structures are key to understanding who chooses a criminal career path.

In sum, an individual’s 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 recognize themselves as deviant.

Social Control and Regulation

Social Control as Sanction

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 practice social control, the regulation and enforcement of norms. Social control can be defined broadly as an organized action intended to change or correct people’s behaviour (Innes, 2003). The underlying goal of social control is to maintain social order, the ongoing, predictable 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 does not mean picking one’s nose in public will not be punished; instead, nosepickers 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 is caught plagiarizing the work of others or cheating on an exam, for example, they 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 the corporation.

Not all forms of social control are adequately understood through the use of sanctions, however. Donald Black (b. 1941) identified four key styles of social control, each of which defines deviance and the appropriate response to it in a different manner (1976). 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 social controls emphasize the use of sanctions, compensatory, therapeutic and conciliatory social controls emphasize processes of restoration and healing. The latter are types of social control that sociologists refer to as disciplinary.

Social Control as Risk Management

Many recent types of social control have adopted a model of risk management in a variety of areas of problematic behaviour. Risk management refers to interventions designed to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events occurring based on an assessment of probabilities of risk. Unlike the crime and punishment model of penal social sanctions, or the rehabilitation, training, or therapeutic models of disciplinary social control, risk management strategies do not seize hold of individual deviants but attempt to restructure the environment or context of problematic behaviour in order to minimize the risks to the general population.

Example

For example, the public health model for controlling intravenous drug use does not focus on criminalizing drug use or obliging users to rehabilitate themselves to “kick drugs” (O’Malley, 1998). It argues that fines or imprisonment do not curtail drug users’ propensity to continue to use drugs, and that therapeutic rehabilitation of drug use is not only expensive but unlikely to succeed unless drug users are willing to quit. Instead, it calculates the risk of deaths from drug overdoses and the danger to the general population from the transmission of disease (like HIV and hepatitis C) and attempts to modify the riskiest behaviours through targeted interventions. Programs like needle exchanges (designed to prevent the sharing of needles) or safe-injection-sites (designed to provide sanitary conditions for drug injection and immediate medical services for overdoses) do not prevent addicts from using drugs but minimize the harms resulting from drug use by modifying the environment in which drugs are injected. Reducing risks to public health is the priority of the public health model.

In the case of crime, the new penology strategies of social control are also less concerned with criminal responsibility, moral condemnation, or rehabilitative intervention and treatment of individual offenders (Feely & Simon, 1992). Rather, they are concerned with techniques to identify, classify, and manage groupings of offenders sorted by the degree of dangerousness they represent to the general public. In this way, imprisonment is used to incapacitate those who represent a significant risk, whereas probation, restorative justice and various levels of surveillance are used for those who represent a lower risk. Examples include sex offender tracking and monitoring, or the use of electronic monitoring ankle bracelets for low-risk offenders. New penology strategies seek to regulate levels of deviance, not intervene or respond to individual deviants or the social determinants of crime.

Similarly, situational crime control redesigns spaces where crimes or deviance could occur to minimize the risk of crimes occurring there (Garland, 1996).  Using alarm systems, CCTV surveillance cameras, adding or improving lighting, broadcasting irritating sounds, or making street furniture uncomfortable are all ways of working on the cost/benefit analysis of potential deviants or criminals before they act rather than acting directly on the deviants or criminals themselves.