Unit 15 Types of social control and deviance

1. What are the types of social control used to suppress deviance?

Social control refers to society's efforts to regulate itself; it includes those mechanisms by which social norms are upheld and by which their actual or potential violation is restrained. In other words, social controls are processes used in encouraging people to conform to norms that define acceptable or preferable behaviour.

Social control operates on both an internal and an external level. On the internal level, individuals learn through socialisation the norms and laws that define proper behaviour. Internalisation is the process through which cultural standards become a part of an individual's personality structure. When society's norms and values have been internalised, most people conform to them because such behaviour seems " natural." That is, properly socialised people police themselves, and social control becomes self-control.

Not all people are properly socialised, however, and some never internalise the important values norms of a society. Thus some other mechanism is also necessary to prevent high rates of deviance. External social control consists of sanctions—penalties for violating norms or laws, or rewards for conforming to them. There are two types of sanctions: informal social control and social control.

Informal social control is the unofficial pressure to conform to norms and values. In everyday situations, people reward or punish others as a way of controlling their behaviour. For example, we might make fun of someone who dressed in clothes that were years out of date, just as we might compliment someone who dressed in the latest styles. This kind of behaviour is a subtle way of people how they " should" dress. Informal social control makes use of positive sanctions (rewards such as a compliment, a kiss, or a pat on the back) and of negative sanctions (punishments such as ridicule, ostracism, or threats). It is important to note that the agents of informal social control do not occupy official enforcement positions, such as policeman or judge. We are all agents of informal social control whenever we visibly approve or disapprove of another person's behaviour.

Formal social controls are the official pressures to conform to norms and values specifically enforced by organisations, such as police departments, legislatures, courts, prisons, detention centres, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres. In formal social control, the agents of social control are usually assigned the full-time job of controlling deviant behaviour, whether they are policemen or judges, psychiatrists or ministers. The relationship between deviance and agents of formal social control is complicated by several factors. First, laws are sometimes ambiguous, and agents of social control must decide whether a behaviour is or is not in violation. Second, social control agents often use known deviants or criminals to collect information about misbehaviour. Third, the creation of new laws sometimes creates new crimes and requires entirely new forms of social control.

2. What is crime, and what are its major types?

Crime is a violation of a norm that has been entered into the law and is backed by the power and authority of the state. Not all deviance is criminal behaviour, and not all criminal behaviour is always considered deviant. An act is criminal if a) it violates a law and b) it carries the threat of formal sanction (such as fines or jail terms). Like deviance, crime is defined in relation to specific histori­cal and cultural settings. Some behaviour once defined as criminal is now defined as an illness (e.g., alcoholism), a process known as decriminalisation.

There are five major types of crime. First, index crimes against people and property include most of the acts that we typically regard as criminal: murder, rape, burglary, and theft. The FBI collects statistics on these crimes. Much of this type of crime is not reported, however, because the victim either fears revenge or lacks confidence that the police will succeed in apprehending the culprit. Most office statistics-such as the FBI's " index" - underestimate the actual rate of crime.

Second, victimless crimes include illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug use, in which the only obvious and immediate victim is the person who chooses to engage in the activity. Some people argue that defining these activities as crimes is an attempt to " legislate morality"; they believe that the police should not waste their valuable time on such activities when other types of crime are more damaging or more threatening. Others argue that these self-destructive crimes cost society a great deal, in part because some victimless crimes (for example, drug use) are often linked closely to crimes with victims (such as theft).

Third, organised crime has been defined as a continuing conspiracy that operates for power and profit. Participants in organised crime seek immunity from the law either through threats or through corruption. Organised crime specialises in providing illicit goods and services (drugs, prostitution, gambling), though the profits from activities are sometimes laundered through invest­ments in legitimate businesses. The Mafia extorts money from small shopkeepers, for example, by threatening to set a store on fire unless it receives monthly payments. In other cases, organised crime assumes a monopoly over a market for some legitimate good or service, and extorts special payments from legitimate businesses or customers who must deal with them.

Fourth, white-collar crimes are those committed by individuals of high social status in the course of their occupation. When an attorney bribes a witness, when a businessman pads his expense account, when a physician knowingly overcharges his patients, they are committing white-collar crime. This type of crime differs from street crime in three ways: 1) it relies on manipulation of records and on concealment rather than on force or the threat of force; 2) it is more costly; and 3) lighter sentences are meted out to those who commit white-collar crimes. White-collar crimes are committed for personal gain.

Fifth, corporate crimes are illegal acts committed on behalf of a formal organisation. They include the following: crime against customers, such as the manufacture or sale of unsafe products; crime against employees, such as knowingly subjecting them to health risks; crime against the public at large, such as disregard for environmental hazards; and crime against owners, such as making managerial decisions that are not in the stockholders' best interests. The goal of corporate crime is to enhance company profits. Several features of the modern corporation encourage these crimes: managers are pressured to make decisions that are profitable in the short run (with disregard for longer-range consequences); huge size and complicated bureaucratic structures make it difficult to trace such illegalities and to assign responsibility; and highly specialised divisions responsible for manufacturing or for quality control make it difficult to recognise product liabilities or environmental hazards. Although corporate crime costs society more than street crime, only recently has the public become more concerned about environmental pollution caused by corporate negligence than about burglary.

3. Has the American criminal justice system been successful in controlling crime?

Although rates for certain crimes have declined recently, crime rates in the United States are higher than those in comparable countries. One reason is the ineffectiveness of informal social controls, resulting from increasing fragmentation of this society. Also, for members of many racial and ethnic groups, discrimination makes it difficult to attain culturally valued goals through legitimate means; hence, they turn to deviant means instead. Elliot Currie argues that the crime rate will be reduced only by major social structural changes-significant rearrangements of resources and opportunities among members of American society.

In most cases, enlarging the police force does not bring about a reduction of crime, but certain reorganisations of police activities have been more successful. For example, when routine bureau­cratic functions are turned over to civilians (freeing police officers from these time-consuming tasks) and when local communities are mobilised to assist the police in law-enforcement activities, increases in crime rates can be slowed.

The American criminal justice system has been described as a " funnel": only a very small percentage of the large number of crimes committed in this country results in arrests, convictions, and prison sentences. In many cases, victims will not testify against accused criminals, so the case is thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Sometimes the accused person admits guilt to a crime lesser than the original charge, a process known as " plea bargaining." Furthermore, the prison system has not been effective in accomplishing its goals. Instead of providing rehabilitation and ireful training, many prisons and juvenile detention centres encourage further criminal activity because of overcrowded and wretched conditions.